The year was 2019 when I first set foot in Philadelphia. I was leaving the south to begin my time as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, carrying with me the belief—perhaps inherited, perhaps naïve—that my continued education might offer a clearer view of the country I lived in and the one I was determined to help sustain.

On my mind at the time was Anthony Ray Hinton’s The Sun Does Shine, which had been released just a year prior in 2018. The book told the story of a man who had served over 30 years in prison and was on death row for a crime he had never committed. Hinton’s incarceration was a result of mistaken witness identification, false and misleading forensic evidence, and inadequate legal defense, leading to his imprisonment for a 1985 double robbery-murder.

Hinton’s account of incarceration was not written to persuade so much as to survive. He wrote about the slow erosion of time behind bars. He wrote about hope as a discipline rather than merely a feeling. He wrote about the peculiar cruelty of a system capable of taking decades from a person and calling it justice. He wrote about his freedom being taken away from him, not for what he had done, but for what the state needed him to be: guilty, containable, forgettable.

Reading his story was a formative moment for me as I began grappling with the concept of the prison as a system that demands guilt, containment, and erasure in order to function. I questioned whether the prison was the true rehabilitator it had been made out to be. I questioned the idea of retribution—if someone caused harm toward someone, should our response be to inflict that harm back on them? Then there were “justifiable cases,” or, in other words, the stance that says prison is okay for group A of people (you know, the monsters), and prison is horrible for group B (the perhaps not-so-bad monsters). And who decides which group you belong to? Is it the act itself or perhaps something much larger? Something written on the body, impossible to shed. Something fixed at birth. Race has always been the invisible hand on the scale within America’s carceral system, a sentence handed down before any crime is committed, tilting presumed innocence toward guilt, mercy toward punishment, and freedom toward captivity.

I was arriving at Penn with these questions unresolved, not yet aware that the university itself would become another site of reckoning. Before classes had even started, I was greeted by Dr. Angela Davis, who was on campus to speak about abolition feminism, collective action, and the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. There’s a moment in her talk where I remember her reflecting on the phrase Black Lives Matter, reminding the audience that to insist on the value of Black life was not an act of exclusion but an invitation to moral consistency. If Black lives were ever truly allowed to matter, she said, then all lives would matter as a byproduct. It was a simple formulation, but one that required the country to abandon its most comfortable lies about itself.

Not long after that talk, the country entered a racial reckoning. Statues fell, corporations issued statements, and there were moments where the language of justice and freedom, defined by the community, briefly entered the mainstream. Yet even in that moment, it was clear that the reckoning was provisional, bounded by comfort and constrained by fear. The demand was not for transformation but for reassurance, not for truth but for resolution. The lie, or the story we Americans tell ourselves about our history, to borrow from James Baldwin, had not been confronted so much as it had been managed, contained, and repackaged in a way that allowed the country to move forward without looking too closely at what it had done or what it would continue to do.

The country wanted absolution without confession, change without cost. It wanted to acknowledge systemic racism while maintaining the systems that produced it. What became clear was that the reckoning was never about justice. It was about comfort—about finding a way to live with the knowledge of harm without being required to stop causing it. That comfort would be tested.

In the 2020 election cycle, more than a transfer of power was at stake. When the results came in, Joe Biden’s victory was received as relief—relief that a norm-breaking presidency might end, that the machinery of government might resume something resembling restraint. For many, Biden’s win symbolized a fragile recommitment to the idea that democracy, though battered, could still function. But Donald Trump refused to concede, insisting without evidence that the election had been stolen. The lie was not meant to convince everyone. It was meant to mobilize enough. What followed was a deliberate effort to erode public faith in the electoral process itself, transforming defeat into grievance and grievance into purpose.

January 6th exposed the limits of that reckoning. The U.S. Capitol was breached, the Vice President was threatened, and members of Congress were evacuated as a mob attempted to halt the certification of a lawful election. This was not a spontaneous outburst of anger, but the culmination of years of grievance, radicalization, and political encouragement. It was an assertion that democracy is only legitimate when it confirms a particular vision of who belongs. What unfolded that day was a declaration that the lie of American democracy—that it is neutral, fair, and equally accessible—would be defended by force if necessary.

I watched from Philadelphia, the city where the Constitution was drafted, where the very ideas of self-governance first took shape. The irony was not lost on me. Here was a country, my country, that could not admit what it was, attempting to preserve its innocence through violence. What I witnessed that day was not new. America’s greatest achievement is its ability to believe itself innocent. January 6th was an attempt to preserve that innocence, to deny the reality of a changing electorate and a multiracial democracy by insisting that any outcome not aligned with a particular vision of the nation must be illegitimate. The violence was not an aberration; it was an inheritance.

