At Kerby’s Koney Island in Rochester Hills, Leon Douglas took his coffee with a packet of Splenda and ordered scrambled eggs with wheat toast, substituting the side of hash browns for tomato slices — a healthy choice. As the server dropped off his breakfast, and former Oakland County Judge Fred Mester’s ham-and-cheese omelet (with American cheese, of course), Douglas sprinkled salt and pepper over his plate and dug in. He had just finished telling me about his childhood, the moment a police officer yanked him off his bike when he was 13, alleging he stole the bike he was riding and beat him to a pulp in a children’s detention center.
“He continued to smack me until my nose was bleeding and my mouth was busted. From that day on, I never had any respect for the police ever again.” He gave up his dreams of being a lawyer or a police officer. “Authority became an issue with me. That made me dislike them,” he said, with a now-retired circuit judge to his right. The judge scoffed.
Usually, judges and felons see each other in courtrooms, dressed in suits and robes with an obvious power dynamic at play. But here, at a run-of-the-mill breakfast joint in a strip mall, they sat together in the same booth. The judge wore a United States Army-embroidered cap and a tie patterned with the American flag. Pinned to his jacket was a name tag — he had come from a retirement home. Douglas wore a zip-up hoodie and tennis shoes. The two are friends. They met years ago when Douglas was still in prison, and the judge decided to fight for his freedom. They met me and a photographer at Kerby’s to unpack Douglas’ deepest regret: a robbery gone wrong on Easter weekend of 1973.
Douglas’ gravelly voice contrasts sharply with just how friendly he is. He likes to talk. Without much hesitation, he told me about his arrest for felony murder, when, as a juvenile, he was sent to the largest walled prison in the world: the Southern Michigan State Penitentiary in Jackson. He was sent there after misbehaving at the juvenile reformatory he was being held in, and while in Jackson, Douglas continued to be rebellious, which got him into more trouble.
As punishment for mouthing off, Douglas said he was put in a “maximum security solitary where you have nothing in the room other than a hole that you defecate and urinate in.” While he was in “the hole,” they told him to be silent. “While being punished, they tell you for more punishment, you can’t talk. So me, being a kid, I’m gonna talk, and you can do what you’re going to do. Whatever the repercussions, I’ll deal with it,” he laughed.
Regardless, he’s talking now.
***
You cannot predict life perfectly. Nobody can. But, given the circumstances of Douglas’ childhood, most people could furnish a pretty accurate guess about where he was headed. No gene or DNA sequence indicates that someone will be convicted of murder, but when your grandfather kills a man, your father spends time in and out of prison and your grandmother is robbed and murdered in her home, in front of your family, that sets off a chain of trauma that is hard to overcome.
Douglas told me he had a middle-class upbringing where finances weren’t much of a concern. On his mother’s side, his grandparents “dabbled a little bit in selling liquor,” enough for them to be known for having money in Pontiac in the early 1900s. His grandfather was the first Black man in Pontiac to have a brand-new Cadillac, he said, and with peddling booze and owning a Cadillac comes attention.
“A guy came in the house, stuck my grandmother up and killed her. Cut her throat and shot her because he thought a lot of money was in the house,” Douglas said. His uncle, 14 at the time, saw her being killed.
“Everybody else became alcoholics and died from complications and didn’t live to be older than 52 years old,” Douglas said.
This was the life into which Douglas was born: one of trauma and coping — comfort and uncertainty — in middle-class Pontiac in 1954. His father faced troubles of his own.
“My father, he went to prison as well, and I swear I believe that DNA has a lot to do with things of that nature,” he said. “I stayed in trouble basically, you know, being truant and incorrigible because like I said, my father was in prison at the time.” He took a bite of his breakfast. “What they say about parents not being in the house is so true.”
The server came around with two pots of coffee and asked if we needed more. I had forgotten we were at a coney island and not a private room discussing the facts of Douglas’ life, and after I got more coffee, I immediately forgot where I was again. I asked about his dad.
“When he came around, he was a decent father, but he was just a street hustler.” Douglas’ father worked and sometimes held a job, but eventually “the streets snatched him up.” Soon after, his mother and father separated, and Douglas started splitting time between his parents.
“My mother, you know, God rest her soul … but if she was living today and I was a kid, she’d be serving about two to four (years in prison) for child abuse,” he laughed, somehow, and I wasn’t sure if I could laugh, too.
“My mother was very abusive. It’s what made me first start lying because I figured it’s best to tell a lie rather than get myself hit upside the head with a shoe, beat with a plunger, one time with a fishing rod,” he said.
As a child, Douglas was learning to forgive the unforgivable, to appeal to a higher power when he couldn’t bear the weight of it all himself.
“Can you imagine when someone hits you so bad and so hard and you tell God to forgive them for they know not what they do?”
This was practice.
“Can’t nobody tell me that it doesn’t affect you in a mental way. As you get older, you know how some people say, ‘Oh, shoot that was 60 years ago. Come on, get on with it,’ but you don’t get on with things like that, you know, it lives with you forever.”
***
Had Douglas been born a year earlier, in 1953, making him 20 in 1973, instead of 19, sticking up a bar and grill on Easter Sunday, I would not be talking to him and Mester. But alas, life isn’t perfectly predictable.
