010 – Samuel

Samuel has been working for me for three years now.  I’d met him when he was an aide at Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts in the fall of 1980.  There were about a dozen aides who worked on the wards as trustees.  All were men serving life without parole sentences for first-degree murder.  All were let out of prison for six hours each weekday on an unpaid work release programs.Samuel had been born Black and poor in Virginia, one of seven children.  It really is no excuse.  After high school he’d joined the U.S. Coast Guard, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but he was a bit of a misfit, smarter than the others, and not just a little lost.  It was while in the Coast Guard that he began hanging out in Boston: women, a little smoke, nothing to do, and nowhere to go.  Adrift.  He and his best friend, Digger, decided to stick up the bar at the Holiday Inn on Massachusetts Ave. outside Central Square in Cambridge one November after midnight.  It was ill conceived and more impulsive than well reasoned.  They waited until the bar was empty.  They nursed their beers.  The bar tender served them a last round.  Digger pulled out a pistol.  Sam claims he didn’t know Digger was even carrying.  The bar tender drew a gun.  They each fired and the bartender was dead.  He had a wife and two young children.  Sam was shot in the exchange of fire and ran bleeding from the bar.  They’d taken all of two hundred dollars.  The FBI knew who he was immediately by his fingerprints on the beer bottles.  He became a fugitive and was successfully a fugitive for years.  Traveled in fear but without incident.  When they finally caught him the Middlesex County prosecutors offered to give him a second-degree murder sentence if he were to plead guilty and give them the name of his accomplice and best friend.  Fifteen years to life seemed as long as life then.  The disloyalty was too unbearable.  He took the case to trial and lost, as he knew he must.  There simply was no alternative.  And in the end he found himself in state’s prison for the remainder of his natural life without the possibility of parole.