Carlos Vicario: As we come to Part 8 of this interview, we’ve discussed your trial, your early days adjusting to life in prison. But in between, we haven’t touched on one important event: the day a jury convicted you, at sixteen, of first-degree murder. Looking back to that moment in the courtroom, what do you recall most clearly? What was going through your mind?

Efren Paredes, Jr.: I think my initial reaction was disbelief. No one could have convinced me that I would be convicted of a crime I did not commit, prior to the jury verdict. Had I been offered a one-year sentence as a guilty plea I would have refused it. That’s how much misguided confidence I had in our broken criminal justice system. At that moment, I felt swallowed up in a sea of disappointment, anger, and confusion; like my body had become a battlefield of injustice.

At sixteen, I had no idea that people were ever convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. My naiveté led me to believe that if someone was innocent they would be found not guilty by a jury. I was oblivious to the notion of wrongful convictions.

After the jury announced their verdict, I recall seeing my mother crying. I also remember looking at the jurors, and many of them not wanting to make eye contact with me even from across the room. The ones that did make eye contact appeared to do so begrudgingly. With the exception of the jury foreman (who, we later learned, knew and worked with the aunt of the victim’s wife in my case) the jurors appeared uneasy about their decision.

CV: After that, did you hold out hope that the judge would still sentence you as a juvenile, and make it possible for you to be released at 21?

EPJ: No. Between the time the jury convicted me and the date I was sentenced, a couple of months later, my trial attorney gave me no reason to believe I would be sentenced as a juvenile. He never even discussed it with me. I thought because I had been convicted in adult court, it was a foregone conclusion I would be sentenced as an adult.

In fact, I remember my attorney preparing me for my sentencing hearing by telling me we would appear in court, the judge would sentence me to life without parole, and we would appeal the sentence. I don’t know if he told me that because he had given up hope and knew something I didn’t, or if he wasn’t familiar with defending a juvenile in adult court.

My experience and research leads me to conclude it was likely both. After all, I was the first juvenile in Berrien County to ever be automatically transferred to adult court without a waiver hearing, according to a new law passed just months prior to my arrest. My attorney obviously had no experience effectively challenging the new law because no attorney in the county had done so yet.

CV: What did it mean to you at sixteen, hearing the words, “life without parole?”

EPJ: I drew a blank. It didn’t even register to me at the time, because of what my attorney told me before the sentencing hearing occurred. I didn’t know what a life sentence meant and no one ever took the time to explain the gravity of it to me (including my attorney). Instead, I was told we would appeal the decision and eventually win on appeal.

A 16-year-old boy doesn’t understand what a life sentence is. To a kid a long time is weeks or months. They don’t have the capacity to process things in term of years, and especially a lifetime. It wouldn’t be until I went to prison and met people serving life sentences that I began to understand what a life sentence truly meant.

CV: I want to direct readers to the transcript of your sentencing, because I think it’s important here to keep the totality of the experience in mind. At this point, we’re talking about someone who has just turned sixteen, who has had to deal—without any professional help—with losing a co-worker to senseless violence, with false accusations, with the trauma and mental injury of solitary confinement; and who is now sitting, facing a judge and hearing these words read from the letters of the victim’s family:

“I would rather the people found guilty of this crime spend the rest of a very long life in prison. Maybe in that way they will suffer the rest of their lives like we will. Death would be the easy way out.”

“I want each boy sentenced to the same maximum sentence they gave me; life with no life. There is no way to bring Rick back, but I want them to live a hellish nightmare like the one I’m living.”

“I want the guilty to pay and suffer.”

“They are animals who do not belong on the streets to have a chance to do this again.”

“As I watched him in the courtroom, he showed no feelings, expression or remorse. I have no doubt in my mind that he would kill again.”

You’re sixteen. You know you did not commit this crime. What was your reaction to these statements?

EPJ: Let me talk about the statements themselves, first. You have to understand what this family sat through at the trial. Some have described it as a media circus, but I believe that term fails to capture the magnitude of what was taking place both inside and outside the courtroom. The trial lasted five days: it was covered intensely. So that’s battering and intrusive to grieving people to begin with. But then they had to sit through all the testimony, including the ugly details of exactly how their loved one had died—like where each bullet struck, and what it did. It isn’t possible not to be traumatized all over again by an experience like that. No system or institution more intrusively provokes post-traumatic symptoms than a courtroom.