Easter weekend brought the friends and family together, he told me. The young men gathered together as families do at Douglas’ aunt’s house. For a moment, it was a regular holiday weekend family gathering until they plotted a robbery.
Douglas’ friend began asking everyone in the room how much money they had, but the boys were broke. His friend had a plan to change that. They knew of someone running an under-the-table numbers game racket — old-school lottery hustling — who regularly counted his money at Harold’s Bar in Pontiac. The plan was simple: “Go in there, stick him up and get the money they had for the betting slips he did that day.”
It did not go so simply. When Douglas and his three co-conspirators went into the bar, more people were there than they expected. They made everyone get on the floor. They collected the money, but on their way out, someone stood up.
“A guy tried to get up when he was lying down and my man shot him. Bam.” They fled and went back to Douglas’s aunts with their money, crafting a story for the rest of the family about how they got the cash. Behind closed doors, Douglas and the other robbers lamented how it had gone wrong. The man who pulled the trigger said he had to. He had no other choice. With a little bit of panic, they hoped the man didn’t die.
“Lo and behold, the next day I read the newspaper: Man killed in robbery on South Boulevard.”
While they discussed the details of the crime, a family friend overheard them. She testified against them, raised charges and Douglas, at 19, was tried as a juvenile and sentenced to life in prison without parole — the mandatory sentence for the crime of first-degree murder.
At first, Douglas struggled to accept it. He didn’t pull the trigger. He hadn’t wanted anyone to die. He and his wife, Gloria, whom he met in second grade, fought hard for his release, appealing at every chance possible, but for 50 years he believed his fate was death in a cell.
“I was dead in the water. And every lawyer that I ran into, they depleted my wife’s bank account. My wife’s 401(k). Everything,” he said. “She went bankrupt twice trying to get me out with these lawyers.”
Douglas and Gloria became close in seventh grade. After he went to prison, she married another man and had two kids, but she stayed in his corner throughout. She’s been his most fervent advocate. In 1992, after years of fighting for him, they got married — in love, but certain that he would remain in prison. But after two bankruptcies, she proved to be a significant force in getting him out. Her brother happened to know a circuit judge by the name of Fred Mester, who was also monumental in the fight for Douglas’ release. In a reversal of roles and a twist of fate, the judge, who had “gotten tired of sentencing kids to prison and not doing anything about it,” gave Douglas a call.
“I was dead in the water until I met this young man right here,” Douglas said, wrapping his arm around Mester’s shoulder. And Mester, with his retirement home name tag still pinned to his suit coat, laughed.
“At least he called me young!”
Mester explained that in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case about a few 14-year-old boys who were charged with murder and sentenced to life in prison. The case, Miller v. Alabama, was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that sentencing juveniles to life without parole constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.
“I called (Mester) on a Friday and he told me, he said, ‘From this day on, I want you to call me every Friday. I’m gonna bring you home.’ And you know what? Judge worked that magic.”
Mester, along with Gloria and Kim Thomas, the University of Michigan’s director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic, took 18 months to get Douglas out of prison after 50 years of certainty that he would die there. Life is unpredictable that way.
The judge had high praise for Douglas and Gloria. “She had the faith,” Mester said. “That’s the great thing about Leon’s story is that he never lost faith. And he kept that faith in Gloria, too.”
With Gloria, Douglas has adjusted to his new lease on life. It hasn’t been easy; after sleeping with the lights on for 50 years, it’s hard to turn them off, he said, but he’s adjusted. He works the night shift at a local factory and is getting ready to start a job at Central Michigan University working with law students to teach them the ins and outs of prison, while also contributing to mentorship and bible study groups in the metro Detroit area.
“That’s the only way I feel I can be accountable is to give something back to the young men and young women out there having problems. You have to give something back,” he said.
He hurts every day about the moment he saw a man lose his life. He wears it on his shoulders. As I sat in the booth across from him, it was clear he was hurting about it at that moment.
“They always say that you ought to regret what you did but it’s not just that. Be sorry for what you did. Realize that you were a hateful person at that time and judge yourself. Don’t be ashamed to judge yourself and realize and know that what you did was wrong,” he said. His eyes welled up. “That is something that will stay with me until the day that they throw dirt on me. I just hope that I can be something better now.”
I do not carry the pain that Douglas does, and I hope I never do, but under the fluorescent lights of the diner, I think we both felt some catharsis, some weight lifted from sharing stories. No longer was I in a harshly lit diner — I was somewhere else. The sun seeped in the windows. The light got softer. I shook his hand, watched him depart and noted that the world seemed a little different coming out of Douglas’ story. Somehow, some way, after 50 years in prison, after 69 years of abuse and trauma, Douglas finds a way to seize a second chance at life — something rarely afforded to people convicted of murder.
Deep down, tucked away under layers of regret, between the soft pauses as he recounted his life of pain, there were sparks of hope. Next month, he’s going to Florida on the first vacation of his life with Gloria. At 19 years old, hopping in and out of jail, he wouldn’t have expected to be here. Life is unpredictable that way.
Statement Deputy Editor Liam Rappleye can be reached at rappleye@umich.edu.