Barred for Life

If you need to get ahold of attorney Charles Carbone on Thursday mornings, you won't find him at his cramped but atmospheric second-floor law digs in the shadow of the Transamerica Building. Instead, he's at the KPOO radio station on Divisadero, his moped parked just across the street, and he is hosting a show on prison conditions. Between the interview segments, reggae music plays.

In the seclusion of the studio, Carbone can dress as casually and flamboyantly as he pleases, a rare luxury for an attorney, which means his wiry body (he weighs all of 133 pounds) is contained in drainpipe-orange jeans, the belt for which has a huge turquoise clasp, and a thick cotton shirt with big faux-wood buttons. On his shirt's left collar is a green, yellow, and red Jah pin. On the third finger of his right hand is a ring with a large milky stone, a Lady Buddha ring (to match the Lady Buddha statuette in his office); on his left hand, a ring hosting a large engraved silver square — which represents, he explains, a Tutuareg map pointing a way out of the wilderness of the Sahara Desert.

It's certainly not the stereotypical image of a high-powered San Francisco attorney. Then again, there's very little that isstereotypical about Carbone. Over the last few years he has become a virtual one-man crusade, a go-to lawyer to whom desperate prison lifers from around California turn when trying to navigate the parole process and, in particular, when appealing parole denials.

With the exception of capital defense attorneys, there's no more thankless legal business than arguing that one murderer after another should be returned to the community. Your clients have been convicted of atrocious crimes, sometimes so ghoulish they'll infiltrate your nightmares.

For Carbone, that role is filled by the dying little old lady he is trying to get released on "compassionate" grounds, who decades back tortured a drug-dealing confederate to death over several hours. The public hates these individuals, and, by extension, you. (Despite recent drops in public support for the death penalty, a 2006 poll found that well over 60 percent of Californians still favor the ultimate sanction for murderers.) The parole board — which relies almost exclusively on "gut instinct" in these cases and whose members tend to be ex-law enforcement personnel, prosecutors, and crime victims — is utterly suspicious of you and your clientele and claims of "rehabilitation." And the governor's office has nothing to gain and a whole bunch to lose — remember Willie Horton? — by letting your guys roam the streets again.

Moreover, Carbone and the other attorneys who work this beat have found over the years that there's virtually no legal standard that can be applied on these parole denials. At the end of the day, it all comes down to certain "feelings." In the same way as a New York City co-op board can refuse to let buyers into a building for any generic reason, so long as it's not overtly racist or otherwise discriminatory against a particular group, so, too, can a parole board deny parole on the vaguest of vague rationales.

To make matters worse, district attorneys, along with victims or surviving family members, marshaled by Crime Victims United (CVU), come to the hearings to testify about your client's crimes and their impact. If, despite that, the board recommends parole, there's always the possibility of the victim's family publicly lobbying politicians for a reversal.

"When people run for office, we have a stringent procedure," explains Harriet Salarno, a one-time dental hygienist from San Francisco, whose daughter, Catina Rose, was shot dead, execution-style, by an ex-boyfriend on her college campus in 1979, and who has devoted the last three decades to organizing victims into a coherent movement under the auspices of CVU. They send out a questionnaire to many politicians around the state. "They must come to Sacramento, and come before our board. We're bombarded all the time for our endorsement." And how influential is CVU? Well, explains Salarno, according to a survey by a group of public relations firms, they're No. 2 in the state, after the firefighters union.

So Carbone must gather evidence, overcome the interest groups' influence, and face an arbitrary parole board. It takes a tireless crusader. There are 30-plus prisons in California, and only a handful of attorneys willing to devote the bulk of their time to working parole cases for lifers. As a result, a man like Carbone is almost always on the road, traveling from one prison to the next to meet clients and argue difficult cases — the ones few others want.

In 2006, California's parole board issued one of Carbone's clients, Oakland native Debra Mattie, a parole date nearly 30 years after she'd been sent to prison for 15 years to life.

Back in the 1970s, Mattie, at the time a heroin addict, was told by her then-boyfriend that he wanted her to partake in a sex party at a local hotel. Against her will, she was bundled into a car with several of his friends, and driven toward the hotel. En route, in this semi-kidnapped state, she got into a fight with one of the other women in the car, grabbed a gun that her boyfriend was carrying with him, and shot her through the face, killing her instantly. Both Mattie and her victim were added to the grim statistics of poor Americans who dole out or are on the receiving end of acts of unfathomable and senseless violence.