So then, being in that courtroom five days, and hearing a constant stream of false and misleading information about me—and because of my attorney’s advice to not show emotion—they saw nothing in my face or behavior to make them think I was capable of human emotion. The feeling you hear expressed in those statements was pure, raw pain that any reasonable person in the same circumstances would have felt.

Rick’s family did not do anything wrong. They were there to defend him and his memory, and demand justice. They had a right to express their pain. They did for Rick what any devastated family would reasonably do for a loved one killed by an act of senseless violence.

Even at sixteen, I had a strong sense of that. Rick was someone I had looked up to and respected. I was not angry with the family he loved. I knew the things they said were intended for the person who had really killed him—that because they didn’t get to see and hear all the facts, they had been misled into believing what wasn’t true. And I reminded myself of that again and again, so I would not take it in a personal way: they don’t know the truth, but someday they will.

CV: You had a conviction in the absolute triumph of the truth.

EPJ: I still do. I’ve learned that wrongful convictions happen more frequently than we think: that false witnesses can get on the stand, and corrupt people can swear corrupt things. But despite the flaws in our broken criminal justice system I continue to believe that the truth always triumphs in the end. When I was that young, I just didn’t understand how long it can take to happen.

I sometimes look back and wish I’d done what I wanted to do at the time: stand up in the courtroom and try to defend myself. Just to stand up, when someone was saying something that was not true, and vigorously, loudly deny it; and insist they stop lying about me and admit they were lying. Maybe it wouldn’t have prevented my being convicted, but at least everyone would have known exactly what I was thinking and feeling right then.

CV: But then how do you respond to members of the Tetzlaff family who have continued to oppose your release throughout your campaign for freedom over the years? We’re not just talking about about a one-time expression of grief and anger.

EPJ: Again, you need to think about how hard it is for a trauma survivor to heal from this kind of loss. I was much older than sixteen when I found Judith Herman’s book, “Trauma and Recovery: the Aftermath of Violence,” but I take it to heart. Consider what she writes here: “Traumatic events destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of creation.” That’s a total overturning of everything. The survivor has to rebuild.

You know, I’ve said this before, but I felt terrible for Rick’s family about his death and I still do. I prayed for them then, and I still do. My heart breaks for their family every time I think about Rick. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Rick’s death and the tremendous loss his family has suffered. There is so much pain there, and no one should ever judge the way another person grieves or processes their pain.

When I learned about Rick’s death as a fifteen-year-old, I cried, I was sad; but I had no way to understand grief or loss the way I do today, at the age of 46. Rick left behind a wonderful wife and son who he talked about often, as well as his parents and siblings. As a father and husband myself, now, I know this family has endured devastating suffering—so deep that nothing can fill the void.

CV: Then would you be open to communicate with them, if you could?

EPJ: Other people have asked that question: would you talk to them?  My answer has always been, “Of course I would.” They deserve to be able to ask me questions, and learn who I am firsthand. That personal conversation can be tremendously important. Even in cases where prisoners were in fact guilty of serious crimes, I know some who have reconciled with their victim’s family members. Some have visited with the prisoners and gotten to know more about them. I believe reconciliation is possible where both parties are receptive to healing and moving forward with rebuilding their lives. This is what transformative justice is about.

CV: Except that in this case, we have a problem, because the only thing someone wants to hear is, “I’m sorry, I did it.” And you can’t say that. You can’t ask for forgiveness. So what do you want to say instead?

EPJ: It’s true that maybe they never will forgive me, believing the things they do. The most important thing is not for them to forgive me, but for them to find purpose in their pain, to heal, and have peace. But, without forgiveness, that’s hard to have. Many people mistakenly believe that forgiveness is for the offender. It can help that way sometimes, but the biggest thing is that when we forgive we do it for ourselves, so that we can move forward with our lives and not be paralyzed by pain.

I believe it is possible to forgive people who we believe to have offended us in some way, even when we disagree with the facts surrounding an incident. I also believe it’s possible for each one of us to learn and acquire better understandings as we gain new information. We have all experienced episodes where we believed we were right about something, only to later discover that we were wrong. That’s a normal part of the human experience; and it doesn’t make someone a bad person, just a person who has more learning to do.

