How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am (18 page)

I showed the video I had shot in the prison and made my case for clemency. Senator Bruno simply said, “I agree with you.”

He went to then New York’s Governor Pataki. Elaine Bartlett, Arlene Oberg, and Jan Warren were granted clemency that year,
and Leah Bundy received it the following year. Elaine had served sixteen years, and the other women had served several years.

Elaine’s family was shattered by the experience. Her youngest son took to the streets and was sent to prison. When Elaine’s
mother died, her oldest son had to leave college, where he had a basketball scholarship, to come home to look after what was
left of the family.

Elaine’s boyfriend, whom she later married, had warned her and went with her thinking he could somehow protect her. He, too,
was arrested, and he served twenty-one years before he was released. He had sold drugs as a teenager, so he got an even harsher
sentence. It’s hard to express the gratification I feel when I say I was able to get jobs for Elaine and Nathan Brooks when
they were released from prison.

Arlene Oberg, one of the sweetest women I ever met, died of a heart attack while still in her thirties.

The Rockefeller Drug Laws under which all these women received mandatory sentences have since been revised but are still unreasonably
harsh. They were put into effect to punish drug dealers. Instead, way too often they are used against addicts and desperate
people who make a delivery to pay for their addiction.

And it is still legal at this writing to put a police sting on a young woman on welfare with no record who has never even
delivered drugs. Shame!

It’s hard to top the unintended consequences of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, but we’ve done it with our felony murder rule,
which was intended to cover such examples as when two people go into a bank with guns and one kills someone, both are guilty
of murder. I can agree with that.

Brandon Hein was a teenager who didn’t kill anyone, but he’s serving the same sentence—life imprisonment without the possibility
of parole—as the Menendez brothers, who killed their parents; Gary Ridgeway, who killed forty-eight women in Washington state;
Sirhan Sirhan, who killed Robert Kennedy; and Charles Manson, although Charles Manson does get to come up for parole. Brandon
Hein can’t. Ever. So what did Brandon Hein do? He was drunk and got into a fight that involved six boys, one of whom stabbed
another, who bled to death. The boy who did the stabbing admitted he did it in an effort to get another boy off his younger
brother. The state did not claim that Brandon killed anyone, but under the felony murder rule as applied in this case in California,
Brandon was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. How can that be?

Under the felony murder rule, if a jury decides that Brandon and his friends went to a fort in the backyard of a house in
Agoura Hills, California, to steal marijuana and not just to smoke it or buy it as the boys claimed, Brandon could be convicted
of intended robbery, and that is what the jury decided in spite of the fact that most of the boys knew each other, no one
wore disguises, and nothing was taken! Several important factors help explain this gross miscarriage of justice. First, the
boy who died was the son of a policeman. Second, the trial took place after the O.J. Simpson acquittal and a hung jury in
the Menendez brothers’ case. The prosecution badly wanted a conviction. The most important prosecution witness in this case
was Mike McLoren, who was with the boy who died and was also stabbed by Jason Holland, who admitted all of this. The witness
has been a known drug user and dealer for many years who had lied to the authorities on several occasions before his testimony.
Legal scholars have said the sentence for Brandon Hein, who had no prior record, is one of the most outrageous applications
of the felony murder rule they have ever seen. If you want to talk about human rights violations, you need look no further
than the Centinela State Prison in Imperial, California, where Brandon Hein is in his thirteenth year of incarceration. Brandon
began his sentence when he was eighteen. He is now thirty-one. A life sentence with no chance for parole for a teenager who
did nothing more than get drunk and get into a fight!

An even more egregious example of the felony murder rule is the story of a boy in Florida who in 2004 lent his car to his
roommate, as he had done many times before, and went to sleep. The roommate and others went out and committed a burglary and
a murder.
The boy who was home asleep at the time was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole!
The prosecutor said, “No car, no murder.” He might have just as well said, “No car dealer, no car, no murder.” The boy who
lent his car who was asleep in his bed at the time of the crime had no prior record. The prosecution implied that statements
the boy gave recalling what he knew when he was drunk the night before implied he was aware his roommate was borrowing his
car to commit a crime.

I would feel a lot better about my country if we got rid of the felony murder rule. I don’t know of any country in Europe,
including England, that hasn’t gotten rid of it, as have India and Canada, because it’s unjust! A few of our states have gotten
rid of it but not California or Florida.

Who’s the criminal here? The boy who was asleep in his bed at the time of the crime, or the state that sentenced him to life
in prison with no chance of parole? The felony murder rule disgraces America. I can think of many things my country does that
disgrace us, and the felony murder rule is right up there.

I hope everyone who reads this tells
everyone
they know about the unintended consequences of the felony murder rule. If a lot of us start talking in our own ways and making
phone calls, sending letters, etc., we can make America a better place.

As far as all those politicians who present themselves as tough on crime are concerned, I believe
I’m
tougher on crime than they are. I would make the case as hard as I could to
never
have people who’ve been arrested several times, sometimes with violence involved, walking the streets. I would
never
have clearly criminally insane people walking our streets but have them in institutions where they at least have a chance
to be treated. This is not a job that our corrections officers should be dealing with. They should not have feces thrown at
them. My position would always be tougher and fairer. Each case must be looked at individually. One size never fits all. That’s
why I believe
mandatory sentencing is criminal, and mandatory laws that let people out of prison when common sense says they shouldn’t be
let out should be eliminated.

Oh, and by the way, we’ve never been able to pass an antilynching law in America. The best we’ve been able to do is have a
“nonbinding resolution.”

You can’t make this up!

I
remember telling one of my producers, John Gabriel, the news that my CNBC show had been canceled and replaced by a rerun
of
Hardball with Chris Matthews
in June 1998. He was stunned as he stared at me, making sure I wasn’t joking, and never took his eyes off me as he reached
behind him to feel for the sofa he sank into.

