Volume 52 - Issue 1

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N

VOL 52 / ISS 1 / SEP 2019

THE NEW JOURNAL

Coming Home Convicted Stefon Morant served 21 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Now he’s home—but still fighting to clear his name.

editors-in-chief Laura Glesby Max Graham executive editor Elliot Wailoo senior editors Lily Moore-Eissenberg associate editors Hailey Andrews Beasie Goddu Alejandra Larriva-Latt Sara Luzuriaga Helena Lyng-Olsen Jack McCordick Eli Mennerick Trish Viveros Candice Wang

copy editors Jisoo Choi Elena DeBre Matthew Kleiner Yonatan Greenberg Nicole Jefferson Sofia Laguarda creative director Chase Westover design editors Meher Hans Zihao Lin Sam Oldshue Alex Rivkin photo editors Vivek Suri web designer Philippe Chlenski

reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

Dear readers, If you were in town over the summer, you might have noticed teal signs cropping up throughout the city, taped to people’s first-floor windows or mounted in front lawns. The signs read, in all caps, “YALE: RESPECT NEW HAVEN.” Those words now appear in hundreds of homes, spelling out a stark message to the University.

Union activists distributed the signs this summer as they knocked on doors throughout the city, pressuring Yale to fulfill a promise it made years ago to hire a thousand New Haven residents. (You can read more about Yale’s pledge in our April 2019 issue.) The signs speak to this particular promise, but they bear a broader meaning, too.

In these pages, you’ll find stories that straddle, and sometimes blur, the boundary between Yale and New Haven.

We hope they can deepen a sense of shared commitment and understanding across the town-gown line. At The New Journal, we strive to pay earnest attention to our school and city, and to tell about both with compassion, integrity, and respect.

We’re constantly looking for feedback on how we can better live up to our mission, tips on what we should cover in the future, and new contributors to our publication. Please don’t hesitate to drop us a line with any thoughts or questions. We’d love to hear from you!

Happy reading, Max & Laura max.m.graham@yale.edu laura.glesby@yale.edu

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 52 issue 1 SEP 2019

SINCE 1967 28 cover www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

COMING HOME CONVICTED

Stefon Morant served twenty-one years for a crime he

didn’t commit. Now he’s home—but still fighting to clear his name.

Keerthana Annamaneni 23 feature

UNGUARDED

For adults with developmental disabilities or mental

illnesses, conservatorship can be lifelong—and life-shattering.

Lily Moore-Eissenberg

standards points of departure 4

THE CAFE AT THE CORNER—Mara Hoplamazian

IN STEP WITH TRADITION—Abby Steckel 10

snapshot THE SIMULATION INVITATION—Elena DeBre Yale’s virtual reality lab seeks to make high tech accessible.

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snapshot AT HISTORY’S HELM—Helena Lyng-Olsen A replica of the Amistad slave ship sets sail on the Long Island Sound. critical angle THE RESEARCHER’S RESPONSIBILITY—Katherine Hu A Yale professor collected DNA that helped China persecute its Uighur population. Should he be held accountable?

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poem SICK POEM—Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

34 endnote

FAREWELL, SHIRU CAFE—Jack McCordick

SEPTEMBER 2019

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THE CAFE AT THE CORNER

P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

Inside New Haven’s oldest gay bar, a culture of inclusivity confronts a town-gown divide.

MARA HOPLAMAZIAN

“

You come here not to be hidden, but to be safe,” Daniel Eugene says, gazing out the window of his Westville studio, as the last dregs of sun wash in. Though we’re not at Partners Cafe, he speaks about the gay bar, which has been a New Haven landmark for four decades, as if it is all around us. Daniel’s space is decorated with photographs of the Partners façade. An artist and a New Havener, Daniel has been going to Partners, located at the corner of Crown and Park, nearly every week since he was old enough to enter.

Now, fourteen years later, when I ask him how he feels about the bar, he coos, “I love it.”

The men who bartend at Partners love it too.

When I spoke with Paul, who has been working at the bar for the last eight years, he couldn’t keep a smile off his face. As I walked in, I saw what Daniel meant about safety. The front door is set into a concrete wall, interrupted only by narrow glass-block windows. One Yelp reviewer compared the bar to a bomb shelter. Daniel said the peculiar architecture served a historical purpose—when the bar first opened in 1974, the safety of queer

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Design by Chase Westover

spaces depended on their anonymity. Today, Partners remains understated on the outside, a reflection of the confidentiality that many queer people still rely on. Inside, it’s animated by soft velvet and dark wood. The gold ceiling washes patrons in a warm flush.

Paul, a young man as burly as he is sweet, thinks that for most Yale undergrads, Partners is the first gay bar they’ve been to. “You can just tell—some of them are from small towns; they’re 21; they’re just learning how to order a drink,” he reflected, smiling.

The same nostalgic grin graced the faces of Sam and Dustin, two undergrads who frequent the bar, when I asked them about their first time there. “I had never been to a gay bar,” Dustin remembered.

“I didn’t feel like I knew how to be that kind of gay, as in, be comfortable enough being gay to dance and kiss someone on a dance floor. I didn’t know it was so normalized.”

Sam remembers exactly what they ordered on their first night at Partners—Rolling Rock, in a bottle. “It was bear night,” they giggled. “It felt super queer.” They drew out the word “queer,” as if to mirror the distinctly open atmosphere at Partners that distinguished it from other gay bars.

That night, Sam was inspired to bring the comfort they felt at the bar into the rest of their life.

“I went to the bathroom to text my roommate—to come out to him,” they recalled.

But while Yale undergrads are learning how to order drinks, older patrons toast to Partners’

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history. Another long-time bartender, Anthony, first visited Partners five years ago when he was 21, in the closet, and didn’t know how to order anything but a Midori Sour. He now opens on Thursdays, and said that the community of older patrons creates a “gay Cheers energy”—a reference to the eighties sitcom set in a bar with a theme song called “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.”

Being in an intergenerational space changed the way Anthony understood the queer community.

“I’ve learned so many things just talking to people from different generations, asking them things about their lives,” he reflected. “People come in

“Sam was inspired to bring the comfort they felt at the bar into the rest of their life.”

and tell me how they met here, how they fell in love, how the door used to be that way,” he said, gesturing towards the far corner of the bar.

Older patrons’ memories of how the AIDS crisis affected Partners have a particular resonance for Anthony. “This place was full—and then, gone,” he recalled, snapping his fingers. The movement to create an organization to fight AIDS in New Haven began in the Partners basement. This year, that organization, AIDS Project New Haven, celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary.

Though older patrons have memories to share, the interactions between Yale undergrads and New Haven locals are usually limited to a nod upon walking in the door. While bartending, Paul has observed that the bar’s vibes are split by the staircase and by affiliation—Yalies dancing upstairs, and New Haven residents sitting around the downstairs bar. On the first floor, Partners looks SEPTEMBER 2019

a bit like a sports bar, with too many television sets to count and a Simpsons pinball machine in one corner. Up the staircase, there’s a stage, two neon paintings of hunky men in promiscuous positions, and the space where a stripper pole once was—a memory passed down through generations of Partners lore.

On a Wednesday evening, the upstairs stage is full of undergrads affiliated with student groups or frats that have rented out the place to party away from Yale. “We’re judgement free,” Paul said. The safety that Partners provides for patrons doesn’t end with the queer community; when a Yale men’s sports team threw its formal underneath the disco

ball, Paul remembered, the athletes took off their shirts and hogged the AUX as much as students from the co-op. The bartenders don’t worry about straight patronage taking away from a culture of queerness. They welcome straight customers into the space on their own queer terms.

Anthony is pleased that Partners provides a place for undergrads to feel safe much as it has for generations of New Haveners. But, he said, the dynamic is strained by some of the more entitled Yalies, who have yet to learn the practice of tipping. “It’s important for Yale to understand that New Haven local places and the people who work there are trying to make a living. They’re not a commodity of the University,” he reflected.

Anthony grinned as his first customers of the night glided in. They were a group of coworkers on a bonding night out, and it was their first time at Partners. Soon they were laughing with Anthony, trying to buy him a drink. A couple of men in their late thirties walked in later, whom he greeted together, and then each separately, asking them about their days. The conversations swelled together, filling the room. Before I left, I asked Anthony what he wanted for the bar going forward. “What I hope this place does,” he said, smiling, “is that it lasts.”

– Mara Hoplamazian is a senior in Grace Hopper College.

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

IN STEP WITH TRADITION Connecticut’s contra dancing community reckons with the prospect of change. illustration by Zihao Lin

“

Lean into it,” he said. “It’s supposed to feel like a washing machine.”

My dance partner was at least fifty years my senior. He had hunched shoulders and smiled through wrinkled cheeks, but his weathered appearance belied surprising vigor.

Following his advice, I tilted backwards into a forceful spin.

About fifty people had crowded onto the dance floor. A live band called Fifer’s Delight supplied cheerful jigs. Many women wore dresses or long skirts, while men sported various shades of casual attire, including one standout pair of bright green shorts. On this summer evening, the New Haven Country Dancers were hosting their monthly contra dance.

I paid the five-dollar student fee and made a name tag before joining the two lines of beginners for the opening lesson. At the direction of the dance caller, I wheeled around in a contra swing with the dancer across the aisle. When the caller ordered a “left hand star,” I clasped my neighbor’s left wrist, and we formed a circle with another couple. Then we repeated the sequence with accordion and fiddle accompaniment.

A folk tradition with roots in England, Scotland, and France, contra primarily involves walking steps, which makes it welcoming to novices like myself. It’s also easy on replacement knees; two of eight regular dances in Connecticut take place at senior centers.

After joining the New Haven Country Dancers in 2013 at age 24, Catherine McGuinness revamped the group’s website and helped with recruitment efforts. McGuinness is also an advocate for gender-free dancing. Instead of saying “gents and ladies,” some callers are transitioning to “larks and ravens” to challenge traditional gender roles and make contra more welcoming to LGBTQ people.

Lark starts with the same letter as “left,” where the lead dancer stands, and “raven” for “right.” At the

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New Haven dance I attended, the caller used the gendered terms but mentioned that anyone could lead or follow.

Gender-free dancing has sparked lengthy debate in the “Stuff Contra Dancers Say” Facebook group, which has over 2,500 members across the country. Some commenters feel inconvenienced by learning new terms. Others believe the change is a symptom of excessive political correctness.

And some even requested that callers issue a warning about the use of gender-neutral language ahead of dances. As one Facebook group member euphemistically put it, the new lingo might attract “colorful people.” McGuinness advised opponents of the new language to “just dance with whoever is coming at you.” David Lindsay, a bespectacled sixty-something-year-old who founded the New Haven Country Dancers in 1976, took a more conservative stance. He said he’s fine with people dancing their preferred part, but the lead remains the traditional man’s role.

