Redemption.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about redemption. What does it mean to be redeemed? Who decides when you’ve redeemed yourself? Can some people never be redeemed?

I will tell you now, I’m not sure that I have any answers. So I’m going to put a jump here: if you don’t want to read my meandering, you’re welcome to skip over it and go read “TMQ Watch” or “Gratuitous Gun Porn” or even the flaming hyenas entries. I won’t hold it against you.

Devin Faraci writes about movies. He used to edit the Alamo Drafthouse’s “Birth.Movies.Death” magazine.

Last October, he resigned as editor after a woman (also a film critic) accused him of groping her. Mr. Faraci stated at the time that he didn’t remember the incident, but apologized anyway. According to a statement from Tim League (Alamo Drafthouse owner) Mr. Faraci admitted he had a substance abuse issue and went into recovery.

Sometime over the past year, Mr. League (according to the same statement linked above) rehired Mr. Faraci. Mr. Faraci did not “hold any leadership position at Alamo Drafthouse or Fantastic Fest” and was not “involved with Birth.Movies.Death. in any capacity”. Mr. League puts this as giving Mr. Faraci a chance to bring in some income while working on his recovery.

Except that Mr. League and the Drafthouse were, perhaps, a little less open about this than they could have been. On Tuesday, folks noticed that he had his name on some copy written to promote the upcoming “Fantastic Fest”. I have seen it described as an “open secret” that Mr. Faraci was writing for the Drafthouse again: it certainly wasn’t one I was aware of, but it also wouldn’t be. (I read increasingly little of what the Drafthouse puts out, and I’m not closely tied to the Austin movie community.)

On Wednesday, Mr. Faraci resigned, again.

Did the Internet outrage machine basically hound a man who sincerely admitted his wrongs and was trying to do better out of a job? Or was it too soon for him to be seeking redemption? Should he have been out of the picture for a while longer, working on his personal stuff?

And who should decide if Mr. Faraci has sufficiently redeemed himself? Should the woman he wronged have a say in that decision? I think it’s obvious that her voice is the one that matters.

I don’t know. Is it more than just Mr. Faraci being offered a shot at redemption? Is it the whole set of circumstances surrounding it? If the Drafthouse had been open earlier that they had rehired him, in a non-supervisory non-leadership position, to give him a chance to work on his (stuff), and that they were watching him closely, would the reaction have been the same?

If you were a woman who was groped by a powerful film critic, and he lost his job over it, what would redemption look like to you? What would you find acceptable atonement? Do you think it would even be possible to redeem yourself for that?

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Michelle Jones killed her four year old son.

Let’s be clear about that. She killed her child. I don’t want to minimize that.

Jones got pregnant at 14 after what she called non-consensual sex with a high-school senior. Her mother responded by beating her in the stomach with a board, according to the prosecutor who later handled her case, and she was placed in a series of group homes and foster families.
In a personal statement accompanying her Harvard application, Jones said she had a psychological breakdown after years of abandonment and domestic violence, and inflicted similar treatment on her own son, Brandon Sims.
The boy died in 1992 in circumstances that remain unclear; the body was never found.

She admitted this two years later, “during a stay at a mental-health crisis center”. “At her trial, a former friend testified that Jones confessed to having beaten the boy and then leaving him alone for days in their apartment, eventually returning to find him dead in his bedroom.”

She was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

While she was in prison, she worked in the library. She became a paralegal, and managed to get a bachelor’s degree. She also audited graduate courses.

Her blossoming as a historian began in 2012, when Kelsey Kauffman, a former professor who volunteered at the prison, encouraged inmates to research the origins of their involuntary home, which opened in 1873 as the first adult female correctional facility in the United States. Soon, Jones was placing library requests for reference books and, when they arrived months later, scouring the footnotes for what to order next.
After meticulously logging demographic data from century-old registries from the Indiana Women’s Prison, Jones made a discovery: There were no prostitutes on the rolls. “Where,” she asked, “were all the ladies?” meaning so-called ladies of the night.

Ms. Jones and other eventually figured out that a “Catholic laundry house” in Indianapolis was actually where the prostitutes (and other women convicted of sex offenses) ended up. “Then they found more than 30 similar institutions around the country, akin to the Magdalene Laundries recently unearthed in Ireland.”

Under Kauffman’s tutelage, they wrote up their findings, published them in an Indiana academic journal, and won the state historical society award. Jones also presented the paper remotely at multiple academic conferences, and, at others, shared different work about the abuse of early inmates at Indiana Women’s Prison by its Quaker founders.

Her sentence was reduced to 20 years, “based on her good behavior and educational attainment”. She was released in August, a few months ahead of schedule, so she could start a Ph.D program. While she was still in prison, she applied to eight programs. She was accepted into the history program at Harvard, and also named as a “top alternate” in Harvard’s American Studies program. But…

…two American studies professors flagged Jones’s file for the admissions dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In a memo to university administrators, these professors said the admissions dean had told them Jones’s selection would be reviewed by the president and provost, and questioned whether she had minimized her crime “to the point of misrepresentation.”

You can guess what happened:

While top Harvard officials typically rubber-stamp departmental admissions decisions, in this case the university’s leadership — including the president, provost, and deans of the graduate school — reversed one, according to the emails and interviews, out of concern that her background would cause a backlash among rejected applicants, conservative news outlets or parents of students.

I get it. Even Harvard 2017 would have a problem saying to people, “Yes, one of our graduate students is a convicted child killer.” (Or even an undergrad, though that was over 20 years ago.)

But I remember something our old friend Erle Stanley Gardner wrote in The Court of Last Resort. I’m summarizing pretty heavily here, but the essence of his point was: we have parole and probation for a reason. And that reason is to give people who have made mistakes in their life a second chance. If we let people out on parole, and then don’t employ them – don’t give them jobs, treat them like social outcasts – aren’t we giving them motivation to make the same mistakes again?

But are there some crimes, like killing a four-year-old child, that just can’t be redeemed? Does your mental state at the time matter?

“Look, as a mother, I thought it was just an awful crime,” said [Diane] Marger Moore [the prosecuting attorney – DB], now a lawyer at a large firm in Los Angeles. “But what Harvard did is highly inappropriate: I’m the prosecutor, not them. Michelle Jones served her time, and she served a long time, exactly what she deserved. A sentence is a sentence.”

Who gets to make the decision this time about her redemption?

Brandon’s father and grandmother could not be reached for comment.

In her statement to Harvard, Jones wrote of Brandon: “I have made a commitment to myself and him that with the time I have left, I will live a redeemed life, one of service and value to others.”

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