CV: Let me pull out that part: “even when we disagree with the facts surrounding an incident.” You’ve had to forgive people with whom you dispute the facts, yes?

EPJ: Yes, many times. And don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t learn to do that overnight. When I first entered prison, I was frustrated, embittered, and filled with resentment because the system had failed me. So I clung to a distorted notion of not forgiving anyone who had lied about me, or who had done anything that resulted in me going to prison.

It took a long time—soul searching, growing, and learning about character development—before I discovered how unproductive it was for me to think this way. I learned that I was gaining absolutely nothing by being unforgiving, and the only person I was hurting was myself. I was exacerbating my own pain.

Once I learned to forgive, I felt what I imagine a butterfly feels when it emerges from the darkness of a tight chrysalis to spread its colorful wings. I felt like I had wings, taking me out of my former negative thought loop. Forgiveness comes from a place of power: it’s a universal teaching throughout the world’s different faith traditions.

CV: Why do you think it’s so difficult for us to forgive others?

EPJ:  We allow our emotions to dictate our responses to situations. That’s instinctive, it’s natural, but it can make us turn inward and do destructive things to our lives. If we’re trapped in trauma, it erodes us inside: we can lose who we are, we can lose our self-worth—and we can’t grow. If you want to move forward and think forward, you need to understand that the traumatic events you live through are part of your larger life story. They’re not your life’s defining moment.

Barbara Brown Taylor, who is an Episcopal priest and the author of “Learning to Walk in the Dark,” says, “People who do nothing but damn and pound and pummel can turn to stone, like hot lava that cools into a sharp rock. When we forgive, we free ourselves from bitterness, and we grant the person who wronged us the chance to make things right.”

CV: So maybe you can be free of bitterness, but what about the person who wronged you, who doesn’t want to make things right? What about—let’s say, the prosecutor in your case, who wants to see you in prison until you die?

EPJ: I don’t harbor any negative feelings towards the prosecutor. We have differences about the  facts in my case, but I would rather focus on the future and not the past, which can’t be changed. Further, I don’t know him personally, nor do I know what lies in his heart. I don’t want to make false assumptions and misjudge someone, because I know how it feels to be treated this way.

Now, I do recognize that prosecutors have a challenging job to do. I think they could be more flexible and compromising, particularly with the cases of those who are juvenile offenders and/or first-time offenders. But after ensuring public safety, every prosecutor needs to think of rehabilitation as part of the sentencing goal. Ninety-five percent of all offenders are eventually released! So using retribution as the only goal of sentencing is not thinking about the future in a practical way.

While I’m on this subject, retribution is aimed at the past. Rehabilitation and redemption are about reaching toward the future. You don’t heal pain and suffering by creating more pain and suffering in the world, or treating people as soulless bodies to warehouse until they die.

CV: Back to our question, though—what about someone who’s wronged you and doesn’t want to make it right? Someone who may not even believe they’ve wronged you? Do you still forgive that person?

EPJ: One thing I’ve learned is that forgiveness shouldn’t be a quid pro quo or contingent upon someone else. It’s not deal making. If it were, people would have the power to really imprison each other in pain—like holding hostages. “You won’t forgive me, so I won’t forgive you.” That’s the way people think sometimes. What they are actually saying is, “I’m surrendering my decision-making power and control to the person who harmed me, and I can’t move forward with my life.” But it’s not true. We all possess within us the ability to make better decisions. Whether we choose to do that or not is entirely up to us, not others.

We have to understand that, because sometimes people aren’t mentally or emotionally equipped to make certain choices in their lives. There are also people who become addicted to anger and lashing out, as the only ways to coping with their pain and frustration. I’ve discovered in many instances, though, that it isn’t their fault. For many of these people, it’s all they’ve ever known in their home or upbringing.

Even when someone doesn’t have a terrible upbringing, we still never know the experiences they’ve lived. Some people will take longer than others to mentally and emotionally mature, and some may never develop the skills to do it at all. The stage of another person’s development (or their deficiencies) shouldn’t be a barrier to healing and moving forward with our own lives. If it were, no one would ever be able to escape any pain they experience from human interactions.

CV: Of course, we promised readers in our last interview that we’d talk about personal growth—specifically, from going through pain to growing through pain. When you’re so full of hurt, anger, and frustration, how do you accept the fact that this isn’t getting you anywhere and you’re the one who has to change? What’s that little moment in your brain that says, “We’re not winning, here, man. Time for a new game plan.”

