From The Intercept:
In the days after President Joe Biden commuted his death sentence, 40-year-old Rejon Taylor felt like he’d been reborn. After facing execution for virtually his entire adult life for a crime he committed at 18, he was fueled by a new sense of purpose. He was “a man on a mission,” he told me in an email on Christmas Day. “I will not squander this opportunity of mercy, of life.”
Taylor saw new signs of life all around him. Biden had granted clemency to 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, an unprecedented move that none of them expected. One of his neighbors, a man who long ago seemed to have “fallen into an abyss in his fractured mind, never to return again,” suddenly appeared lucid, talking to Taylor instead of the voices in his head. “He even cleaned up his cell today, something he NEVER does. … He now has hope, despite a life sentence! I’m amazed!”
The sense of renewal was shared by men like Charles Hall, whose years on death row had been especially punishing. In a six-page letter to Biden, he vowed that the decision to grant clemency “will not be wasted on me.” Hall had earned a paralegal certificate while on death row and he planned to continue his education, he wrote, adding that change and positivity are possible “even behind razor wire, fences, walls, and bars.” Continue reading >>>
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