A self-described folklorist, Lindsay was introduced to contra as a teenager at Pinewoods Camp, which teaches traditional European dance and music in the woods of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Lindsay still attends local dances but no longer has a formal role in the volunteerrun New Haven group.

Lindsay’s penchant for European dance extends beyond contra. He founded the New Haven Morris and Sword Team in 1977. Based on my Googling, Morris dancing appears to involve mostly older white men wearing ankle bells and performing synchronized skipping steps, while sword dancing concentrates on earnest stick combat. Midconversation, Lindsay jumped up to demonstrate an aerobic step, keys jangling as he hopped and kicked in the public library.

Not all dancers share Lindsay’s reverence for tradition, but most seem to agree on the importance of community to contra dance. The

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New Haven Country Dancers share snacks and conversation after the first hour and a half of do-sido-ing, and some gather at a diner after the dance.

According to Gaffney, many contra groups have a similar format. “If you go somewhere where there’s a contra dance, you’re going to be able to walk in and feel at home,” he said.

The contra community is tight-knit. It’s also mostly white. Some contra dancers say the welcoming vibes don’t extend to people of color. One Facebook post asked, “Why is contra dancing predominately [sic] Caucasian?” Over four hundred commenters interrogated the lack of diversity, suggested responses, gave examples of microaggressions, and contested the examples.

One dancer from a North Carolina group said their group was “very diverse.” A second dancer from the same group called it “very white.” A third dancer offered, “As an actual, real-life contra dancer of color… I can tell you all that walking into a space that’s noticeably, overwhelmingly

white can feel unwelcoming and off-putting.”

McGuinness wants the New Haven group to be more diverse, but she is nervous about making people of color feel uncomfortable or singled out for their race. “It’s something I’ve struggled with,” she said. “My understanding is that because [contra] tends to be quite white, a person of color comes, feels out of place, and doesn’t come back.”

Lindsay, on the other hand, doesn’t think dancers should feel accountable for contra’s homogeneity.

“Civil rights is way beyond the scope of trying to create an Anglo-American-based folk dance tradition in a community that’s a melting pot,” he said. Lindsay described contra dancers as both “community-oriented” and “a little bit tribal,” and seemed to ignore the conflicting connotation.

Contra’s Facebook commenters continue debating what level of racial diversity should be expected of a tradition that has historically been connected with white European culture.

From the mid-nineties until late 2016, the New Haven Country Dancers didn’t actually meet in New Haven, and instead danced at a community center in the predominantly white suburb of Branford, where they moved after several members’ cars were broken into. Now the group rents the Friends Meetinghouse on a treelined street in New Haven’s Fair Haven Heights neighborhood. Bordered by the Quinnipiac River, the meetinghouse seems separate from the rest of New Haven. But onto the dance floor come questions that resonate throughout and beyond the Elm City, questions about how communities are constructed, and to what extent they require change.

– Abby Steckel is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College.

Illustration by Zihao Lin SEPTEMBER 2019

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Yale Schola Cantorum David Hill, conductor Works by Judith Bingham, Tallis, and others Friday, September 20 · 5:30 PM Christ Church (84 Broadway at Elm)

Great Organ Music at Yale

tElEMann: Day of JuDgment

Works by Bach, Mendelssohn, and Dupré Sunday, September 15 · 7:30 PM

raChEl laurin Works by Buxtehude, Franck, Brahms, and Laurin Sunday, November 24 · 7:30 PM SEPTEMBER APRIL 2019 2019

Defiant SpiritS: fernanDo Brito’S Sinaloa Award-winning Mexican photographer captures the resilience of Sinaloa culture in the midst of the criminalized state September–December 13 Weekdays 9–4 (except holidays)

Yale Schola Cantorum David Hill, conductor Sunday, October 13 · 4 PM Woolsey Hall

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roBErt quinnEy

in Miller Hall 406 Prospect St.

Mozart: rEquiEM

Walk through thE vallEy

Guest artists perform on the Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall

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Choral EvEnsong

Yale Schola Cantorum Juilliard415 Masaaki Suzuki, conductor Friday, November 1 · 7:30 PM Trinity Lutheran Church (292 Orange St.) Preconcert talk at 6:30 Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium

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SNAPSHOT

THE SIMULATION INVITATION Yale’s virtual reality lab seeks to make high tech accessible.

ELENA DEBRE

I

t’s midnight in Times Square, and I can’t believe I’m here. Well, I do believe it. Taxis and black cars whiz by, dodging pedestrians.

My pulse races as I merge into the nightlife of this city I love. Even though I’m due at my Yale lab in 30 minutes, I feel a kind of subversive relief amid the late-night revelers as they shuffle past, some holding hands, others clutching shopping bags from luxury stores. The flashes of tourists’ cameras blur into neon advertisements illuminating the block.

Suddenly, I’m jolted by a pedestrian’s iPhone ring. But that’s impossible: this virtual reality (VR) is designed to be soundless. I take off my headset.

Back at Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, known as the CCAM, Justin Berry scrambles to switch off an alarm on his phone.

It’s a Saturday in late July, and Berry, a critic at the Yale School of Art, has nonetheless come into the office to talk with me about his work on VR and his pet project, the Blended Reality Collective.

Launched at Yale during the summer of 2016 with a grant from software company HewlettPackard (HP), this project aims to facilitate students’ explorations of immersive technology.

This includes both augmented reality (AR), which digitally alters or enhances the real world—like Pokémon Go; and VR, a computer-generated auditory and visual experience—like mine in Times Square—that makes a user feel present in an environment other than his or her actual one.

Although we experience VR through an electronic 10

Illustrations by Chase Westover and Sam Oldshue

headset, our bodies respond as if the simulations are real. In stressful ones, our hearts race. We feel afraid. Our brains can’t tell the difference.

Members of Blended Reality consider Berry among immersive technology royalty. But when I sat with him in his office at the CCAM, I was relieved to find he wasn’t godly or intimidating.

He wore a black baseball cap that he flipped backwards when putting on a VR headset. He had just stepped off a plane but didn’t seem jet-lagged; throughout our interview, he jumped to his feet to act out a point or shifted into a theatrical voice to emphasize an idea.

Although it’s his second year leading Blended Reality, Berry doesn’t have a background in coding. “My master’s is actually in painting— that’s how non-technical it goes,” he laughed. As we talked about his work at the intersection of art and technology, I commented on the beautiful photograph of a waterfall hanging on his wall, and he informed me that it was a still he’d taken from the background of a war game. “One of the things I’m really interested in is: what does it mean to look at something the way you aren’t supposed to look at it? What do you see when you look at a virtual world the same way you look at the real world—with the same critical lens?”

When I asked Berry for a tour of the facilities, I didn’t expect to end up in Times Square. The spell THE NEW JOUR NAL

of my disembodied experience in New York quickly subsided, though, and I wasn’t too disappointed to be brought back to reality. The wood-paneled, recently-remodeled CCAM is stacked with a large motion capture studio, VR suites that anyone can reserve, and cubbies with cameras and headsets spilling out of them.

Any Yale student can walk into Berry’s office at the CCAM and use this technology to make projects, like nursing school student Travis McCann’s medical training simulation or junior Noah Shapiro’s fantastical zoo—home to dancing bears and flying horses. Undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, from fields as diverse as Nursing and Near Eastern Studies, have participated since the collective’s beginning.

Teams receive an HP laptop, attend sporadic meetings and workshops, and present at two campus-wide showcases throughout the year.

Groups also travel to HP’s headquarters in Palo Alto to present their creations.

This level of undergraduate involvement is unprecedented. For example, at Stanford, the premier VR developer, experts work on the technology behind closed doors. VR equipment rarely touches student hands.

Yet, for all its democratic aspirations, Berry’s collective remains a relatively untapped resource here at Yale. Berry hopes more students will walk in, pitch projects, and join the program.

His mission is to popularize immersive media technology like VR and to move it beyond geeks

SEPTEMBER 2019

and gamers.

Shapiro, the director of the Blended Reality collective’s undergraduate contingent, known as Yale Students in Immersive Media, first heard about the CCAM and its open doors when a close friend recommended that he check out the space last year.

“I’m one of the luckiest people,” Shapiro gushed. “Like I think anyone else would, I just fell in love with it. It’s one of the coolest things.” The excitement in his voice made me feel as if he was letting me in on one of Yale’s biggest secrets.

The merit of VR is clear: it enables responsible users to see perspectives that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. The technology was famously called “the empathy machine” in a TED Talk by artist Chris Milk. In other words, even

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digitally-inspired human emotions and sensations affect the real world.

A VR experience on the Syrian refugee crisis, “Clouds Over Sidra,” helped accrue over a billion dollars in donations to the cause. After a pro-life lawmaker experienced Planned Parenthood’s VR simulation “Across the Line,” which simulates wading through a raucous crowd of anti-abortion activists outside an abortion clinic, he expressed anger over the struggles of women attempting to visit the reproductive health care provider in hostile

territory. Following her immersion in a virtual solitary confinement experience, CNN producer Cathy Hackl said the “humanity switch” in her was flipped on. “I felt like I was actually walking in someone else’s shoes,” she said in a recent article by the online publication Narratively.

But if VR ends up in the wrong hands, it can be exploited to a harmful end. A violent VR experience can cause real trauma in the user, studies show. Technological philosophers Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger wrote in a 2016 paper in Robotics and A.I. journal, “Torture in a virtual environment is still torture. The fact that one’s suffering occurs while one is immersed in a virtual environment does not mitigate the suffering itself.” VR impacts one’s psychology and behavior, and its effects can be felt even after the goggles are off.

Critics of VR worry, too, about how this immersive technology will transform our understanding of what is “real” and change our relationship with the world around us. If someone 12

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uses VR long enough, can it replace real life?

This idea was recently tested in an experiment described by Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in his book Experience on Demand. Bailenson writes of how a German psychologist conducted a study on himself in which he spent a full day and night in a virtual reality experience. Over the course of those twenty-four hours, he began to confuse the virtual reality experience for his actual reality.

Even so, Bailenson is not deeply concerned that computer-generated experiences will replace reality. He writes, “The most amazing moment in VR is the moment when you take the [headmounted display] off and are flooded with the full gamut of subtle sensory inputs that VR can’t capture—fine gradations of light, smells, the sensation of air moving on your skin…These are all sensations that are incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to effectively simulate in a virtual world. In a strange way, VR helps you to appreciate the real world more.”

Still, many critics worry about the long-term social, mental, and physical effects of futuristic and dizzying head-trips to the Great Wall of China or the moons of Mars. In December 2017, the first VR-related death occurred. In Russia, a user was so immersed in VR that he forgot the physical layout of his room, fell through a glass table, and bled to death, according to Balienson’s research.

“There is no doubt that the concerns are real— distraction, addiction, simulator sickness, privacy concerns, and unethical use cases,” Bailenson told me. The key, though, is “to be transparent about these concerns now, and to design VR platforms, hardware, and policy norms to ensure the medium thrives while minimizing the downsides.”