Trump’s reelection in 2024 confirmed that the reckoning had been deferred, that the lie still functioned as political currency. Since returning to office, Trump has used the language of loyalty and victimhood to reframe January 6th, casting those convicted for their roles in the insurrection as political prisoners rather than threats to democracy. Through a series of pardons and acts of clemency, individuals who assaulted police officers, coordinated breaches of the Capitol, and sought to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power have been granted mercy.

My point in mentioning this here is not that these individuals deserved incarceration—I remain convinced that prison is a harmful institution that has not served the rehabilitative or restorative purposes it claims. The question I’m interested in is not whether they should have been punished more severely, but rather: what institutions, what systems of radicalization, what failures of education and community brought them to that moment? And more pressingly, why is mercy extended so swiftly in some cases while withheld entirely in others?

The pardons came quick, without hesitation, without the procedural scrutiny typically required. They were celebrated as acts of justice, framed as mercy extended to patriots who had been wronged by an overreaching state. It made clear that clemency operated according to a logic that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with power. The mechanisms of accountability—courts, trials, evidence—could be bypassed when politically convenient, while others would spend decades proving their worthiness for freedom.

On the other side of this, I’ve seen what mercy looks like when it must be earned. Clemency carries another meaning, one far removed from spectacle and ceremony. Through my work with the ACLU’s Clemency Project, I alongside undergraduate Tyler Douglas were assigned the case of Gregory Williams in 2025. I remember sitting in the Princeton Public Library, several of Gregory Williams’ case files spread across my laptop, attempting to construct a narrative that might persuade the state to reconsider a life it had already deemed disposable. At one point, I stopped and looked up at Tyler, sitting with the weight of what we were doing. We were negotiating the terms under which freedom could be imagined for someone we had never met.

We combed through all of the records that were given to us. We looked through sentencing transcripts, character references, and rehabilitation programs completed behind bars. We were building a case for mercy and, I might add, it was a case that required perfection. Gregory would need to prove that he was worthy, that he had changed, that he deserved a second chance.

Gregory Williams had been sentenced to forty-two years in prison for robbery charges. The plea offer extended to him was nine years. He rejected it and chose to fight for his freedom. It was a right guaranteed by the Constitution, yet in practice, it became a decision that bore additional years of his incarceration. Gregory’s sentence, among the thousands of others throughout history, was a lesson. It was a warning about what happens when one refuses to comply with a system that equates confession with justice.

Decades passed, years that cannot be returned, before we submitted our petition for clemency to the governor. On November 10th, 2025, the governor granted Gregory clemency, and he was released on parole.

This contrast haunts me, not because I believe the insurrectionists should have remained imprisoned, but because the disparity reveals something fundamental about how the state determines value. Gregory Williams spent decades proving himself worthy through every institutional metric available, only to be granted conditional freedom after the punishment had already extracted its cost. Meanwhile, those who stormed the Capitol received pardons almost immediately, with no questions asked about rehabilitation, remorse, or transformation.

The issue is not that one group received mercy while the other should have been punished more harshly. The issue is that mercy operates according to political utility rather than human need, and that the state refuses to interrogate the institutions that produce harm. For the insurrectionists, there was little serious examination of the media ecosystems and political rhetoric that radicalized them, minimal accountability for the systems that failed them long before they arrived in Washington. For Gregory Williams and countless others in the carceral system, those questions are rarely posed either—the state does not investigate the failures of education, housing, healthcare, or economic opportunity that preceded incarceration. It simply punishes, extracts, and moves on.

The price of freedom in America has always been tied to race. It is unevenly distributed, carefully rationed, and deeply political. The same country that pardons white nationalists without asking what brought them there demands that Gregory Williams, a Black man, prove his own humanity. Prove that his life is worth something. The same system that rushed to absolve those who attempted to overturn democracy moves with deliberate slowness when considering the release of someone rotting behind bars. Freedom becomes, then, a reward granted to those who serve power and withheld from those who challenge it or simply exist outside its favor. And the deeper questions—what institutions create harm, what conditions lead people to violence, what true accountability might look like—remain unasked, because asking them would require confronting the systems themselves.

The price of freedom in America is then giving up the lie, and yet the lie persists because we—America—need it to. Because confronting the institutions themselves—the ones that incarcerate, the ones that radicalize, the ones that decide whose life holds value—would require confronting ourselves. And we are not ready for that. We have never been ready for that. So, we call the distribution of mercy “justice.” We call survival “democracy.” And we ask ourselves why nothing changes.

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