EPJ: This is just such a different moment for every person, because our different experiences shape us and our perceptions about life. For me, I reached a point in my life some years ago when I became exhausted. I was letting toxic emotions swallow up my life—anger, raging resentment, indignation, mental anguish—corrosive stuff. And I no longer had the energy to hold out against it, or let it keep going on.

CV: You’ve talked about how prisoners learn to suppress those emotions in front of staff and other prisoners.

EPJ: Yeah, except, you know what? You’re strangling yourself. Choking on your own ego. I was choking on mine. Running into walls, instead of looking for a door out. Like so many other people in this situation, I was afraid to admit I might be wrong about what it would be like to change. I didn’t want to feel vulnerable, and I didn’t know what the outcome would be, and I was afraid of that.

I was doing this to myself: no one forced me into this condition. This prison was in my mind, my emotions. I had no idea how this kind of mental poison can limit the human imagination, or put a person into a downward spiral.

Finally I got it: this takes way too much energy. That was when I knew I had to explore solutions, and I latched onto the adage, “For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” So it sort of became an everyday mantra for me. I wanted my life back, and not to be cheated out of any more happiness.

The biggest thing that helped me cement this thinking into my daily life was the birth of my daughter. She makes me want to stay accountable, to make good choices. If I were a planet, she’d be the sun at the center of my orbit. Most of all, I want to avoid disappointing her as a person and a father. I do the work to make myself better so I can give her the example she needs, and deserves.

CV: You’ve suggested before that your daughter has contributed to your education, as well as your personal development.

EPJ: My daughter has helped me grow and learn to appreciate life more in so many ways. Being incarcerated from the age of fifteen onwards, I wasn’t able to interact normally with girls my age during some critical years—that’s because girls under 18, who weren’t immediate family members, were not allowed to visit the prison at all. I had no sisters. Women I interacted with during prison visits, or who worked inside the prison, were all older—they were not my peer group. So what happened was that through my mid and late teens, I learned about women from the men around me, and from what I saw on television. You can imagine how unhealthy, how really dysfunctional, that is inside a prison.

But I always loved books and learning. As I grew older, I began to read more about women, gender issues, feminism, relationships, power dynamics—all those things. Then I started to look at how I was thinking about them. And you know what? It was distorted. I could see that, and I didn’t like it. People had been unfair to me: I didn’t want to be unfair. So my studying helped me develop more empathy, and learn to listen better and communicate better. Then, as I formed relationships, they helped me grow—to build positive perceptions that were much healthier. That’s not to say all the stereotypes and distorted ideas about women just evaporated from my thinking right away, because they didn’t. But I began making progress. (laughs)

Back when I was growing up, in the 80s, boys didn’t hear so much about equality, about mutual respect between them and girls. The idea was more like be tough, be masculine, don’t show any emotion that could be perceived as weak. Be the decision maker—you’re better than a girl. Girls should be small, they should be quiet, they shouldn’t argue or be confrontational.

The birth of my daughter hit me like no other experience ever had; and it forced me to look all over again at my life, and how I thought about girls and women. It was like she could hold out a little shovel in her tiny hand and whisper to me, without any words at all: “It’s time for a fresh start—a new beginning. Start digging into your life. It’s time for you to change.”

CV: So what did you uncover as a result?

EPJ: I had to rethink everything, all the time—everything I thought I knew about what it would be like to have a daughter, everything about the world she was going to live in. I had to think about what I thought and felt and the person I was. And then I had to look hard at how patriarchal and sexist our society is.

I guess I’d always known there were power imbalances, but I hadn’t looked very closely at them up until then. Then I looked at my daughter, and for the first time I was really thinking about how women are objectified, disrespected, treated as inferior—how unfairly they can be treated, and the injustices they face. And it was like a dam crashing down, and this huge wall of water bursting through, and I was ashamed. Like the universe sat me down, and looked me in the eye, and said, “You’ve been selfish, foolish, ignorant and narrow, for not thinking of this all along.”

So I said, I’m not going to be this way anymore. My daughter is going to smash all the glass ceilings, and I’m going to be right beside her when she does it.

Now, I knew prison wasn’t necessarily an inviting space to start advocating for girls, women, and gender equality, ok?

CV: I think we could call that an understatement.

