Sentenced to Die in There
Evans Ray is really good at cheering people up. He’s the kind of person who makes a beeline for the shy looking person at the party, who would give his seat up on the bus for Grandpa.
And who would go out of his way to make the new guy at Big Sandy Penitentiary feel a little less like the bottom had dropped out. Big Sandy is a high-security United States federal prison for male inmates in Kentucky, notorious for its violence and gang-related activity. Evans spent part of his mandatory minimum life sentence there.
Judge Williams was reluctant to hand down the sentence, saying, “It is not my desire to sentence you to life … I believe that the circumstances justify a sentence shorter than life. I further believe that there is some disproportionality between what you’ve done and the sentence of life.” But, he added, “my hands are tied.” In the end Judge Williams was allowed no discretion and had to impose life.
“He should have done some time for the crime,” says Evans’ mother, Gwendolyn Bell. “But life in prison, without the possibility of parole? This is like a death sentence.” She’s right: Evans Ray was supposed to die in prison.
Those years were anything but easy. He watched his cellmate die from an aneurysm right in front of him, and every day he had to deal with threats of violence. He learned to combat all the “negativity with positive,” enrolling in as many programs as he could and focusing on how he could help other men.
The years were hard on his family, too, especially his four children. “I remember asking my son one time, ‘What do you tell people when they ask about me?’ He said, ‘I just don’t talk about it, Dad.’ That was hard to hear,” Evans says now. “Thinking he might be ashamed of me.”
On August 3, 2016, though, after more than 12 years behind bars Evans’ sentence was commuted (or shortened) by President Obama. He still vividly remembers the moment he heard the news, right down to the minute — 1:16 p.m. — that a guard came to his cell to tell him he had a phone call in the office.
Shortly after hearing that he received clemency, Evans moved to a halfway house, then into home confinement at his mother’s house. On December 1, he officially became a free man.
“It’s the best feeling in the world since he’s come home,” says his daughter, Inahaya.
Every day he wakes up, surprised to find that he’s “in a big bed, not a cell, and that the toilet isn’t in the room.” It’s rare to catch him without at least a small smile on his face — although the transition hasn’t been easy. “Slowly, I’m building up that trust again. But it’s hard, after all those years of wearing that mask, having to be so guarded.”
To see Evans Ray today smiling and enjoying time with his family, it’s difficult to fathom that he was sent away to die in prison. Everyone, including his mother, knew he deserved to go to prison for his crime. But no one, including his judge, thought he needed a life sentence. But because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws — laws that were put into place by politicians in Congress, who knew nothing about Evans Ray or his case — he was never supposed to come home.
Recently, he got a job working as a counselor at the Community Empowerment Leadership Academy in Southeast D.C., where he works helping young people avoid the pitfalls that took him down the wrong path all those years ago. He’s a natural, of course, because of what he’s been through, and because of how he talks and connects with people in general.
If anything, he seems tailor-made for this kind of work. Evans Ray was sentenced to a life without hope. But he never lost it — and now he’s helping others find it.