I don’t remember any explanation. I told the staff, and everyone was in a state of shock. I immediately took my things and
left the building. Later, someone from NBC told me, “You didn’t have to leave right away,” but, of course, I felt like… well…

It was shocking, because as was later reported we had been the highest-rated show on CNBC at ten p.m., eleven p.m., and one
a.m., often beating CNN. Our program was also the only CNBC talk show to receive a nomination every year for a Cable Ace Award
for Best Talk Show.

A couple of weeks later,
New York Newsday
’s columnist Marvin Kitman wrote about the incident, and even more than ten years later, his kind words have stuck with me:

“Charles Grodin, my favorite late night talk show since it debuted January 9, 1995, was abruptly taken from us two weeks ago.
After 624 programs the show was sacked by ‘Mutual Agreement’ or whatever CNBC wants to call what happened the night of June
5th.…

The actor/director/author went where no talk show has gone lately. Not only could he make you laugh, but he could make you
think. It was an original concept to give an open mike to somebody who could not only speak his mind, but had a mind he could
call his own.

His monologues were fascinating because they were so rare.… He talked about injustice, welfare, the homeless, the poor. He
was using TV to discuss issues. Using it as an educational tool… To be fair, as Grodin himself said, CNBC was the only place
that allowed him to come on and talk about some of these things, and then ‘they only took me off for economic reasons.’

He was one of the things that was good about TV, a genuine original, the closest thing we had to an Oscar Levant.”

Marvin thought the reason for my cancellation was an interview I did with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the previous November about
his book
The Riverkeepers
, which referenced CNBC’s parent company, General Electric, polluting the Hudson River. “It was the longest attack on a General
Electric–owned network on GE for polluting the Hudson River,” Kitman wrote. “Not only had GE dumped PCBs, Kennedy explained,
but it was now doing everything in its power not to clean it up. Why? The cost. ‘If it was $20,000,’ Kennedy said, ‘it would
have been done 20 years ago. Now they estimate a billion.’ But that was nothing like Kennedy’s claim that ‘Every woman between
Oswego and Albany had elevated levels of PCBs in her milk because of GE.’ I’m sure that must have thrilled them up there in
Fairfield, Conn.”

After the cancellation of my show, there was such an immediate, overwhelming outpouring of protests from the viewers that
within about a week they called and asked me to come back to host a Friday night show at seven p.m. on MSNBC. Within a year
and a half that came to an end as well. By that time I was ready to go, because five years of hosting a show, even if the
last year and a half it was once a week, felt like enough.

I should have seen the writing on the wall, because before we were canceled we were moved from ten p.m. to eleven p.m. and
replaced by, of all things, reruns of Conan O’Brien, which followed
Rivera Live
, a programming concept that boggled a lot of minds. It was definitely an effort to ease me out. I no longer believe what
I said at the time, that it was done for “economic reasons.”

One executive at CNBC, Bruno Cohen, whom I liked, told me a sponsor had asked, “Is he going to keep doing those monologues?”
Bruno told him, “That’s the best part of the broadcast,” so I probably offended more people than I can imagine.

Since soon after I left MSNBC I was hired to be a commentator on
60 Minutes II
, I never thought much about what Marvin Kitman had said. But in recent years I’ve run into two of my former friends from
GE/NBC/CNBC at events. One looks at me like I stabbed him in the back. The other looks at me like he was on my side. I’ve
since offered both these people to raise money for one of their charities, but my call wasn’t returned, confirming in my mind
that what Marvin said in fact was true.

Marvin Kitman summed up his column with the following:

“Chuck, you did a super job for the last few years. You asked the basic question in your commentaries and interviews: What
is going on here? You did it on national TV. It’s a credit to GE that it let you do it and a discredit to stop you in mid-sentence,
metaphorically. This is a crazy time in history. We need people to sort it out. Some of us may not have liked your approach,
but you were doing what TV public affairs should be doing, explaining the insanity of these times to us.”

I now agree with Marvin Kitman that the corporation saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, appearance as not in their interest, so
they tried to stop free speech, but of course free speech is more important than any corporation, and it’s not as though Mr.
Kennedy’s appearance had any impact whatsoever on the strength of GE. Free speech is one of the things that distinguishes
America from so many countries, and any corporation that tries to stop it shames itself.

R
ight around this time, when my son was ten years old, I became engaged in one of the most dramatic battles I’ve ever experienced.
My boy tried out for and became a player on the fifth-grade travel basketball team.

For those of you who may not know, schools generally have travel teams and intramural teams. You have to try out to be on
a travel team. Intramural teams are for any of the kids who want to play. On travel teams the goal is to win. On intramural,
while everyone would like to win, there’s an understanding that all the kids get equal playing time.

Somehow I ended up on a kind of travel basketball oversight committee. While my experience on the Fifth Avenue co-op board
in New York City made quite an impression on me, nothing had prepared me for the travel oversight committee. This hit harder
because it was about kids.

It all started innocuously enough. The fifth-grade travel team was coached by a very nice man who was the father of one of
the players. Even though we were having a big winning season, as time went on I and a number of others began to see that the
best players were seldom on the floor together. The coach wanted to win but also seemed to have the intramural point of view,
which meant giving more time to the players who didn’t start. One could call this a humanistic point of view.

He was a great guy and all the boys liked him. Still, the oversight committee felt we should follow the established procedure
when the fifth-grade team moved to sixth grade. We changed coaches and chose someone who not only had coached before and won
but also wanted the best players on the floor as long as possible.

This led to an extremely successful season in which we even won a tournament, but it also led to a different problem. Our
sixth-grade coach, also a very nice man, wanted to win so much that the players who didn’t start got as little playing time
as possible.