When I put on the headset at CCAM, the whitewalled computer classroom transformed into New York City’s bright and colorful midnight in Times Square. I am not surprised that VR users say they become so immersed in the experience they forget their body remains in the physical world.

VR’s immense and still evolving power, many experts warn, demands that users and creators wield the technology carefully.

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The creation of socially responsible VR content depends on who rules the virtual realm. This fundamental concern, says Berry, is at the root of his collective’s philosophy. Tech companies such as Facebook and Google are racing to develop the virtual field and reap its financial rewards, perhaps leaving social and ethical obligations behind.

“If we leave it up to industry, no one cares,” Berry said. “I think the goal is to get the people that care about this stuff to ask difficult questions, to consider it a moral issue, a social issue, a cultural issue.”

While acknowledging the ambiguous ethical questions of virtual reality—and its potential dangers—Berry defended his lab’s democratic approach. He said the collective creates a low-stakes environment for experimentation with emerging media and opens the otherwise exclusive field of blended reality to a diversity of perspectives.

“The most powerful piece of technology we actually have is just our open doors,” he added, letting out a burst of laughter as he scanned the lab’s expensive, state-of-the-art equipment.

A blended reality utopia? Perhaps. It remains to be seen whether this technology has the power to withstand the worst of us. Meanwhile, I’m open to immersing myself in our collective imagination.

– Elena DeBre is a sophomore in Pierson College.

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SNAPSHOT

AT HISTORY’S HELM A replica of the Amistad slave ship sets sail on the Long Island Sound.

HELENA LYNG-OLSEN

T

he enslaved people would have slept down here,” the shipmate told us, gesturing to the room. “They would have been among the barrels and other cargo on the ship. On the night of their mutiny, they crept onto the deck of the ship where the staff and crew members were sleeping.”

Twelve small bunks with cloth curtains drawn across them lined the walls of the hold, alongside a mini kitchenette with a sink. The lighting was darker and the air cooler underneath the ship’s deck, where we could hear the murmurs and footsteps of the teachers and their families above, buzzing with excitement for the upcoming sail on the Long Island Sound.

An hour ago, I had crossed the gangplank onto a fully functional replica of the Amistad, a twomasted schooner that in 1839 was the scene of the rebellion of fifty-three enslaved Mende people.

After successfully overtaking their captors aboard the ship, the Mende attempted to sail back to Sierra Leone. But their plan was thwarted by the Spanish navigators who stealthily turned the ship in the opposite direction at night. Two days later, the ship landed in the New Haven Harbor. Soon began what would be one of the first human rights cases to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When the Amistad docked in New Haven in 1839, the courts did not know how to legally classify the Mende people on board. Should they be punished for their rebellion? Granted freedom?

Sent home? On the one hand, the owners of the Amistad had engaged in illegal activity: the U.S. and Spain, where the ship was from, had already pledged to abolish the international slave trade.

On the other hand, slavery itself was still legal 14

Illustrations by Sam Oldshue

in the U.S., and mutiny and murder were not; the Mende had killed two crewmates during the rebellion. The courts imprisoned all fifty-three of the Mende people, including their leader Sengbe Pieh, or “Cinqué,” in the New Haven jail for two years, until their trial finished. But the court proceedings, in which John Quincy Adams acted as the captors’ attorney, became a rallying cry for the national abolition movement. In 1841, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that the Mende had acted as free men and fought to escape illegal confinement. Thirty-five of them chose to return to Sierra Leone the next year.

Standing under the low ceilings of the ship hatch, I thought of a past when the walls were gone, the empty cavern filled with food, drink— and people, living in inhumane conditions, torn from their loved ones and home country. But as the shipmate led us back up the hatch onto the deck above, we sailed past Lighthouse Point Beach, past the shoreline houses in East Haven, through blue waters below blue skies that faded to orange and pink. The ship’s shrouds stretched up to the sky with crewmates climbing up and down them, the white sail billowed, and the “Amistad” pendant curved with the wind. While the replica ship was meant to commemorate the original’s harrowing history, it is also meant to inspire a new generation of students to try to end the legacy of slavery and celebrate the teachers making this happen. The ship hearkens back into the past, but it also sails forward.

I had signed up for a New Haven public school teacher “sunset sail” organized by Discovering Amistad, the non-profit that now owns the replica ship. Built in 1999, the ship has a crew of between six and twelve people at any point and sails around the Long Island Sound, docking in New Haven, Bridgeport, and New London, among other towns on the Connecticut and Southern New York coastline.

Jason Hine, Discovering Amistad’s chief educator, enthusiastically greeted each teacher as they boarded the ship. Wearing a baseball cap and a Discovering Amistad polo, he stood near its bow during the sail, chatting with the teachers around THE NEW JOUR NAL

“The fact that for years and years this story had not been told and was not known was a real tragedy.” him. He has told this ship’s story hundreds of times. Before joining Discovering Amistad, Hine served as a high school Social Studies teacher in nearby Lyme, Connecticut. Now, he organizes educational sessions about the Amistad in local schools, and he takes students out to sea.

Aboard the replica ship, Hine and his crew show students how different parts of the ship tell different stories. At the helm, students can see the wheel that the Spanish crewmembers secretly turned towards New Haven at night. Students stop at the hatchway from which the Mende emerged on the night they took over the ship, and as they walk along the deck, they trace their hands on railings and structures similar to those from the original ship—made of lumber from Sierra Leone.

Hine sees the ship as a chance not only to engage with the past, but also the present.

“We are talking about the Amistad,” Hine told me, “and almost two hundred years later, we’re still wrestling with the same issues.” When Hine asks students how the story of the Amistad connects to the present, they connect the dehumanization of the enslaved Africans to “how Donald Trump talks about Mexicans or people from other countries” or the plight of the Mende to “Colin Kaepernick taking a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.” Hine said that he hopes

SEPTEMBER 2019

that students learn to become comfortable with having a conversation about race.

Hine isn’t the first person in New Haven’s recent history to find and celebrate the story of the Amistad. In 1986, Reverend Peter Ives was digging around the back of his Center Church on the Green when he found dusty pamphlets describing the history of the Amistad in a “very brief fashion.”

Ives had lived in New Haven in his teenage years but knew nothing of the event.

“I began to investigate what this was, and I realized that no one in New Haven at that time had any idea what this was all about,” Ives told me over the phone. “The fact that for years and years this story had not been told and was not known was a real tragedy, that kids over almost a hundred years or so really didn’t know this story.”

That night, he called up the late Reverend Edward Edmonds, a prominent African-American minister from the United Church of Christ on Dixwell Avenue, and Al Marder, a New Haven activist for causes ranging from world peace to communism. The three decided to ask thenMayor Biagio DiLieto to appoint an Amistad Committee comprising one hundred reverends, scholars, and popular community figures, half of whom would be African-American and the other half white. After two years of preparation, the committee celebrated the 150th anniversary with months of lectures, banquets, dramatic readings, and youth marches, along with video, opera, and book productions, and an Amistad Choir. The centerpiece of the celebration was a commemorative statue that still stands today in front of City Hall, featuring Cinqué in three settings—his homeland (in Sierra Leone), the courtroom where the trial took place, and in New Haven after his freedom.

I first learned about Ives, Edmonds, and Marder’s efforts on a snowy March afternoon, sifting

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through boxes of Amistad Committee materials in the Whitney Library at the New Haven Museum.

The library—full of local archival material—is snugly located in the back of the museum, at the end of a marble-floored hallway. I was the only person there, save Frances Skelton, the reference librarian, who helped me find the boxes in a back storage shelf. I was surrounded by pieces of New Haven’s history—genealogy books tracing back the oldest inhabitants of New Haven, yellowing maps of the city, centuries-old scrapbooks telling the story of a city of another time. As I paged through boxes of the Amistad Committee’s minutes, receipts, invoices, and typewritten letters, a narrative of its work over the years began to emerge.

Here were the records of Marder’s efforts to do everything possible to bring the Amistad

back into the public consciousness. “The original Amistad Committee of 1839 helped to shape the course of New Haven’s history,” he wrote in a letter to each member of the committee members on the eve of the opening ceremony that would kick of their yearlong effort. “We the Amistad Committee of 1989 are also making history in our recognition of this event and providing a lasting tribute to its lessons.”

While Marder, Ives, and Edmonds led the struggle in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties, a younger contingent of New Haven history keepers have started a movement to help students remember all of America’s history, especially the stories that often go untold. Students for Educational Justice (S4EJ) is comprised of New Haven students, mostly high schoolers, who have successfully lobbied to include Black and Latinx history in all Connecticut public high school history curriculums with the passage of 16

Connecticut House Bill 7052.

On an August afternoon, fifteen of S4EJ’s students sat in folding chairs arranged in a circle at the Institute Library. They quietly chatted among one another, until Chinedum Nnodum, the program director, asked the group: “Do you all know the story of the Amistad?”

Solemn students shook their heads. In total, five out of the twelve students in attendance had heard about the Amistad. Anthony, a senior at Common Ground High School, said he had learned the story as a sophomore in a class on local history. Bryson, a senior at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, recalled that his grandfather told him a joke about the Amistad when he was twelve. But for most, the ship’s name didn’t ring any bells.

“It’s very important you know the story,” Nnodum said. “Especially considering the work we are doing.” He explained that the people on board the Amistad were “enslaved people,” not THE NEW JOUR NAL

“Walk around New Haven, and centuries of history surround you, from the names of streets and schools to lingering statues and monuments.” “slaves”—the latter suggesting that they were property or objects, not people. And he described how the event had complicated New Haveners’ perceptions of what it meant to be free or enslaved.

“It helped shake entrenched racism in America and New Haven,” he said.

Briyana Mondesir, a member of S4EJ and a sophomore at Washington and Lee University, joined the group when she was a student at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School.

“I felt so many times in school that the history we learned wasn’t history relevant to my life, or history essential for understanding identity in this space,” Mondesir told me at the meeting. “History can be really relevant if you can walk through it.

So many stories of people of color took place right here in New Haven—it’s incredible.”

In 1999, the charter school network Achievement First opened the Amistad Academy Elementary School, Middle School, and High School in the Dwight and Newhallville neighborhoods of New Haven. The New Haven Museum now hosts a permanent exhibit featuring a large portrait of Cinqué, and Marder founded the Connecticut Freedom Trail, which marks 150 spots in Connecticut related to the abolitionist movement, including some recognizing the Amistad.

But how many people who pass by these mentions of the Amistad remember the ship’s story? Walk around New Haven, and centuries of history surround you, from the names of streets and schools to lingering statues and monuments.

These names have passed the test of time—but do we remember the stories and significance behind them?

Every name that dots the city has its own story.

It’s worth hearing the one that Marder, Ives, Edmonds, the students of S4EJ, and Hine and his crew have all worked to remember.

