Happy birthday, Marcus?
It's hard to be happy when you're serving time because of a judge's mistake that no one is willing to correct.
THE PART OF the judicial system that worked for Marcus Perez: the stone-walled State Correctional Institution at Graterford. The part that didn't work for him: the courts, which put him there for life on a botched sentence.
Don't take my word for the botch. I have the word of 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Theodore McKee. Then a Common Pleas judge, McKee told me he made a mistake that Perez has spent more than 20 years in the maximum-security lockup trying to fix.
When Perez took a plea bargain for his part in a homicide he does not deny, McKee told him "life" doesn't mean "life" and, "You will not die in prison." McKee told him to expect to serve 17 1/2 to 35 years.
Perez was 19 at the time. Wednesday he will observe - "celebrate" is not the right word - his 44th birthday in his 6-by-13 cell.
There will be no party, no cake, he tells me in the visitors' room at Graterford.
A birthday "is like nothing in here, they don't care about that, just another day. If a friend knows it's your birthday, he might say 'happy birthday' to you."
How "happy" can you be? Graterford isn't a Pharrell Williams song.
In the visitors' room, men in faded maroon jumpsuits with "DOC" imprinted on the back talk softly with their women - girlfriends, wives, baby mommas, whatever. Some kiss and nuzzle, some caress. Almost all the visitors are women or children. They sit on rows of plain seats.
Perez expects his daughter Shannon, 26, to visit on the weekend with his granddaughter, Khylei, 4. They can't come on his birthday because Shannon drives a school bus and the little girl is in preschool.
I've written about Perez before, telling the bizarre story, hoping for relief.
In short, McKee says he was "dead wrong" in telling Perez he would be eligible for parole. He forgot that the law had recently changed and neither the prosecutor nor defense lawyer corrected him.
By the time the error was caught, the case was out of the hands of a guilt-stricken McKee.
Four years after sentencing, inexplicably and wrongly, the court transcript that recorded McKee's assurance to Perez was changed after a call to the court reporter from Assistant District Attorney Jerome Teresinski (the godfather of one of D.A. Seth Williams' daughters). That violated the rule that the trial judge must be notified first, and must approve the change. McKee wasn't notified. The improper change hurt Perez's case.
Perez has filed appeals, but no judge was willing to give him a new hearing to get the sentence he was promised. Judge McKee, who has a stellar reputation, has stated openly that he made a mistake, but his fellow jurists act like mastodons frozen in ice. "Justice" seems less important than nonsensical technicalities.
One explanation might be D.A. Williams' reflexive opposition to the appeals.
As a law-and-order guy, I never dreamed I would stick up for a murderer, even though I know that Perez - who has taken numerous courses to better himself - is not the stupid teenage hothead he once was.
I'm also a stickler for justice. It has to be correct, fair and clean. The judge has to be right and the D.A. can't mess with the transcript, which he did. Even judges have been rebuked for altering transcripts.
I don't care that Perez is in jail. He should be. He earned that.
I do care that because of McKee's mistake, he has no chance of parole. That wasn't the deal he agreed to. It is unjust.
That's why this birthday, like the 24 preceding birthdays, won't be happy for Perez.
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