For the first 15 years behind bars, trouble and Debra seemed to go together naturally. She was busted for possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia. She got into fights, was punished for disrespecting staff. Finally, though, something clicked and she thought this was an idiotic way to while away a life. Like many other prisoners who've been behind bars for much of their lives, prisoner W-15265 got religion. She enrolled in vocational training and self-help programs, and got certified in masonry and home and auto upholstery.

As the 21st century got underway, Mattie's psych evaluations were all positive. In 2004 her counselor's report deemed her a "low degree of threat to public safety." A year later her psychological assessment said she had a "low to moderately low" likelihood of acting violently upon release. She lined up a place in a drug-treatment transitional housing setup in Hayward, and got herself five job offers.

In September of last year, more than a decade after she was first eligible for parole, Mattie beat long odds and got the parole board to recommend she be let out of prison.

Since there are about 29,000 lifers in California, and the board only recommends a few dozen a year for parole, clearly Mattie — and Carbone, who filed a document listing 17 reasons why she was a good parole candidate — had convinced some inherently cynical people that she had really turned her life around.

But Mattie didn't get to go home. Shortly after the parole board issued its recommendation, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the decision, his two-page release review, dated Sept. 22, 2006, declaring that "the negative factors weighing against her parole suitability presently outweigh the positive factors tending to support it."

It was not an unusual case. "We don't need to apologize in being extremely tough in looking at people who have killed and abused others in horrendous ways," explains Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Dave Dahle, who is in charge of his office's "lifers division," which monitors the current sentencing status of the 12,000 lifers in the system who originate out of L.A. County. "Is it capricious? No. Is it tough? Absolutely. To get yourself back into society, an inmate has to be as focused as a student working on a Ph.D."

And so, despite those who deal with her daily believing she is no longer a public threat, 54-year-old Mattie remains behind bars. Soon, she will begin her fourth decade of incarceration. If she lives another 20 years in prison, at current costs the state will be spending about $1 million incarcerating her for the time period afterthe parole board deemed her rehabilitated.

"Society sentences us to life and then they forget about us," Mattie wrote from the Central California Women's Facility. "The parole board found me suitable and Arnold reversed their decision. He has no faith in his own appointed board members. I have done all I can possibly to do to [sic] become a better person. I am not the person I was 27 years ago."

Since 1988, when voters passed an initiative restructuring the parole process, governors have had the power to reverse parole recommendations for murderers. All four governors since then have used their veto vigorously.

Gray Davis, the only Democrat of the quartet, was so concerned about being perceived as "soft on criminals" that he went out of his way to stress that he would neverrelease a murderer serving life; and, almost true to his word, he vetoed all but six of these parole recommendations, arousing the wrath of civil liberties groups but protecting his flank from attacks by tough-on-crime Republicans. And the handful Davis did ultimately release were easily understood to be "sympathetic" cases; in particular, women who had murdered their partners after suffering years of domestic violence and psychological abuse.

Thus, while most lifers in California are sentenced to between x years and life, building in the possibility of parole should those individuals dramatically change their lives and moral values while incarcerated, in practice Davis converted almost all of their sentences into life without the possibility of parole.

When Schwarzenegger was elected, he held a press conference at the state Capitol announcing he would take a more nuanced approach to the issue. For a few years, he kept his word on this. In March, the San Francisco Chroniclereported he had overturned 90 percent of the parole recommendations for lifers sent his way in 2006. Recently, however, his parole veto pen has been wielded more often — though, to be fair, he is still paroling far more lifers each year than Davis did during his entire tenure.

"If I sound a little angry," Mattie's letter continued, "I am and have good reson [sic] to be angry. Yet, bitter, I am not. I accept full responsibility for my crime. I blame no one for my actions. I cannot unscramble an egg. I can't go back in time and change what I did. If I could, I wouldn't be here. And yes, I am very remorseful."

"It's case by case," says Bill Maile, spokesman for the governor. "And the underlying criteria in each case is the threat to public safety." And do politics ever play a role in the decision-making process? "No way. Absolutely not." Which begs the question: What hands-on criteria does the governor use when he and his legal staff peruse a parole file, and then he denies a parole that has been recommended by a panel of experts who themselves have had to consider an array of testimony provided by all those who work with the parole applicant?

For whatever reasons, the number of lifers paroled remains tiny, which either suggests the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is failing dismally in its rehabilitation attempts, or the politicized parole system is dramatically malfunctioning when it comes to dealing with rehabilitated individuals convicted of high-end offenses.