– Helena Lyng-Olsen is a sophomore in Pierson College.

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CRITICAL ANGLE

THE RESEARCHER’S RESPONSIBILITY

graphics courtesy of Sam Oldshue

A Yale professor collected DNA that helped China persecute its Uighur population. Is the researcher responsible?

KATHERINE HU

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strain to pick up Abduweli Ayup’s voice over our WhatsApp call. A Uighur linguist, activist, and now refugee, he sketches a bleak outline of his detention in Chinese prison in 2013, after attempting to fund a new Uighur language school in Xinjiang. His descriptions are graphic: a yard full of detainees bombarded with explosives that induced vomiting and tears, the forced collection of DNA via blood and saliva.

“They don’t just have my fingerprints, they have my toe prints,” he mentions, chuckling.

Earlier this year, The New York Times revealed that Kenneth K. Kidd, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the Yale School of Medicine, inadvertently aided Chinese authorities in surveilling Uighurs like Ayup. Li Caixia, the chief forensic physician at China’s principal police authority, spent eleven months at Kidd’s lab in 2014, bringing DNA samples and expertise back to China.

Kidd, whose work centers around forensics, maintains that he didn’t have concerns about working with Li Caixia. He frequently collaborates with law enforcement, and has helped push for the use of DNA in courts to exonerate the wrongly convicted. In an interview with NPR this July, he maintains that he did “nothing wrong” and shouldn’t be expected to know “everything that’s going to happen in the future.”

But a closer look at Kidd puts his naiveté into serious question. This isn’t the first time he has been involved in a genomics project accused of racist motives. Kidd’s relationship with China is also ethically suspect; he has collaborated 18

with scientists who misuse genetic research for nationalist purposes and received funding from Chinese governmental institutions.

Was Kidd truly unaware of the plight of Uighurs like Ayup, as he claims? Or did he put scientific achievement first, turning a blind eye to the agenda of the Chinese surveillance state? * Kidd is no stranger to ethical controversy. In the 1990s, he was a key figure and project-planner for the Human Genome Diversity Project, or HGDP, an effort by the late Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford to study genetic diversity by gathering DNA samples from all over the planet. The project never acquired enough funding, however, and was quickly mired in allegations of racism. CavalliSforza mentions Kidd’s involvement in the initial planning stages. Kidd would pen Cavalli-Sforza’s obituary in The American Journal of Human Genetics decades later.

The HGDP’s original focus was collecting DNA samples from indigenous people who, according to the project, were “in danger of dying out.”

Cavalli-Sforza and his collaborators hoped to form a database that could help study migration histories, noting that isolated populations were best suited for this task. Indigenous activist groups such as the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism struck back, pointing out that the scientists’ methods were exploitative. These groups argued that “theories of migration,” which Kidd studied, “[could] be used to challenge aboriginal territorial claims or rights to land.”

Jonathan Marks, a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was also an outspoken critic of the project during its heyday in the nineties. According to him, “The project was framed in the science of the nineteensixties, which involved saying anything to get a syringe full of native blood and then buggering off with it, with full ownership of the ‘biological THE NEW JOUR NAL

specimen’ and no obligation to the participant.”

Marks was an associate professor at Yale at the time. He spoke to Kidd privately about his many concerns regarding the project’s ethics, and recalled that “[Kidd] did not take criticism well.”

Kidd allegedly forbade a graduate student of his from speaking to Marks, whom he believed to be “dangerous.”

In hopes of salvaging the project, Kidd and the other members of the North American Regional Committee would co-author a 1997 paper outlining a proposed set of ethical standards. This paper urged researchers to “learn as much as possible” about the populations they were studying and mandated that they consult anthropologists before considering genetic sampling. In essence, it was a list of lessons learned, lessons that could’ve prevented the predicament Kidd is in today.

HGDP never made it off the ground. But that didn’t stop Kidd from reviving the project under a different name—ALFRED, or the Allele Frequency Database. Ken Weiss, a former leader of the HGDP, confirmed that the two projects are highly similar: both are free, public databases with DNA sequence results and genotypes from as many populations as possible.

YA L E CENTER FOR BRITISH ART

ALFRED has been Kidd’s pet project since 1999. Currently, it contains data on DNA samples from 2,942 Uighurs, most of which were collected in China over the last two decades. Two hundred and seventy five of the subjects are from Urumqi— the same city where Ayup stood in a line with over a hundred detainees signing paperwork he would never read, potentially giving away the rights to his own DNA. * According to Weiss, Kidd originally “put together ALFRED as a database of what was available.” But in the nineties, databases mostly contained European DNA, due to the Western focus of scientific research. This posed a problem, given that genomics research often requires data from a breadth of populations.

China’s return to the international stage via Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 policy of Reform and Opening Up came at an opportune time. China represents 20 percent of the world’s population.

Access to these DNA samples, and cooperation with government gatekeepers was crucial for Western geneticists.

Since the nineties, the Chinese government has invested in large-scale genetic databases. Its

The Yale Center for British Art, through the generosity of Nancy Horton Bartels and her late husband, Henry E. Bartels, is pleased to offer paid academic-year and summer internships to Yale undergraduates. Awarded annually, these internships introduce students to museum operations and best practices in the curatorial, conservation, and administrative departments.

For more information and to submit an online application, please visit britishart.yale.edu/education/yale/internships or contact Research (ycba.research@yale.edu | +1 203 432 2824).

SEPTEMBER 2019

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desire to catalogue the country’s fifty-five ethnic minorities is a geo-political strategy: the 1912 fall of the Qing Dynasty put the status of huge swaths of territory conquered by the Chinese empire, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, into question.

To maintain claim to those territories, leaders such as Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang-Kai-Shek needed to “explain why those people were Chinese,” Professor James Millward, who specializes in Central Asian history at Georgetown, told me.

That explanation is often propagated through popular political terms such as zhonghua mingzu, which roughly translates to “Chinese race.” It imposes the idea of a huge Chinese family—an idea that China would attempt to use genetics to prove with the rigor of a parent who knows best.

Scientists like Li Hui, a geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai, are part of that effort. A 2016 feature in Science describes Li Hui’s desire to use genetics to prove Chinese legends true, as well as his rise to prominence by using DNA to “discredit a theory that indigenous Taiwanese… descended from Micronesians and Polynesians.”

He traced their genes to the Dai minority of China, bolstering China’s long-standing claim that Taiwan belongs to it.

Kidd and Li Hui are long-time collaborators.

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Since 2007, they have co-published twelve papers, most recently in September 2018. In 2009, they co-published a paper titled “Genetic Landscape of Eurasia and ‘Admixture’ in Uyghurs.” Using data from ALFRED, they concluded that “Uyghurs’ genetic structure is more similar to East Asians than to Europeans.” They argued that “the median line of the Eurasian genetic landscape appears to lie to the west of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.” Oddly enough, this is the same landscape that the Chinese government prefers, with Xinjiang’s genetic boundary resting in tandem with the government’s physical one.

Scientific collaborations between Kidd and Li Hui are peppered with Chinese legend and subtle propaganda, such as a lengthy paragraph devoted to “Shennong, the God of Medicine in China and India,” who, according to Chinese legend, was an emperor five-thousand years ago. The paper argues that Shennong could be “early history rather than purely myth,” bolstering China’s claim to a fivethousand–year history—a political tool that Xi Jinping uses to emphasize the Party’s essential role in protecting a civilization “superior” to the shortlived Western world. Most historians, however, argue that Chinese history prior to 3,200 years ago is merely legend, due to a lack of written records.

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Kidd’s willingness to turn a blind eye may spring from a desire to maintain access to Chinese DNA samples. Professor Cao Cong, who specializes in the study of Chinese science and technology, explains that it is “impossible for a foreigner to collect [DNA] samples in China” without “the collaboration of a Chinese scientist.”

In June 2019, this unspoken rule was elevated into law. According to The Scientist, China now requires international scientists using materials containing human genomes (or data derived from those materials) to have a Chinese collaborator.

While not all Chinese geneticists are associated with or even supportive of Chinese government, their work has always been under its watchful eye.

Regulations passed in 1998 mandate that scientists receive government permission to transfer genetic samples or data outside of the country.

Everything would come full circle when Li Hui co-authored a 2015 paper alongside Kidd and Li Caixia, supplying DNA samples from Uighurs, Inner Mongolians, and Khamba Tibetans. Li Caixia would follow suit, with Chinese samples from fifteen ethnic minority groups, including the Uighurs, Tibetans, and Dai. One hundred and ten of Li Caixia’s samples were collected in Xinjiang, a place where, as Uighur poet Tahir Hamut told me over the phone, “It is not possible that any Uighur is willingly giving away their DNA.” * Hamut grew up in Xinjiang, attending college and working briefly in Beijing before returning to Urumqi, where forced DNA collection has become the norm. We communicate in heavily accented Chinese. For both of us, it is a second language—mine by choice, his by force.

Hamut arrived in the United States in 2017, after enduring three years in a labor re-education camp.

But his and his wife’s departures were not without consequence: his wife’s three younger brothers and his younger brother were taken into captivity soon after they fled Xinjiang. It took around two years for them to locate two of those brothers. As for the other two, Hamut remains “unsure if they are dead or alive.” * In an interview with NPR this July, Kidd was asked whether he still believes that every Uighur sample in his research was collected with informed consent. Kidd responded haltingly, his words stilted. “It’s impossible to believe that unequivocally. But on the other hand, I SEPTEMBER 2019

have no way of knowing one way or the other.”

He argued that the forced DNA collections in Xinjiang weren’t widely known at the time of his collaboration with Li Caixia in 2014.

But Kidd’s claim is unpersuasive. News outlets such as The New York Times reported extensively on the 2009 Xinjiang riots between Uighurs and the Han Chinese, as well as the subsequent security crackdown in the region. Those riots came on the heels of massive protests in Tibet, highlighting historical frustration with Beijing’s policies toward ethnic minorities. Here, one might wonder why Kidd didn’t consider the ethical guidelines he demanded of others during the HGDP, which might have prevented the dilemma in which he now finds himself.

Yangyang Cheng, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell, points out that funding from Chinese government institutions “absolutely” compromises a U.S. researcher’s freedom to criticize China.

Since 2009, Kidd has co-authored at least six papers that were either partially or entirely funded by grants from Chinese government institutions such as the National Science Foundation of China and the Key Project of Chinese Ministry of Education.

Kidd continues to add new populations to ALFRED; his most recent paper, released after the controversy, examines twenty-five new ethnic groups for forensic markers, adding their population samples to ALFRED. Among those are the Chengdu Tibetans, Liangshan Tibetans, Qinghai Tibetans, and the Yi, all of which are ethnic minorities in China. * Towards the end of my call with Hamut, the Uighur poet, I ask him what he believes Kidd should do, even if Kidd believes that the Uighur samples in ALFRED were collected ethically. I can hear the passion in his voice, the subtle frustration with the clunkiness of a second language. Hamut puts forth a demand.

