On a 97-degree day in August 1982, a hot and lonely and drugged Cicero Falkland ignored his bedridden grandmother’s exhortations to stay home.
He needed money.
His little brother was hungry.
His father has been in prison
for 16 years, his mother for seven.
His job pushing a broom for
Safeway got Cicero nowhere near the money that he needed to feed and clothe the
family.
So Cicero Falkland departed the
dilapidated family residence at 4:45 PM, giving himself plenty of time to survey
an ample dinner crowd at a chicken shack a few blocks across I-75/Central
Expressway in Dallas, Texas. One dude,
approximately 46 years old, looked vulnerable.
He was above average height, skinny, hands full of sacks of chicken and
accompaniments. Cicero was heavier,
hands less burdened, carrying no sacks but wielding the great equalizer.
“Drop those sacks and give me
your wallet,” directed Cicero.
The man dropped the sacks but
panicked and stretched his hand out, found the barrel of Charles’s pistol, and
then felt the explosion In his chest. Whether
some tugging action on the part of the victim or Charles’s independently moving
fingers had caused the triggers to be pulled remains in dispute.
But having failed to
abide by the provisions of probation for a burglary charge, and with a host of
juvenile offenses on his record, Cicero was sent up in December 1982 for third
degree murder, probation for the burglary charge was revoked, and he was
incarcerated at a maximum security facility in West Texas, given by the
standards of draconian Texas penal standards the relatively light sentence of
Life with possibility of parole.
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Cicero was among the
first African American students to attend Thomas Jefferson Junior High School
in North Dallas, bused in from his all-Black neighborhood near downtown
Dallas. He dropped out after his grade 7
year.
In prison, Cicero found
GED courses ill-taught and intimidating.
He mostly eschewed the minimal formal education classes that were
offered but became an avid reader---
novels, political tracts, works of sociology. He had a few rough incidents within his first
six years of incarceration .
Since then he has been a
behaviorally model prisoner.
Nevertheless, he has been denied parole eight times, including recently,
in May 2021. Parole board members, of
eight possible reasons typically cited, give “nature of offense” as the
official reason for denial. But victim’s
rights weigh heavily in Texas, and for each of Cicero’s parole hearings, two and
sometimes three members of the victim’s family have argued emotionally and
emphatically against Cicero’s release.
Such objections are given heavy consideration and are very frequently
decisive.
………………………………………………………………………………………
I first met Cicero in
1998 when I was doing research on a school run by a friend of mine from the
Southern Methodist University (SMU) days in Dallas. She had been a tutor of Cicero during our
years at SMU, lost touch as she was starting her school, then reengaged when
she found out that he had been sentenced to prison. Cicero has had little family support and now
has none; my friend has been Cicero’s
main human contact on the outside all of these years. I also have kept in contact during the new
century and have recently adopted an attorney’s role in the case, endeavoring to
find the best possible strategy for overcoming the objections of the victim’s
family and for presenting the most vigorous case for Cicero’s successful
prospects upon release.
Cicero is well-read in certain
fields but his vocabulary is still a work in progress. His writing is error-laden and grammatically
challenged. His mathematic skills do not
go beyond addition and subtraction, and even those are still to be developed
fully. I have now for Cicero’s use worked
up a special adaptation of the mathematics chapter in my book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts
Education, which covers fifteen academic subjects to give citizens the
education that they never attained in public school institutions.
I also have sent Cicero
my English usage chapter and have assigned him essays of utmost topical
interest to him, including making his best case for release from prison.
I find myself in the familiar position of
providing the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education that Cicero never got--- as most of my students are not getting--- in the public schools.
For Cicero, who will either
gain some time to live freely or continue to endure an adulthood and then death
entirely within prison walls, the acquisition of knowledge and skill to work
and function successfully is a life or death matter.
But then that is true
for everyone, especially those most academically abused by the wretched
Minneapolis Public Schools and other systems for which MPS is a salient
example.
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