According to Carbone, about 3 percent of lifers eligible for parole in any given year get dates from the board and, because of the power of the full board and the governor's office to reverse these decisions, only about 1 percent end up going home. Carbone's record for his clients is slightly better than this, but it's still pretty dismal.

In 2006, calculates Bill Sessa, deputy press secretary at the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 53 lifers were paroled and nine more were ordered to be released by the courts after filing habeas petitions. In the first seven months of 2007, 36 lifers were sent home.

"There is a considerable amount of case law at the U.S. Supreme Court and California Supreme Court that defines parole as a highly discretionary decision," says Sessa. "There's no automatic formula for that decision. It's a tough call. Is someone really rehabilitated, or do they know how to talk to you, to convince you to make a decision? Ultimately, you trust a composite of information. Instinct. Body language. What they say. What you hope they say but they don't. You can't presume that because one commissioner granted a date, another commissioner hearing the same case will do that. It's not a mathematical formula."

And because of the discretionary nature of this process, you hear stories such as the one Carbone tells of a San Francisco-based client, convicted of murder while a drug-addicted teenager under the near-cultlike influence of an older man, and now, in his mid-30s, is deemed rehabilitated by prison staff and psychiatrists. The man, whose family asked SF Weeklyto keep him anonymous in order not to antagonize the parole board regarding future dealings with him, was recommended for parole at a hearing — his fifth — for which the transcript was subsequently lost. He had to go through a new hearing.

Carbone says the inmate had clearly demonstrated that he was a changed person. The recommendation was reversed, not because of new information before the commissioners, but simply because this time around they felt differently. "It was a pro-forma consideration," says Carbone, who puts heart and soul into these cases, coming to know not just the prisoners but also their immediate family and friends. He recalls it angrily. "'Fuck off! Go away! We don't want to release you.' Just a bunch of boilerplate reasons."

Current parole board members do not generally talk to the press, so it's almost impossible to get a bead on how they reach decisions. But for former Board of Parole Hearings Commissioner Belinda Harris-Ritter, herself an attorney whose father and stepmother were murdered, the system is unacceptably chaotic and random.

Harris-Ritter resigned from the board last January, after chairing parole hearings for lifers for the previous six months. In a stinging letter to the Senate Rules Committee, the ex-commissioner wrote: "I would be fine with a law that stated convicted murderers shall never be released from prison. But that is not the law we have. The law states that when these life inmates come up for parole, they are to be paroled unless it would be a public safety problem. The burden is on the state to show there is a public safety issue. Either follow this or change the law."

"My views on the parole process?" Carbone's anonymity-requesting client wrote from Soledad Prison. "It's completely arbitrary. There is no case-by-case evaluation. My last hearing went nearly three hours, and they 'deliberated' less than 15 minutes."

Carbone believes that cases like Mattie's, and that of the man described above, exemplify everything Harris-Ritter thinks is wrong with the current system.

"Dear Debra," Carbone wrote his client on Nov. 15, "I am so sorry that the governor reversed your parole grant. The impending election probably didn't help. That really stinks. I only hope you are not too depressed or saddened by the news. The 'fight' for your freedom is far from over, and I haven't given up. Neither should you. ... In support, Charles Carbone, Esq."

Carbone grew up in the Republican 'burbs north of San Diego, then moved to New York City as a teenager, following his artist mother's getting yet another in what he says was a long line of divorces.

There, at the height of the crack wars, he volunteered in a welfare hotel in Harlem, witnessing residents prostituting themselves for drugs, guns being bandied about, and violence practically as endemic as the narcotics themselves. He also joined a Board of Education-funded improv theater company, going into high schools in tough parts of town, play-acting social scenarios, and having students shout out how they'd like to see the scenes develop. "AIDS, teen pregnancies, drugs, guns, we'd be up there and five, six, seven, eight different scenes, and have the audience give us suggestions on how to fill in the scenes," the attorney recollects. "That was an education for me."

Finally, he worked for the Citywide Task Force on Housing, helping low-income Bronx residents fight eviction orders. "Right when that motherfucker Giuliani came in. It was a horrible time in New York to be homeless."