“This is an issue of morals, of ethics. This is something that should not be happening at all.

Uighurs are not in a position to reject giving away their DNA; it is simply impossible. When a million people have been locked up…everyone needs to be thinking critically about this issue.”

Kenneth K. Kidd included.

– Katherine Hu is a junior in Ezra Stiles College.

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POEM

Wants you to go back to bed, there’s no point in doing homework now. You need your rest.

Mixes robitussin and theraflu,

SICK POEM

ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

Stinky, steaming teas, suggests you salt water gargle.

Even though there’s no proof that the savoury soup Does anything, your mother passed it down to you, Just like hers did.

Makes chicken soup, from scratch, In a stovetop cauldron filled with sweaty onions, and Silvery brown potatoes, blood orange carrots, and Black pepper.

Sick poem will brush your hair, and braid it, Rub the joints on your fingers made weary From all that typing.

She’s looking out for you, She promises. She’ll wake you up If the world starts ending.

In the meantime, remember, No milk, extra water, Feed the cold, starve the fever.

Don’t forget about her, when you get better, Remember how much work your body does for you, You push it back and forth like the tides,

Illustration by Zihao Lin

Expecting it to return to you.

She keeps trying to explain: Some day, it won’t.

– Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is a junior in Berkeley college.

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

F E AT U R E

Design by Meher Hans

UNGUARDED For adults with developmental disabilities or mental illness, conservatorship can be lifelong—and life-shattering.

LILY MOORE-EISSENBERG

O

ne summer afternoon in 2012, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, a police dispatcher named Sharon Imbert had just finished cleaning her brother-in-law John Fritz’s kitchen when she discovered a receipt for a $2,000 money order tucked into a basket of apples. A gift from Sharon, the “snack basket” doubled as an in-house mail drop: whenever John, who has cerebral palsy, received paperwork he could not understand, he left it there for Sharon to find. “What’s this?” Sharon asked John, holding up the pink slip. “Oh,” he replied.

“Michael told me I had too much money.”

Sharon pressed for details, more confused than alarmed. For thirty years, an estates lawyer named Michael Schless had managed John’s finances as his court-appointed conservator. John told Sharon that Schless had called him on the phone the previous week. Apparently, Schless had instructed John to mail him a money order in the amount of $2,000; John’s savings account, he said, was “too full.” Schless wanted to transfer the excess funds into John’s checking account at TD Bank.

Along with cerebral palsy, John has co-occurring physical and intellectual disabilities that limit his ability to live independently.

When his mother died, he moved from her home to a subsidized apartment, and the Imberts assembled a team of home health aides to help him with chores and personal hygiene.

An eternal optimist, John is “the type of person that wears rose-colored glasses,” Sharon said. In reality, he wears boxy, wire-rimmed glasses that slightly enlarge his eyes; the sixty-nine-year-old’s feathery brown hair shows only a few streaks of gray. He loves to swim, and spends the better part of each year looking forward to his two-week stint at Camp Harkness, a summer camp for adults with disabilities, by a lake in Waterford.

SEPTEMBER 2019

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Under water, where gravity’s pull is weaker than on land, he can move his limbs freely, and they obey his commands.

By the summer of 2012, John’s inheritance, once worth $270,000, including a mortgage and interest-bearing accounts, had inexplicably run dry. Before his mother died, she had carefully secured a trust fund for him “so that John would never have to worry,” Sharon said. But then, several months before the pink slip appeared in the snack basket, Schless cancelled John’s home health aides for lack of funds. Sharon and her husband, Jim—a burly man with a buzz cut and the calm that comes from decades in federal law enforcement—started visiting John’s subsidized apartment daily to cook and clean. Almost overnight, it seemed, John went broke, and no one could explain how.

The Imberts, with John’s approval, filed a request for a change of conservator in December 2012. Jim replaced Schless, gaining access to his brother’s bank records. Over the next year, the Imberts spent their limited free time piecing together the paper trail that Schless had left in his wake. Each weekend, Sharon, who has closeset blue eyes, a sturdy build, and a firm handle on common sense, rose early. She hauled out a cardboard box full of files and settled into a chair at her built-in kitchen desk.

“Every day I worked on this, there was a discovery,” Sharon told me, perched beside Jim on the stoop of their modest summer home in Niantic, Connecticut. “And every day, it got more horrible.” * Conservatorship is a legal arrangement designed 23

to protect the country’s most vulnerable adults.

Hailed as an alternative to institutionalization and even as a means of preventing homelessness, conservatorship transfers the authority of a disabled person to a trusted family member or attorney. The legal ground for establishing this relationship is a finding of “incapacity”: when a judge deems an adult incapable of managing their own affairs, for reasons of disability, age, or mental illness, the state may appoint a conservator to take over.

Nationwide, court-appointed conservators and guardians—the terminology differs by state—help manage 1.3 million lives and at least $50 billion in assets. In Connecticut, conservatorship is housed in probate, a system of specialized courts descended from the Orphans’ Courts of the American colonies that handle a wide variety of cases involving children, seniors, and adults with mental illness or intellectual disabilities. From colonial times, Connecticut’s probate courts inherited a scattered system—before a recent restructuring, there were 123 of them—and the power to act as a benevolent parent to those in need of protection or care. Paul Knierim, Connecticut’s former probate administrator who left the post in late August, described the responsibilities of conservators as “truly awesome.” “We are asking them to take on the well-being of an individual who, by definition, is unable to manage his or her own finances and personal care,” he said. “That is so big a set of duties that no person can take it lightly.”

Yet Connecticut’s system and similar ones across the U.S., from Nevada to Florida, have proved ripe for exploitation. In Connecticut, as in many other states, there are no statutory requirements for becoming a conservator. The state’s probate courts do not conduct background checks, except on conservators serving indigent people, meaning anyone on public assistance or whose income is 125 percent or less of the federal poverty level.

Even for those cases, the vetting is cursory. Probate administrators check disciplinary histories, but “as long as they have a law license,” Knierim said, attorneys can sign up for as many conservatorships

“Almost overnight, it seemed, John went broke, and no one could explain how.”

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as they want, provided the local probate judge approves the caseload—and the growing demand for conservators incentivizes judges to do so. In theory, once approved, an exploitative conservator could move between districts unnoticed: there is no statewide record of conservators who have been removed from their conservatorships because of misconduct or malpractice.

According to the National Council on Disability, conservatorship “is often viewed as an issue impacting older Americans and not thought of as an important disability issue,” even though in at least eleven states, the legal procedure to impose a conservatorship on developmentally disabled adults is less rigorous than the equivalent procedure for the elderly. Some of those adults, like John, spend more than half of their lifetimes under conservatorship. When conservators abuse their power, the betrayal can be psychologically devastating and financially disastrous. Less calculably, the abuse of conservatorship erodes residents’ faith in the legal system. Last spring, after a Bristol attorney working as a conservator admitted to stealing more than $100,000 from her clients, presiding judge Vanessa Bryant called the public’s trust in the state “a silent victim.” * A few weeks after Jim took over as John’s conservator, in 2012, the Imberts received a handwritten note from Schless, along with two bank checks and a Social Security statement.

According to an affidavit, the checks, which constituted all of the money left in John’s name, totaled $10,473.87—just under four percent of the roughly $200,000 that Sharon calculated should have remained.

Over the next few days, Sharon and Jim, police dispatcher and former federal agent, pursued leads. Jim requested copies of checks from the three banks where Schless had opened accounts for John. But he withdrew his request when he discovered that each copy would cost $1.50. The irony was not lost on him: John could no longer afford the records that would show where his money had gone.

Sharon had better luck. At Wethersfield Housing Authority, the public housing agency that managed John’s subsidized apartment, she found ten years’ worth of records, including more than one thousand copies of checks. Back at her kitchen desk, Sharon leafed through the files.

Auto insurance. That didn’t make sense: John couldn’t drive because of his physical disabilities.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

ATM withdrawals at Costco. Strange: John never used ATMs, and Schless didn’t buy him groceries.

The Imberts did, and they didn’t shop at Costco.

Florida Light and Power. John had never visited Florida. Wasn’t that where Schless, who was in his late seventies, moved after retiring from his legal practice?

An AARP policy.

An online subscription to Fort Lauderdale’s Sun-Sentinel. Florida, again.

Three hundred and fifty dollars in overdraft fees.

Another AARP policy.

A withdrawal of $765, in Florida.

In total, between 2009 and 2012, Schless had spent more than $10,400 using unauthorized checks.

(The closeness of this amount, in stolen funds, to the amount of money left in John’s accounts was pure coincidence.) That didn’t explain the tens of thousands of missing dollars, but it was a start.

To Sharon’s surprise, the records also showed deposits. Why would Schless put money back into the account from which he was stealing? She decided to cross-check the deposit records with other bank statements.

As it turned out, withdrawals from John’s mutual fund account matched the deposits, to the cent.

Schless had been using John’s checking account as his personal bank. When the account ran low, he withdrew money from John’s savings to replenish it. Sharon had finally solved the mystery of the pink slip in the snack basket: the records showed that shortly after Schless called John asking for a money order worth $2,000, he had deposited $2,000 in John’s checking account at TD Bank. So the pattern went: Withdraw from the savings account, deposit in the checking account, withdraw from the checking account, and, presumably, spend.

Schless proved remarkably consistent.

Within three weeks of the $2,000 deposit at TD Bank, the money was gone. Sharon said, “He siphoned it all out.” * As baby-boomers age and the number of mental health cases requiring conservators multiplies—in Connecticut, it has risen by more than fifty percent since 2012—so has the financial incentive for attorneys, or “public conservators,” to build larger caseloads. In 2016, then-probate administrator Paul Knierim created the designation “high-volume conservator,” also known as “contract conservator,” to provide a flat monthly rate of $86 per client to attorneys juggling more than forty conservatorships

SEPTEMBER 2019

at a time. (Probate conducts criminal background checks on contract conservators.) “You can make a decent living if you mass-produce it,” John Keyes, who served as New Haven’s probate judge for thirty-two years before retiring in 2017, said of conservatorship. “It’s like selling enough hamburgers.”

I recently asked a pair of social workers about the on-the-ground effects of ballooning caseloads.

Toshema Brooks and Nanteza Cohen work at New Haven’s Columbus House, a non-profit service provider for people experiencing or nearing homelessness. They described a pattern of disrespect, absenteeism, tardiness in paying bills, and outright verbal abuse by some conservators toward their clients. The two social workers said they witnessed one conservator call Brooks’ client—a middle-aged man who struggles with untreated mental illness, depression, and substance abuse—“lazy” and “stupid” when the four of them met in the conservator’s office. Brooks recalled the conservator saying to her client, “I know you’re a drunk. Are you fucking retarded?”

