Equal Justice Matters Wall (K)
Kelly, Anthony
Kelly, James
Knock, John
Anthony Kelly with his mother.
ANTHONY KELLY
After a confidential informant made a controlled purchase of $20 worth of marijuana from Gwen, a Kelly family neighbor, Kenner Police Department officers used a battering ram to forcibly enter and search her house, which was located across the street from the apartment where Kelly’s mother and brother lived. At Gwen’s house, police found a clear plastic bag containing 21 small nickel bags of marijuana in the toilet, as well as three partially smoked hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes in an ashtray. An additional 21 small bags of marijuana and a bag of loose marijuana were found in Gwen’s purse. According to Kelly, at the time of the police search, he and his brother were at Gwen’s house, helping bring in groceries after driving her to the grocery store.
Police arrested Gwen, her son, Kelly, and his two brothers. At trial, the lead detective claimed that she found Kelly and the neighbor’s son trying to flush the marijuana baggies down the toilet. Kelly insists this is untrue, and both Gwen and her son testified that the detective found the marijuana after everyone had been handcuffed and brought to the living room. Gwen testified that the marijuana was hers, that she packaged the marijuana herself with no help from Kelly, and that Kelly did not know she was selling marijuana. Kelly was convicted, despite this testimony, by 10 out of 12 jurors. The lead police detective, a primary witness against Kelly, was later convicted of evidence tampering and malfeasance in office, and she was accused of taking drugs from the evidence room for her own use.
Kelly was originally sentenced to 15 years but was resentenced to a mandatory LWOP sentence as a third-strike felony offender based on two prior convictions, one for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute in 1995, when he was 21, and the other for simple possession of cocaine in 1993, when he was 19. Kelly had pleaded guilty to both charges and says he was never told that these convictions could be used to enhance a future felony sentence. He says that his sentence “feels like being buried alive.” “Do I deserve to spend the rest of my life behind bars because I was in possession of 21 five-dollar bags of marijuana?” he asks. “This is my life story, I just want someone to hear a changed man cry.”
Kelly, now 39, has served 13 years in prison. He says of prison, “It seems like it would get easier, but instead it gets harder every day.” Kelly, who completed the ninth grade prior to his incarceration but was a special education student at a fifth-grade level, is currently studying for his GED. He has taken faith-based spiritual classes and courses in drug addiction and recovery and says that he has found God while in prison.
When Kelly was arrested, his girlfriend was pregnant with his first child. His daughter is now 12 years old, and he says it is difficult being away from her. “She is my world,” he says. “I always sit and think about my daughter at night and wonder how did I fall short at providing for her.” His father and grandmother have died since he has been incarcerated, and his 73-year-old mother, with whom he is close, has cancer.
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 159).
JAMES KELLY
A married father, Kelly worked as a forklift operator. According to Kelly, he struggled with drug addiction and previously stole to support his addiction, but had finally entered treatment following a prior arrest and was getting his life back on track. In June 2003, he was working off fines by washing cars and doing janitorial work for the Flowood Police Department in central Mississippi. A court clerk noticed a money bag was missing from a desk drawer, and police later recovered it from Kelly’s car. He was sentenced to a mandatory LWOP sentence under Mississippi’s habitual offender law because of his prior convictions for robbery and grand larceny. According to court records, he had previously pleaded guilty to one count of grand larceny, one count of strong arm robbery, and three counts of armed robbery in 1986, when he was 19 years old, and in 1998, when he was 28 years old. Kelly, who is Black, is now 47 years old and has served 10 years of his LWOP sentence. He has completed drug treatment in prison and says that being separated from his family has been “pure hell.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 123).
James Kelly
John Knock
JOHN KNOCK
In the early- and mid-1980s, Knock worked with others to import hashish into Canada and marijuana into the United States. He says he withdrew from the organization in 1988 because he was concerned about U.S. drug enforcement activities and wanted to focus on his marriage. According to Knock, in 1993 one of his former associates attracted the attention of DEA agents, who constructed a massive marijuana conspiracy case through a reverse sting operation using a confidential informant and undercover agents. No marijuana was seized by the government, and the case was largely based on testimony from multiple co-conspirators who cooperated in exchange for reduced sentences. Knock was a fugitive until he was arrested in France in 1996 and later extradited to the United States. He was charged with operating, with co-conspirators, a drug organization that imported and distributed 790,000 pounds of marijuana and hashish from 1984 to 1993. Prosecutors characterized Knock as one of the world’s biggest smugglers of hashish and marijuana. At trial, he was convicted of conspiracy to import and possess with intent to distribute large quantities of marijuana, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and criminal forfeiture. Although Knock had no criminal record, he was sentenced to two life terms plus 20 years for money laundering.
Knock says, “I have been separated from my family for 17 years. I have watched our son grow from three into a young man of 22 through telephone calls and prison visiting rooms. My life partner since 1974 is now my ex-wife…. When a person goes to prison, the entire family pays the price. All do time of some sort.” Knock’s ex-wife, son, two sisters, and brother all visit him regularly. Since 2003, he has mentored inmates, helping them adjust to incarceration and counseling them on how to use their time productively in prison. Known in prison as “the professor,” Knock also teaches and develops adult continuing education and construction classes for other prisoners.
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 163).
*John’s sentence was ultimately commuted by President Trump after serving more than 20 years behind bars.
RONALD KYLES
The house had been vacant for over a year; the owner had moved out of the house after her son was found dead there. Late one morning in February 2006, a neighbor noticed Kyles exiting the house with a television set. Based on the neighbor’s description of Kyles’s car, police later arrested Kyle at his house. He told police he had a circular saw and power converter from the house and claimed that a white man named Danny had sold him the tools and left with the television. The police report supported some aspects of Kyles’s story, as it stated that the neighbor witnessed Kyles with a white man. His first trial resulted in a mistrial when jurors could not agree on a verdict. Kyles was convicted of simple burglary on retrial and initially sentenced to 10 years in prison. That sentence was then vacated and he was given a mandatory life-without-parole sentence under Louisiana’s four-strikes law because of his prior convictions for simple burglary of two sheds, two convictions for possession of stolen property, and two convictions for theft dating back as far as two decades. Kyles, who is Black, reports he had struggled with mental health and substance abuse, but he says he had married, had finally turned his life around since 2004, and was working as a truck driver to support his family. He recalls that when he heard his sentence, “I almost passed out.” Now 49, he has been incarcerated for seven years, during which his son, sister, brother, and mother have died. He remains in contact with his wife, and participates in Narcotics Anonymous and a Bible studies program in prison.
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 125).
Ronald Kyles with his wife, Mechelle Kyles.