During law school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Carbone taught writing and legal research skills to prisoners at Attica and Clinton. Afterward he worked for Ralph Nader as a researcher on white-collar crime and spent time as a special assistant to the Economic Fraud Unit of the San Diego district attorney's office, going after corporate fraudsters. Then, he got a job at the Utility Consumers' Action Network (UCAN) and successfully sued MCI WorldCom for bilking collect-call customers, many of whom were spending a fortune on calls from family members in prison. Now carrying quite a reputation with him, he moved on to Girard & Green LLP, a class action firm in San Francisco specializing in consumer rights, but his heart wasn't in it. By mutual consent, Carbone stopped working for them and took time out to regroup.

Faced with a career crossroads, with fundamental questions about who one is and what one wants out of life, some people travel, or munch comfort foods in front of the TV, or get depressed and drink too much. Carbone's solution? He took a piece of rope, strung it up between trees in a local park, and spent three months teaching himself to walk tightrope. When you fall, he recalls, "it gives you an appreciation for tightrope walkers. It's an extremely difficult thing to do." By the end of those months, he could navigate 15 feet without falling.

Now 35, Carbone knows what he's good at, and he also knows his limits. When he does something with money as a primary motive, he tends to fall off the tightrope pretty quickly. On the other hand, when he does something he cares passionately about, that 15 feet becomes a walk in the park.

Unsurprisingly, the challenges that get Carbone excited tend to be every bit as quixotic and difficult as the tightrope-walking venture. For somewhere along the line, Carbone had become more than just a legal eagle; he was now a firm believer in a cause, and the windmills he was tilting at were the institutions he saw as infringing on prisoners' rights.

A few years back, he got a job with California Prison Focus, taking part in lawsuits over prison conditions. Then, as his reputation grew and more prisoners began contacting him asking for legal advice on their parole hearings, Carbone decided to go solo. He set up shop in a shared office space on Jackson Street. The building was surrounded by plush antique stores and the office itself had exposed old brick walls and stunning views of the Transamerica Building. He moved his filing cabinets in, stacked the floor with overfill files, piled still more boxes on top of the overfill, and set to work, crafting out a specialty niche as an attorney lifers would turn to when trying to secure a parole date.

On his desk he placed his computer keyboard, monitor, basic office equipment, and a little plastic bottle of liquid oxygen. Oxygen? Yes, Carbone explains, matter-of-factly. Put two or three drops in your tea and it's guaranteed to give you an energy boost — not an insignificant detail, given he's often in his tiny black Volkswagen Rabbit stick-shift convertible eight hours or more a day, driving to one out-of-the-way prison or another.

Carbone bought the car from an attorney friend, who'd bought it from California Prison Focus, which had been willed it by an old lady who thought the organization was doing the Lord's work, and he's put 70,000 or 80,000 miles on it in the past three years. Sometimes he drives himself, oftentimes he uses drivers who've replied to an advertisement he placed on Craigslist. Currently, his driver is a 26-year-old drummer named Zach, who drives the Rabbit when he's not touring the country with his band, allowing Carbone to ride shotgun and seatbelt-less, his Apple laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter, working his cellphone to discuss cases and drum up clientele.

Carbone's nothing if not a performer. When he addresses a few hundred women lifers at the Valley State Prison for Women, in the Central Valley town of Chowchilla, talking about how they can best approach their parole hearings, he paces back and forth in front of his rapt audience, barking out questions, beckoning forth answers from the women, incorporating the responses into his patter without even a pause for breath. He ad-libs well and coaxes out gleeful audience laughter with well-aimed one-liners.

"You do the single most difficult thing to do on the planet," he tells the crowd, while explaining how they have to present themselves to the parole board. "Take a negative and turn it into a positive. There's an old adage about public speaking: People do not remember what you told them. They remember how you made them feel. That dynamic exists in the hearing process. You are leaving an impression on the panel."

His audience, many of whom have spent decades in prison, stare intensely. For them, this isn't an abstract classroom lecture; it's a life lesson, something that holds out a faint ray of hope that, one day, they might again be free.

Carbone gets more and more enthused, more and more energetic as the presentation unfolds. He practically morphs into the tap-dancing, "give-'em-the-old-razzle-dazzle" attorney for female murderers played by Richard Gere in the movie Chicago.

It's an impressive show, but, in his portrayal of the parole process as a game to navigate, it's also a tad unnerving. Moreover, the advice he offers these prospective clients — how to talk the talk, how to smooth over the rough edges, how to "present" well — is exactly the sort of pitch calculated to infuriate victims' rights advocates.

"We're not against defense attorneys," argues Crime Victims United's Harriet Salarno. "But we want the scales of justice to be balanced. They have the right to fight, but not to lie."