On the road back to New Haven after the meeting, Brooks pulled the car over to calm her client. He was sobbing, she said, and he threatened to kill himself.

“Do we need to call 911?” she asked him. He shook his head. “We’ll get you another conservator,” she assured him. “We’ll report him.”

In April 2018, I listened to Brooks tell New Haven’s probate judge about the incident in court; he immediately agreed to remove the conservator.

But removals do not ordinarily enter a conservator’s disciplinary record, and the probate court keeps no master list of them—a “hole in the system,” Keyes said. As a result, the conservator in question—who, according to Brooks and Cohen, often complains about his large caseload—will continue to manage the affairs of Connecticut’s most vulnerable. * The Imberts’ second question, after they discovered where John’s money had gone, was how Schless had kept his theft a secret. As they recall events, when they first told Newington Probate Judge Robert Randich about the missing money, he brushed them off, saying that he didn’t believe Schless would have stolen from John. (Randich declined to comment on his interactions with the family because probate judges are not allowed to talk about specific cases.)

The Imberts hired a forensic accountant and returned to Newington’s probate court the next 25

month. This time, Randich agreed that funds were missing from 2010, 2011, and 2012, but he declined to investigate earlier years, according to an affidavit. He ordered Schless to return about $36,000, but probate judges lack power to enforce their orders, so Schless never did. Randich chose not to refer the case to a state’s attorney, an option available to probate judges when they suspect a crime has taken place.

“The system, as it’s set up, is highly dependent on the honesty of the people that serve within it,” Randich told me. He stressed how difficult it can be to detect fraud in a conservator’s accounting “when the numbers balance.”

Sharon, however, maintains that anyone paying attention to John’s case would have noticed the signs. John’s bank records showed about $10,000 in annual losses from one of his long-term savings accounts. By the time she met with Randich, she had spent “gross amounts” of time combing through bank records and compiling evidence to persuade the judge to take a second look at Schless’ accounting, only to find him powerless to enforce the law and unwilling to enlist someone who could. Sharon’s faith in probate evaporated as quickly as John’s savings.

As a last resort, the Imberts’ lawyer contacted a reporter at the Hartford Courant. When an article detailing his plight appeared in the Sunday paper, the Imberts’ phone began to ring. Among the many concerned callers was Brian Prelenski, a state’s attorney.

Over the next year, with the help of a police detective, a forensic accountant, the Courant reporter, and Prelenski, the Imberts found that Schless had stolen at least $60,000, and possibly more than $100,000—a large enough sum to merit a criminal allegation of larceny in the first degree. Prelenski served Schless an extraditable arrest warrant mandating his speedy return to Newington, Connecticut. One early morning in December 2015, three years after he was removed as John’s conservator, Schless caught a flight to Connecticut from Boynton Beach, Florida.

Around 5:30 a.m., he turned himself in at the Newington police station. * On March 18, 2016, in New Britain Superior Court, Schless pleaded “no contest” to first-degree larceny, a felony. He was convicted of stealing $47,746 from John, the amount that fell within the statute of limitations. At age 78, Schless received a ten-year suspended sentence and no jail time, 26

“When conservators abuse their power, the betrayal can be psychologically devastating and financially disastrous.” on account of his age. In court, John read from a prepared victim statement.

“In the past, I trusted people, and trusted lawyers and the courts,” he said. “Now I don’t trust people anymore.”

After John’s story made headlines in the state capital, Connecticut’s legislature passed a law mandating random audits of conservators’ accounting. But piecemeal reform, including a law establishing conservators’ duty to intervene in their clients’ lives as little as possible, has historically failed to change conservator conduct, partly because probate judges have little power to enforce the law, and partly because many of them work part-time, limiting their ability to conduct rigorous checks. Yale Sterling law professor John Langbein, a longtime critic of Connecticut’s probate courts, believes conservatorship should be exported altogether from the probate system, which he characterized in an interview as inefficient and “corrupt.” Sandra Sherlock-White, an elder law attorney who served on a work group to revise Connecticut’s conservatorship statute following a high-profile case in 2014, told me she has noticed a “disconnect” between the letter of the law—which she helped to craft—and the reality on the ground.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

“The trouble is more in the practice. That’s where the rubber doesn’t meet the road,” she said. “There are still violations at times.”

Former probate administrator Paul Knierim attributes those violations to “human frailties”; others, like Langbein, Brooks, Cohen, and Sharon, blame them on a frail system. And when the system fails, not everyone has dedicated relatives who are willing and able to invest hundreds of hours tracing the financial history of a rogue conservator.

On her front porch, Sharon, wiping away angry tears, said of probate, “I don’t even want to say it’s a system. It’s a rubber stamp.” * When John and I spoke on the phone, he was looking forward to his upcoming stint at Camp Harkness, the camp for disabled adults in Waterford. Sharon, Jim, and I sat on the front stoop of their home in Niantic and talked to John on speaker phone. He’d be heading to camp soon.

What was he most excited to do? “See my friends,” he said ponderously. Then, he remembered the lake. “And swim!”

Later, I asked him how he felt about Schless.

“At first, he was O.K. But it made me upset, what he did,” John said.

“Hey, skipper,” Sharon said gently. “Do you remember what you told the judge you wanted Michael to do?”

“Oh,” John replied, pausing. Schless had exploited him impersonally, via bank transactions and from a distance; now, John wanted Schless to witness the vulnerabilities he had exploited firsthand, perhaps through community service that could actually help others with John’s disability.

“I wanted him to work with somebody who has cerebral palsy,” John said. But the judge declined to issue an order. “Candidly,” she said of Schless, “I don’t trust him.”

As the investigation unfolded, the third, and most difficult, question the Imberts faced was how to explain the situation to John. He had trouble understanding Schless’s part in the changes to his life and his body. “He can’t conceive of anybody hurting another person,” Sharon told me. In 2012, the Imberts footed the hefty bill for camp, but they knew they couldn’t afford to keep paying long-term. Meanwhile, John’s teeth had started to rot. Without home health aides, he often failed to brush them properly, and his age and physical disabilities made him more vulnerable to dental decay. Sharon said, “It was a process of telling

SEPTEMBER 2019

him, ‘You’re losing your teeth because, you may not go to camp because.”

Though John recovered about $60,000 in stolen funds between the criminal case and a civil suit, the Imberts say Schless stole tens of thousands of dollars more. They worry that the recovered money won’t cover the care John will need as he ages. In the year after the trial alone, he attended weekly therapy sessions to manage his psychological trauma. In the absence of his home health aides, his dentist pulled all of his lower teeth.

Jim, in a Harley Davidson t-shirt, listened as John spoke over the phone. “We’re asking about the Schless Mess, skipper,” Jim reminded his brother when John struggled to understand a question.

With John, the Imberts try to strike a light tone. In private, however, their mood darkens. Jim believes conservatorship is “a broken system,” and he holds the State of Connecticut responsible. Sharon counts the endangerment of John’s stay at Camp Harkness as one of Schless’s cruelest offenses. And whenever she sees John, his lower dentures remind her of the cost of Schless’s conservatorship.

“John doesn’t need a laugh, doesn’t spend,” Sharon said. “If he has what he needs, he’s happy.”

– Lily Moore-Eissenberg is a senior in Saybrook College.

27

COVER

COMING HOME CONVICTED Stefon Morant served 21 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Now he’s home—but still fighting to clear his name.

KEERTHANA ANNAMANENI

S

tefon Morant wears his heart on his sleeve. When I ask him to tell me about the people that matter most to him, he points at the tattoos covering his arms.

“They’re here.”

His left bicep loudly announces “Kimberly Forever,” after his wife, Kimberly Morant. Her name is enveloped by a fallen cross and a bed of red roses, a nod to their Christian faith.

Stefon’s right bicep bares his oldest tattoo: “MOM,” it declares in faded cursive. The design, a black heart, surrounded by a wreath of leaves, is simple and reminds him of a simpler time. “I don’t know where I would be without my mom,” he tells me. His children’s names are tattooed on his chest.

He has seven—Twyla, Stefon, Julien, Christian, Mia, Jaala, and Prince.

His brothers Frank and Lee are his best friends, and his right forearm is covered by a portrait of Julian Morant, his youngest brother. In the tattoo, Julian wears a bow tie and tuxedo, and Stefon points at his arm, beaming. The tattoo is fading— Stefon has had it for one year now—but I can make out a subtle facial rash on Julian’s tattooed portrait and drooping eyes, signs of Lupus. Julian died from Lupus in 2014, just months before Stefon was released from prison after serving twenty-one years for a crime he did not commit.

On June 17, 2015, Stefon Morant returned home from prison after accepting a deal from prosecutors which slashed his seventy-year sentence to twentyfive years. While the deal allowed him to come home immediately, it also failed to exonerate him of his charges and limited his avenues for redress.

An FBI investigation revealed that Morant and his co-defendant were wrongfully convicted, and 28

the New Haven State’s Attorney acknowledged in court that Morant’s conviction rested on false testimony from the State’s key witness. Yet Morant is still a registered felon.

Morant is far from alone. High-profile wrongful conviction cases across the United States have involved deals enabling wrongfully convicted individuals to return home without being exonerated. Although no studies have tracked the prevalence of such deals, in September of 2017, ProPublica investigated ten cases in the last nineteen years in which defendants across the country who had significant evidence pointing to their innocence chose to plead guilty in order to reduce their sentences. For these individuals, re-entering society with a criminal record comes with financial, social, and emotional barriers.

Four years after his homecoming, Morant continues to face challenges related to his felony conviction. Still, he stands by his choice to accept the deal.

“I missed my family. I needed to come home,” he said. “I didn’t want to be in a cage.” * In 1994, Detective Vincent Raucci Jr., a corrupt detective on the payroll of a New Haven drug kingpin, was investigating the 1990 murder of former New Haven alderman Ricardo Turner and his partner. Morant’s good friend, Scott Lewis, owed Raucci $10,000 in a cocaine-related debt, and when Lewis could not pay, Raucci began collecting evidence to frame Lewis for the murder.

According to a 1997 FBI investigation of Lewis and Morant’s convictions, Raucci coerced vulnerable witnesses to make his case. His star witness was Ovil Ruiz, a teenager with a history of schizophrenia and a criminal record.

When Raucci attempted to pressure Morant into testifying against Lewis, he refused. In return, the detective sought revenge: he framed Morant for driving Lewis to the murder scene, a felony under Connecticut law. After a three-month trial, the jury found Morant and Lewis guilty of two THE NEW JOUR NAL

“For the next twentyone years, Stefon Morant maintained his innocence from behind bars.” counts of felony murder and two counts of murder, respectively.

A few days later, Morant returned to court to receive his sentence.

“Mr. Morant, what do you have to say?” asked the presiding judge, according to court transcripts.

“I don’t understand why am I being convicted of a crime I didn’t commit…I didn’t commit a crime.

