A long overdue homecoming

I FIRST wrote about Montell Johnson for AlterNet in 2008, but I'd known about his case for years. His mother, Gloria, was a regular at the annual gathering of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) in Chicago, and every year, she would give us an update, then leave straightaway to visit him in prison, a long drive she did five days a week.

Montell was sick--very sick. He suffered from multiple sclerosis, a cruel disease that assaults a body's nervous system and had ravaged his body while he was behind bars. To his mother, this alone was cause for pain. But worse was the fact that Montell was receiving lethally inadequate medical care. In 2007, a doctor gave him six months to live.

Montell was convicted and sentenced to death in 1999 for the brutal murder of Dorianne Warnsley, a 23-year-old woman who was five months pregnant at the time. Her mother, Terry Hoyt, has long insisted that Montell did not commit the crime. Over the years, Hoyt became one of his most ardent supporters--and a close friend of Gloria's. "She's like a sister to me," she told me on the phone over Thanksgiving three years ago.

The history of Montell's case is perverse and convoluted (you can read the details here). Serving a life sentence in California, Montell was extradited to Illinois to be tried for Warnsley's murder on the specific condition that the prosecutors seek--and secure--a death sentence.

"The only purpose for California sending Montell to Illinois was so that Illinois could promise to try him and obtain a death sentence," his attorney, Harold Hirshman, told me in 2008. "They were doing their best to help Montell get killed."

"They" included then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, who signed the extradition order. As I wrote for AlterNet, "The agreement even specified what should happen if Johnson's sentence were to change, stipulating that 'should the sentence of death received...be vacated or commuted'" then he was to be sent back to California "'to remain in the custody of the California Department of Corrections.'"

IN 2003, Montell's sentence was commuted to 40 years by Illinois Gov. George Ryan when he famously emptied the state's death row.

But whether due to error or bureaucratic laziness, Montell stayed where he was. By then, he had already been diagnosed with MS. In October 2008, Gov. Rod Blagojevich commuted his sentence to time served, based on his illness. By then, Montell weighed 70 lbs and was paralyzed. He could not talk. He ate through a feeding tube.

His mother thought Montell was coming home, and that she could finally provide him with the care he so desperately lacked behind bars. "I just went to church and cried and couldn't sit still. I just got overjoyed," she told journalist Jessica Pupovic, who co-authored another piece with me in 2009. "I thought, 'He's free! He's free!'" She started preparing her home, on the South Side of Chicago, for his arrival.

But then she got the news: California wanted Montell back. An "air ambulance company" had already been contacted to arrange the transfer of Johnson to California, an almost inconceivable maneuver given not only his condition, but the state's obscene--and well publicized--inability to provide adequate healthcare to its prisoners.

Gloria sued. She and Montell's lawyers have fought the extradition order for years. Appeals to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger--including from Terry Hoyt--went unanswered. The last time I wrote to Harold Hirshman, in January of this year, I asked whether Gov. Jerry Brown might change course on the case. He said he was waiting to hear.

This week, we got an answer.

"Montell Johnson came home today," read the e-mail from Ted Pearson, a Chicago-based activist who has worked on his case tirelessly. I had heard the news the night before, on a conference call with the CEDP board. But seeing those words in my Inbox made it real. I wrote to Terry Hoyt, and she responded to me, to Ted, to Harold and to others.

Gloria called me Saturday and I called yesterday, after he got home...spoke to him on speakerphone O:-). Gloria said he was nodding and nodding :-) I am so very thankful, now I feel as though Dorianne and I have received "some" justice. It has been a very long struggle to accomplish him being home with his mother, and I am also truly thankful for all of those who helped, in any and every way...

There is very little to add except to say that Terry and Gloria are two of the most extraordinary people I have ever known and written about. Montell's story is one of overwhelming injustice in so many ways. But their story--of two mothers who met the day of his trial and who, against all odds, have traveled this road together--leaves me in awe every time.

First published at LilianaSegura.com.