Should lifers ever be eligible for parole? "We have to come to a realization to concentrate on what you feel are nonviolent offenders that can be rehabilitated. Concentrate on them. Leave the lifers alone." In other words: no.

Of course, in the same way Carbone's spiel is guaranteed to rub victims' advocates the wrong way, so Salarno's statement is, to the attorney, like a red flag waved before a bull. He can't abide the notion that his clients have had the keys thrown away on them.

American criminal justice institutions have always trodden a fine line between, on the one hand, revenge or the usage of punishment as a catharsis for devastated victims, and, on the other hand, the ideal, pioneered by the Quakers more than two centuries ago, of redemption or rehabilitation. And what greater canvas on which to paint this eternal conflict than the fate of a murderer? What easier candidate for revenge? What harder, less sympathetic, candidate for rehabilitation?

Yet Carbone can produce statistics to show that released murderers have a far lower recidivism rate than do practically all other categories of criminals. That's because while some murderers, like Charles Manson (currently ensconced in Corcoran Prison), are true serial killers, psychopaths, or sexual predators who need to spend the rest of their lives behind bars on first-degree murder convictions, most murderers who end up eligible for parole are those who killed for economic reasons, or while caught in the grip of a destructive emotional passion, or in response to domestic violence. Often, they've never been arrested prior to killing their victims. Thus, in many ways, despite the appalling nature of their crimes, many researchers believe they are, paradoxically, strong candidates for rehabilitation.

A 15-year study by researchers with the Correctional Service of Canada, carried out between 1975 and 1990, followed 658 paroled murderers. More than three-quarters of them were not reincarcerated while on parole. Thirteen percent were sent back to prison for technical parole violations, and only 9 percent for committing new offenses. Out of the 658, five, or fewer than 1 percent, were convicted of new murders. Obviously, that's five too many — and many public safety advocates make a powerful case that it's better to be safe than sorry when dealing with this group of violent convicts — but it hardly suggests most paroled murderers are simply waiting for an excuse to shed more blood.

If rehabilitation as a philosophy is to work, it has to at least be given the chance to stand on its own for the most morally tough cases. After all, not much is at stake when you argue over whether a car thief is rehabilitated, but an awful lot's at stake with a killer. These days, Carbone doesn't tightrope-walk very often. He does, though, frequently hang upside down from trees in a park near his home. Early mornings, he heads there, puts on big blue boots with grappling hooks attached, swings himself over a branch, and hangs. It's good for the soul and for the body. "It's the same training the Shaolin monks do," he says, as if that explains everything.

To represent lifers seeking parole, well, you've got to have the same kind of self-confidence, the same belief in self-infallibility that you have hanging upside down from a tree. In these parole hearings, you've got to be absolutely sure you're right, that your client really is ready for release. Get it wrong, and you're not just talking about egg on your face, you're talking about a man or woman with a taste for human blood preying on the community because of your misguided actions.

Carbone has no doubts. On the flip side of the parole board's reliance on "instinct," he says he only represents people he knows, in his gut, are ready to come home, people he would be comfortable with babysitting his two young nieces. "The ones that are ready to leave," he asserts, "have an aura about them that is different. They've lost a lot of anger. It's almost like they become more human in some ways." And for those people, he argues, continued incarceration is only about vengeance, it's no longer about public safety.

"It's very tangible," Carbone says of his work. "Giving someone their freedom back is a massive thing. If I can give somebody their life back, it seems like a tremendous gift. Nothing on the planet makes me happier than that."

And what about the victims? "Behind all the banner-waving for victims," the attorney combatively asserts, "is a wasteful and abusive set of 34 prisons in the state where prisoners are not given the tools to make themselves and society any better. Like prisoners, victims deserve a justice system that looks to reconcile and restore the human tragedy inherent in any murder. And yet from the moment of the crime, the wheels of justice don't serve either person."

It's not a great answer. But perhaps there is no perfect answer here. Carbone cares about his clients' freedom. Yet his clients, in killing others, have forever removed the possibility of life, of freedom, from their victims and their victims' families.

If you believe in revenge, it's a no-brainer: Killers should never walk the streets again. If you believe in rehabilitation, it's a lot harder. You want to agree with Carbone, yet you don't want to dishonor the dead; you want to believe that souls can indeed be remade, but you don't want to get it wrong and release a predator onto the streets.

Charles Carbone, Esq., can be found atop the tightrope traversing the horns of that dilemma.