I never committed a crime. I never hurt nobody in my life. I’m innocent your Honor. I leave it with that.”

To the judge, Morant’s words rang hollow.

“If you sat on this jury and you listened to this case,” the judge stated to Morant’s family and a packed courtroom, “you would have found that man guilty of these crimes. He was convicted because he is guilty. He committed these crimes.”

With that, Morant was sentenced to seventy years in prison.

For the next twenty-one years, Stefon Morant maintained his innocence from behind bars. He remained hopeful: in 2014, Lewis won his freedom after a Connecticut state judge agreed that he had been unconstitutionally incarcerated. Led by Yale Law School professor Brett Dignam, Lewis’ legal team of nearly fifty Yale and Columbia law students had presented new evidence, including an FBI investigation that showed Detective Raucci’s involvement with the drug trade and his willingness to threaten key witnesses. Over the course of six years, the law students threw themselves into Lewis’ case, driving all across the tristate area to assemble Lewis’ record and, ultimately, win his freedom.

But Morant didn’t have fifty law students backing him. While Lewis’s team spent years assembling records, working with private investigators, and conducting interviews with people who had known Detective Raucci, Morant was represented by one solo practitioner who barely communicated with him, filed no pleadings, and devoted fewer than twenty hours to working with Morant over the SEPTEMBER 2019

course of two years.

On June 9, 2015, a corrections officer walked by and slipped Morant a pass for the visitation room. He stepped out of the cell doors and walked through two sets of metal detectors into the large visitation room.

Morant’s attorney was waiting to speak with him.

“The state has a deal for you,” he remembers his attorney saying. “You could be out next week, if you want.” As a result of Lewis’s victory, state prosecutors had approached Morant’s attorney with a rare deal. They were willing to reduce Morant’s seventy-year sentence to the lowest possible sentence allowed in Connecticut for a felony: twenty-five years, minus four years because of Morant’s good behavior. And he had already served twenty-one years.

If Morant took the deal, he could be home immediately.

But there was a catch. If he took this deal and returned home, which attorneys call a “time served” deal, Morant would not be exonerated. He would not receive compensation from the state of Connecticut, be issued an apology from his city, or have a clean record. The world could still view him as a felon.

If Morant refused the deal, he would have to argue his case in court, just as Lewis had. But the odds weren’t in his favor. Although Lewis had won his case, Morant was not guaranteed the same verdict. Morant’s attorney advised him not to risk court proceedings, citing the years of litigation ahead. He told Morant that all of that legal work could take him a year or more. Coupled with the justice system’s slow-moving bureaucracy, even if Morant were to win his case on appeal, he would risk being incarcerated for two or more additional years.

Morant, who had missed watching his children grow up and had learned that his little brother and his father had passed away by word of mouth, wanted to go home. He wanted to hold Kim, his childhood sweetheart who visited him every week, and his sons in his arms without being scolded by corrections officers. He wanted to do mundane things, like go fishing on the weekend, cook steaks in his backyard, or wear a belt. In twenty-one years of incarceration, Stefon was never once allowed to wear a belt. “I didn’t feel like a man, without a 29

belt,” he later told me. “Imagine what that’s like.”

On June 17, 2015, Stefon Morant took the deal.

He would no longer be able to file a civil suit for compensation or clear his name. But he was ready to come home.

“I had no understanding” of the legal consequences, he said. “I just wanted out of that cage.”

The very same day, Kim rushed from New Haven to Cheshire, Connecticut, to pick him up. Just as she arrived, Morant realized he had no clothes other than his orange jumpsuit, so he asked a few corrections officers to let him borrow some jeans and a t-shirt. The borrowed clothes were too big for Morant. Without a belt, he pulled up his pants as best he could, ran out the doors of Cheshire, and jumped into Kim’s Jeep wrangler.

“Start driving!” he remembers yelling, and Kim hit the gas.

“You didn’t even hug me,” he remembers Kim saying.

“I’ll hug you when we get the hell out of here.

It’s not real until then.”

“So, did you end up hugging her?” I ask, four years later, in a café in downtown New Haven.

Morant chuckles, and takes a bite of his salmon sandwich.

“I hugged her after she bought me that belt,” he said. “That’s when it felt real.” * “I see these cases all the time,” Darcy McGraw, director of the Connecticut Innocence Project told me. “People want to go home, and the justice system hasn’t been fair to them in the past. Why would they want to take the risk?”

Some wrongfully convicted people, like Morant, accept a “time served” deal. Others choose to accept an Alford plea, a loophole that allows defendants to insist that they are innocent in court records, while still legally pleading guilty to receive shorter sentences. Both legal mechanisms operate similarly. Want to go home? Take the deal.

Some like to imagine that “time served” deals and Alford pleas are a win-win. Prosecutors maintain a successful record, while innocent people are guaranteed shorter sentences rather than rolling the dice with a criminal justice system that has already failed them. And because these individuals cannot sue the state in civil court 30

for wrongful incarceration, the state can avoid expensive lawsuits, some of which end in milliondollar settlements.

But these deals can have serious consequences.

They leave wrongfully convicted people with criminal records, which can limit people’s access to public assistance: three states still ban felons from accessing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. In thirteen states, having a record can strip a person of their voting rights.

But McGraw told me that the most serious burden involves employment. “In every one of these cases that I’ve seen, people just want to find a job,” she said, “and it’s harder to get hired when you have that record.”

When Morant got home, he spent two days with his family before feeling restless. He had gotten used to his regimented day at Cheshire: his days used to begin at 7 a.m. with breakfast. He would then go to work (he made license plates from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.), the gym, dinner, his Bible study courses, and finally, bed. Now that he was home, he needed something to do.

He paid a visit to New Haven Works, a nonprofit downtown that helped him assemble a resume.

Over the next two months, Morant applied to over fifty jobs. After weeks, the letters started coming in. The supervisor at Amazon’s Connecticut manufacturing plant wanted to know why Morant had not disclosed his felony on the application.

“But the question on the application asked, ‘Have you ever been incarcerated for a crime you committed?’” he explains to me. “I didn’t lie. I wasn’t [in prison] because I committed a crime. I was there because they were holding me captive.

I was in a cage.” Morant didn’t get the job at the manufacturing plant. And by the end of the year, he had been denied trucking, sweeping, landscaping, and construction jobs.

Finally—in early 2016—Morant got an offer for a refuse collector position, a stable job working for

“For the people whom the pardon process has failed, the consequences can be devastating.”

THE NEW JOUR NAL

the City of New Haven. For three weeks, he showed up on time to every shift, was polite, and collected trash as efficiently as he could. “I actually started to enjoy it,” he said. “It paid really well.”

But by the end of the month, his supervisor told him he was letting him go. “The job was just a temporary position,” Morant remembers the supervisor explaining. But Morant thinks that his background check had raised a red flag.

The unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people is five times higher than the general rate, according to a 2018 Prison Policy Initiative study. Ninety percent of United States employers use online criminal record reports before hiring for some, if not all, positions. Studies show that employers who do learn of applicants’ criminal histories tend to discriminate against them.

“When an employer finds out you have a criminal record, he’s likely going to hire someone else if he can,” McGraw told me. Morant had first written to McGraw ten years ago, and they’ve been in touch ever since. Once he got out and struggled to find employment, she wrote a letter for future employers, explaining his unique circumstances.

It didn’t always work.

In a job interview at the Children’s Center in Hamden, Morant supplied the letter and began explaining his story. After skimming the letter for a few seconds, the center’s director cut him off and apologized.

“There’s got to be more to your story. You got convicted,” Morant remembers the director saying.

He didn’t get the job. * The classic mechanism for overturning unlawful imprisonment is filing a petition for the writ of habeas corpus, claiming the state is unlawfully holding, imprisoning, or detaining someone.

When these petitions are effective, incarcerated individuals are brought to trial to determine if the court made a legal or factual error in ordering an individual’s detention.

In rare cases, these petitions succeed. Scott Lewis won his exoneration through habeas corpus litigation. But a habeas corpus action isn’t possible for Morant anymore, since he is no longer incarcerated. “In order to file habeas corpus petitions, the state must have your body,” SEPTEMBER 2019

Ken Rosenthal, Morant’s current attorney, told me, referring to the phrase’s Latin roots.

McGraw and Rosenthal both say that Morant has just one avenue left: a pardon. Typically, political executives—presidents, governors, or pardon boards—can issue pardons to convicted criminals. For people who have shown remorse for their actions, who face lengthy time in jail for a low-level crime or who were wrongfully convicted, pardons can be a powerful last resort.

In Connecticut, pardons erase convictions from criminal records, giving back crucial civil rights to those convicted, wrongfully or not.

Rosenthal, Morant’s seasoned New Haven criminal defense attorney (“Ken’s my angel,” Morant tells me), tries to remain optimistic, but recognizes that a pardon based on claims of innocence will be difficult to achieve. “It’s simply never been done before in Connecticut,” Rosenthal tells me from his ground-floor office in New Haven. “I’m not saying we can’t do it; we can.

If anyone can, Stef can.”

Morant and Rosenthal meet once a week to work on the pardon petition, which will be submitted soon. The average turn around rate for pardon petitions is one year, so Morant believes that by this time next year, he’ll have an answer.

Morant and Rosenthal hope the pardon process will work out. But for the people whom the pardon process has failed, the consequences can be devastating.

In 1985, Chris Conover, a Maryland native, had been wrongfully convicted of two murders.

But DNA evidence acquired by the Innocence Project in 2001 pointed to different suspects, casting a shadow on Conover’s conviction. In late June 2003, the state prosecutors agreed to vacate the conviction, based on the DNA evidence, but they also maintained that Conover was guilty and vowed to retry him.

However, leading up to the retrial, prosecutors offered Conover an Alford plea deal, allowing him to maintain his innocence on record while acknowledging that a jury could convict him in a retrial. The Alford plea would enable Conover to go home immediately. If he refused, he would have to take his chances with trial.

Although the Alford plea deal would not exonerate Conover, he took the deal. Conover’s 31

“I missed my family. I needed to come home,” Stefon Morant said. “I didn’t want to be in a cage.”

mother was ill, and he wanted to be home with her as soon as he could. “It would not have been worth it to put my mother and my loved ones through another trial,” he told a Baltimore Sun reporter.

And he worried that he might lose in a retrial and be sent back to prison. “I know that I’ve already walked into one courtroom and been wrongfully convicted,” he told Prison Legal News. He knew it could happen again.

In 2009, his defense team worked to petition then-Governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, for a pardon, which would entitle Conover to state compensation and would push the world to recognize that he was, in fact, innocent. Three years later, O’Malley rejected the petition. Online, the pardon commission advises petitioners: “Avoid trying to make excessive excuses for your crime and arguing away your guilt. Whatever you feel about the crime, you have already been found guilty.”