EPJ: Well, I had to start doing it somewhere. So what better place is there, where people need to hear that message more, than in a male prison? I wanted to do this for my daughter, but also for every other girl out there whose father needs to have his head and his heart cleared of twisted thinking. I mean the kind of thinking from the past that wants to put men in charge of women and own them, and decide who they get to be. I understand it’s not easy to change that thinking. Growth, and changing how you think, means dealing with conflict inside yourself, and winning.

So I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t feel like that gave me a free pass, because I’m a father now, and I owe this to my daughter. I started sharing stories about her with other prisoners—how her birth made me start thinking about all these things and look at my life again. And I told them, we need to take apart this twisted narrative that men should have power over women—because using women and thinking of them in demeaning ways is the behavior of predators. And if you want to make yourself into a decent human being, you need to realize this isn’t acceptable.

I reminded them none of us would be alive today if not for a woman bringing us into the world. If you can’t get beyond that, to the idea of women as real, equal individuals, you need to at least remember your life started with a woman, and that fact alone should make women sacred to you. We have to think about women and girls differently, protect them better, and talk about them with honor and respect.

And you know what surprised me? A lot of them agreed. Nobody argued with me. It was like they wanted to make the change, and they were just waiting for someone else to bring it up, because they didn’t want to be labeled feminist or weak.

CV: But you have to watch your daughter grow up in a world that’s patriarchal and unsafe. Are you thinking about how she’ll have to interact with boys and men as she grows older?

EPJ: All I have to do is reflect back on my younger self, and it hits me. I’m not the only male who’s grown up with immature, distorted thinking. A lot of men have.

Knowing what I do today—let me reference the term, “toxic masculinity,” here—I don’t want males of any age trying to dictate to my daughter what she can do in life, or how she should do it. I don’t want her to feel she has to receive permission from any man or boy to be her beautiful, brown authentic self. I want her to be resilient, fierce, outspoken, a change-maker—a person of integrity, full of confidence, who knows she’s equal to anyone in the world—male or female.

I know she can do that. I’m going to be standing behind her, and she has a wonderful mother who shows her every day how to be a trailblazer for women and girls. Our daughter can’t escape being reminded of her enormous potential. It’s in her DNA.

CV: You named her with that idea in mind.

EPJ: Her middle name is an indigenous Mexican name that means “the seed that can transform into anything.”

To share a little story, I asked her, during a visit recently, if she ever gets bullied in school. She looked at me as if I were being completely ridiculous, and said, “No, Daddy.” So I asked what she would do if someone tried to bully her, and she said in this very stern voice: “I would stand up for myself. And, I would tell my teacher, and you and Mom.” At that moment, I couldn’t have felt more proud of her.

I do understand my wife and I can’t control other people’s behavior. I understand that much too well. But we can teach our daughter how to respond to it, and we can teach her to stay aware of gender power dynamics. Awareness is an issue. If you don’t know why somebody is treating you in a disrespectful way, you might not be prepared to stand up for yourself.

Also, one of the biggest things we do is provide the right modeling. Specifically, I have to be aware of my interactions with my wife—not arguing, but looking for common ground, or sometimes stepping back and being patient until we get to a space when we can discuss things further. I don’t raise my voice to my wife, I don’t disrespect her, because I want my daughter to have a standard for how men should treat her in the future. I want her to grow up to be a powerful woman who knows she never has to shrink to make someone else feel better about themselves.

I hate the phrase, “A woman should stay in her place,” or “A woman’s place is in the home,” so I keep a poster from a digital artist that says, “A woman’s place is everywhere.” It’s a powerful visual statement, and it inspires me every time I look at it, because it tells me, “You have to keep talking about this, and keep fighting these intolerable things.” Keep fighting this toxic idea of a “man’s world,” and the real inequalities of life that women face.

CV: And with that, we have to stop for now. Next time I want to ask you about some of the other public activism you’ve carried on from behind prison bars. Thank you to our readers for joining us again.

 

Part 9 of this interview coming soon.

Efren Paredes, Jr. is a Michigan prisoner and subject of the new multi-channel documentary film installation, “Half Truths and Full Lies.” He is also a blogger, social justice advocate, proud father, and loving husband. You can learn more about Efren by visiting www.fb.com/Free.Efren and www.tinyurl.com/Efren1016.