According to Conover’s wife, Conover struggled with panic attacks, depression and anxiety, knowing that people around him still believed he was guilty.

Darcy McGraw told me that innocent people who take time served and Alford plea deals face additional layers of trauma that exonerated people do not: those who haven’t been exonerated “have 32

courtesy of Matt Nadel

to cope with all the challenges of reentering society and know that the world will never recognize their innocence. It’s a double bind.”

In 2015, three years after O’Malley’s decision, Conover took his own life. His seventy-word obituary online mentions his wife, his family, his small hometown—Towson, Maryland—and directions to his funeral. It never proclaims that Conover was wrongfully convicted. It does not mention his crime. Rather, the last line reads: “In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in Christopher’s name to The Innocence Project, www.innocenceproject.org” * I visited Linda Morant, Stefon’s mother, at her home in New Haven. It’s a cozy white two-story house, with careful pruning and all the marks of a home that has been lived in by generations of family members. The walls are decked with portraits of parents, grandparents, kids, and grandkids, and photos from church, graduations, and vacations; milestones that have come and gone.

When I asked her how she passed twenty-one years without Morant, she pulled out a carefully saved letter from a dusty Bible, in which she had tucked away dozens of family photos, diplomas, and postcards among her most cherished psalms.

THE NEW JOUR NAL

She showed me a letter she had drafted to Judge Hadden, the judge who handed Morant his life sentence. “I am asking you your honor to please grant my son a new trial,” she read from a letter she had never sent, her voice full of the despair that only a mother could conjure, twenty-five years after the fact. Growing desperate, Linda had also written to someone else: God. Dear God please release my son Morant from prison I thank you God and for all of my family and the world to be bless. Amen. 12/6/06 Now that Morant is home, she finds herself praying for something new: his exoneration. “He’s free now, and I thank the Lord for that, but there’s more to be done,” she tells me.

She pulled out every school portrait of Morant and every family photo she could find. Sitting next to each other on her blue couch, we flipped through photos and watched Morant grow up.

Photos of him with missing teeth and ears too big for his face were replaced by junior high school photos of a boy with a small moustache and frayed blue jeans. I saw him graduate night school, diploma in hand, beaming as he hugged his mom in his blue cap and gown. I saw him carry his twins as infants in a hotel room, buy them a stuffed animal that was even taller than they were for their second birthday, and drive them around in his blue Nissan.

She also showed me pictures of memories that Stefon had missed: his daughter at her middle school graduation, a family vacation down to South Carolina, a family cook-out for the fourth of July.

The next week, I met up with Morant and his attorney, Ken Rosenthal, in New Haven. At the end of the meeting, when I began to pack up my stuff, Morant cut me off.

“What do you see when you look at that painting?”

He was staring at an abstract piece of art on Rosenthal’s wall, a work with earthy blues, greens, and browns. I saw splattered paints that seemed to be dripping towards a foggy lake. When I told him that I frankly didn’t really understand it, he threw his head back and laughed, beaming with a smile that covered his whole face.

“Keep looking at it. Look, it’s crying right now.

Or maybe it’s raining. I don’t know yet. But I’ll SEPTEMBER 2019

figure it out.”

* When I first called Morant to request an interview, he told me that he was glad I’d be writing about him, but that he was busy— “there’s a lot I have to catch up on,” he said. He had to visit his family members, walk his mom’s dog, go to work, apply for new jobs, and meet with his attorneys. He would only be able to meet with me at 9 a.m. at Payne Whitney gym. “I work out every day because that’s my daily therapy. You can walk on the treadmill next to me, and we can talk,” he said.

It turned out that the gym was closed, so Morant met me instead at Patricia’s, a diner on Whalley Avenue. In between bites of potatoes and a runny omelette, he walked me through his story, beginning with the day Raucci, the detective, first called him and asked to meet him at a local gas station. “I still wish I hadn’t called him back,” he said. “I didn’t know better.”

Twenty-eight years after that initial phone call, after struggling to find well-paying, consistent employment, Morant has found work he loves at the Connecticut Renaissance, a halfway house for formerly incarcerated men who are reintegrating into society. He said he tries to work as many hours a week as possible to save up money. “It’s been tight for me,” he says. “I can’t buy the things I need to buy, and I have kids.” One day, Morant hopes to chip away at the school-to-prison pipeline by opening up a mentoring program for at-risk young men in New Haven.

But for now, he reminds himself that he is doing meaningful work. “It doesn’t pay much, but I think I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. It’s God’s work,” he tells me.

Although Morant is now stably employed, he knows that many employers still cannot look past his criminal record. As his pardon petition process moves forward, he longs to have his conviction erased from his record, closure after his twenty-one years in prison, and some semblance of justice.

– Keerthana Annamaneni is a senior in Timothy Dwight College.

33

ENDNOTE

FAREWELL, SHIRU CAFE We hardly knew ye.

JACK MCCORDICK

W

ith less than an hour to go before New Haven’s branch of the Japanese-owned Shiru Cafe closed for the last time, the place was almost empty. It was a balmy Friday afternoon just before the end of August, but inside, the AC was pumping cold air into the cafe’s cavernous interior. A cluster of baristas and a manager huddled at the back of the café, leaving the register unattended, while a handful of stray students dotted some of the cafe’s many tables and chairs. No one went up to order a drink. Only half an hour remained until the cafe would shutter its doors, fewer than four months after it opened on College Street. It was a swift and ignominious defeat for a coffee shop that branded itself on social media as “one of the most innovative cafes on the planet.”

The divine inspiration for Shiru’s business model hit its founder, Yuliy Kakimoto, while he was on a snowboarding trip years ago, according to the cafe’s website. By some bizarre alchemy, a car ride through a “long tunnel” during that trip inspired Kakimoto to conceive of a coffee shop that, instead of making a profit by selling coffee, would gather data from students and sell it to companies looking to recruit them. (As of the cafe’s closing date, the “sponsors” page on Shiru New Haven’s mobile app listed no companies.)

I had known about Shiru—which sparked controversy in the United States with its policy barring entry to anyone without a university ID— since early May, when it opened its third U.S. location, in New Haven. Spurred by Facebook ads promising free coffee for “#collegestudents,” I had logged onto Shiru’s website to see exactly what the fuss was all about.

Immediately after loading the homepage, I was waylaid by the “Shiru Cafe Bot,” who politely 34

invited me to start a conversation in a simulated text chat box. But before I could ask any questions, the bot demanded to know whether I was a “student!”, “employer!”, “university professional!”, or “none of the above!” After I replied, my ebullient interlocutor sent me to the app store to download the Shiru Cafe app.

I pressed on.

The app required me to set up an account with my Yale email and student ID number, and subsequently inquired about my area of study, employment history, and IT skills. I had a sneaking suspicion that my answers— “Humanities,” “lifeguard,” and “None of them”—would disappoint. I prayed that the Shiru Cafe Bot wouldn’t find out.

Finally, the app asked me to select my desired industry from a drop-down menu of one hundredplus options, which ranged from the predictable

THE NEW JOUR NAL

(“Private Equity,” “Management Consulting”) to the quaint (“Dairy,” “Furniture”) to the creepily vague (“Outsourcing/Offspring”) to the downright insidious (“Plastic,” “Tobacco”).

I selected “Newspapers,” and my account was complete.

I didn’t make it to Shiru before classes ended last spring, but the cafe popped up on my social media feeds all summer. In May, two prominent members of the New Haven community— New Haven Independent reporter Tom Breen and immigrant rights activist John Lugo— approached the cafe on separate occasions and filmed tense exchanges with its manager, Barbara Jeanna Lafond (who declined to comment for this story), in which they questioned whether Shiru’s business model would exacerbate the city’s town-gown inequality.

During the exchange with Breen, Lafond defended Shiru’s exclusionary policy: “We’re trying to change the normal way of doing things, so that students don’t have to go through what was uncomfortable in the past,” she said.

(Ah, finally, a solution to the crippling anxiety I feel every time I walk into Blue State and brush elbows with a townie.) Soon after, Havenly Treats, a Yale-founded collaborative that trains refugee chefs in New Haven, ended its contract with Shiru and issued a public rebuke.

“I refuse to give a penny to them, and everyone in the community who cares about justice and inclusion should do the same,” read one Facebook review from a Yale graduate student.

Another review simply read: “Racism, classism, elitism. Nah.” In mid-June—a month-and-a-half after the initial controversy over the cafe’s opening— Shiru announced in a cryptic press release titled “Shiru Café USA New Business Model Expands Community Reach” that it was opening up its American locations to the wider public.

But even after Shiru’s gesture toward inclusivity, something about the core of its business model—collecting data from cashstrapped, caffeine-dependent college students in order to help corporate recruiters—still felt wrong.

I returned to Shiru’s website looking for SEPTEMBER 2019

answers and, ignoring persistent “hey there!” messages from my old friend, the Shiru Cafe Bot, I stumbled onto the “Shiru Cafe Blog,” which promises to keep Shiru’s loyal customers abreast of the company’s progress.

“Shiru,” an early blog post informed me, means “knowledge” in Japanese. After snooping around the blog for about an hour, it became clear to me that the people running Shiru have one epistemological fascination in particular: the “millenial.”

Across the blog, articles abound with titles like “What a Millennial Wants.”

“From hiring to training to attrition, leadership needs to understand what makes a ‘millennial’ tick,” advises one post.

Another encourages businesses to woo millennials by appealing to their “freedom loving attitudes.”

If you’re interested in hearing more of the cafe’s sage business advice, Shiru even published a short ebook this spring titled Recruiting: The Gen-Z Perspective. Among other New Age-y business strategies, the book encourages companies to develop an enticing corporate image as part of their recruiting process—because, as Shiru confidently asserts, “Gen Z is finely attuned to branding.”

Millennials, Shiru seemed to be saying, are “principled,” but those principles can be easily bent into fodder for corporate recruitment with the right “branding.” Young people believe that “hierarchy is something that should be deconstructed”—but they can also be lured into a cafe barred to the general public by the promise of a free cup of joe.

“Mr. Kakimoto, a millennial, understands the unique needs and opportunities facing students of his generation as well as employers seeking to hire the best and brightest,” reads yet another blog post on Shiru’s website. I, a millennial, would prefer that Mr. Kakimoto stick to snowboarding.

– Jack McCordick is a junior in Branford College. Yonatan Greenberg, a junior in Saybrook College, contributed reporting.

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The Program in Judaic Studies presents

"Jewish Emancipation Across Five Centuries" A PANEL DISCUSSION on the new book by

Prof. David Sorkin with

Marci Shore

Associate Professor of History in European cultural & intellectual history

Elli Stern

Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History; Judaic Studies, Religious Studies and History

Samuel Moyn

Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of History

October 2, 2019 5:00pm  36

Comparative Literature Library Bingham Hall,, 8th Floor THE NEW JOUR NAL 300 College Street This event was made possible by the William & Miriam Horowitz Fund