Better Together: Darryl Woods’ Journey from Darkness to Advocacy

When Marvin Cotton Jr. called me not long ago, he was direct. “You’ve got to talk to Darryl Woods,” he said. “He’s the man.” Marvin and I had done a couple of podcasts together by then. I knew when he pushed a name that hard, I needed to listen. So I tracked Darryl down, and we got on the line, and what came out of that conversation is one of the heaviest stories I’ve put on this show.

Darryl Woods went into a house at 18 years old to buy marijuana. A murder happened in a back bedroom during a separate cocaine deal he had no part in. He got charged as aiding and abetting. He got life without the possibility of parole. He served 29 years before Governor Snyder commuted his sentence on the last day of the legislative year in 2018, and he stepped out into freedom on 2/12/2019.

That is the bones of it. The story underneath is bigger.

Growing Up on the West Side of Detroit

Darryl was raised by his grandmother. His biological father died while his mother was pregnant with him, and his mother turned to heroin afterward to cope. She was addicted his whole young life. His grandmother had 11 children of her own, and grandkids cycling through the house, so as Darryl put it, sometimes you got lost in the shuffle.

The one thing his grandmother insisted on was church. Sundays, Bible study, services through the week. Darryl told me that mattered, because the neighborhood he was in did not offer many off-ramps. People were selling drugs. People were doing every kind of negative thing.

At 12, he ran away from his grandmother’s house and walked across Detroit to find his mother in the Cass Corridor, one of the roughest stretches of the city. She tried to send him back. He wouldn’t go. He stayed, and he got pulled in by the men running drugs down there, who used young Black kids as runners because juveniles caught lighter time than adults.

By 13, he had dropped out of school. By 14, he got shot in the arm standing on a corner over somebody else’s beef. Almost lost the arm. At 15, his son’s mother got pregnant. At 16, his son was born. At 16, his daughter’s mother got pregnant. At 17, his daughter was born.

Then came the house, and the back bedroom, and the gun going off, and the bars on the windows that kept everybody inside until somebody found a window without bars.

The Courtroom and What His Grandmother Yelled

When the jury came back with the guilty verdict, Darryl lost it. He told me plainly: “I cussed everybody out in the courtroom. I cussed the judge out. I cussed the prosecutor out. I cussed the jury out. I cussed myself out.”

In the middle of that, his grandmother stood up and yelled something across the room. He couldn’t hear what she said. But it calmed him down.

He didn’t find out what she’d said until later, when he ordered his trial transcripts in prison. Almost 700 pages. He read all the way through. At the back, in the spectator notes, was what his grandmother had called out.

“Don’t give up son. Prayer changes everything. God is the only judge.”

That was the line that turned the rest of his sentence. He told me it revolutionized his life. He started learning to read by reading the Bible and law books, as an eighth-grade dropout.

Gladiator School and the Fork in the Road

After quarantine, they shipped him to the Michigan Reformatory, which the men inside called gladiator school. People were getting stabbed, hit upside the head, robbed, pressed. But there was also what Darryl calls the old school: guys going to the law library, going to church, trying to educate themselves.

He describes it as a fork. He could go down the drug road or the right road. He went the right road, and he didn’t go quietly. He helped organize the NAACP chapter inside the prison and served as president. He told me they raised over $100,000 for charitable causes. They got college scholarships for young people. They got summer jobs for youth in their program.

They ran a youth intervention program. He laughed telling me about the name. They called it Scared Straight, even though, as he said, they learned pretty quick that young people aren’t really scared of anything. He served on the warden’s forum. He helped other men with their cases and helped get people out. He became an ordained minister and is a licensed elder in his church now.

He also stayed in his kids’ lives the entire time. He read with them on visits, prayed with them, called their teachers as they got older, helped them with homework. He said his kids never knew him as a criminal, because he never showed them that life. His son ended up at Michigan State University, paid for by academic scholarships Darryl helped him hunt down and essays Darryl helped him critique from inside prison. His son came out debt-free.

The Conviction Overturned, Then Snatched Back

In 2001, Judge George Crockett III, the same judge who’d presided over Darryl’s original trial (the judge Darryl had cussed out), granted him a hearing. That hearing ran from 2001 to 2003. Witnesses got on the stand. A witness recanted. The judge concluded Darryl had been wrongfully convicted on false perjured testimony and overturned both his conviction and his co-defendant’s.

Darryl told me it was a day of reckoning. His kids were ecstatic. His family thought he was coming home. He’d been in 13 years by then. His mother had died. He’d lost uncles. He thought soon had finally arrived.

The prosecutor appealed. The appeal got knocked down. Then it got reinstated. Then the prosecutor won.

It was snatched back.

He went to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals with an attorney named Robert Rosano out of Cincinnati, a man Darryl calls an angel, who would drive to the Michigan prison to visit him. The Sixth Circuit killed it on procedure. The United States Supreme Court wouldn’t hear it. He went before the governor three times for commutation. Denied. One governor looked like she was going to commute, and then something blew up in the media and she stopped all commutations.

Darryl told me he handled it the way he handled everything else inside. He kept praying. He kept serving. He said if he had to die in there, he was going to die empty, having fulfilled his purpose.

The Last Day of the Legislative Year

In 2018, his pastor Charles Ellis came to a revival in the prison with about 50 church members. After praying over Darryl, the pastor kissed him on the cheek and rejoiced. Darryl said it was a first, and he left that day with what he calls blessed assurance that the moment was coming.

Reverend Kenneth Flowers from Greater New Mount Moriah led the charge with Governor Snyder, meeting with him regularly and keeping Darryl’s name in the conversation. Reverend Kristin Adams from Hartford Memorial Baptist joined in. Tom Adams from Chance for Life helped put the commutation petition together. Robert Rosano drove the petition up for free, the same way he had taken the Supreme Court filing for free.

On July 11, 2018, Darryl was granted a public hearing. He was one of 26 people the governor commuted that year, and one of only six with life without parole, out of more than 6,000 petitions filed in the state.

The hearing room was packed. Fire marshals turned people away. Two busloads couldn’t get in. His son spoke. Darryl told me he saw a tear in the parole board member’s eye. He saw a tear in the attorney general’s eye.

Then he waited. All the way to the last day of the legislative year. He was working as a GED tutor by then, on top of his other jobs. The GED instructor asked him to go run a copy in the library. While he was feeding paper into the machine, the radio announced Governor Snyder had just commuted 26 sentences. Darryl told the librarian, “That’s me.” He went down to the officer’s station and had the officer pull up the Associated Press list on the computer. There were 26 names. Because his last name is Woods, he was last on the list.

Walking Out on 2/12/2019

He walked out of prison on February 12, 2019, into the arms of the son he had left when the boy was one year old. He chose his son to come inside and retrieve him. They wept in each other’s arms. His son wept like he was that one-year-old baby again.

The first three digits of his prison number were 212. February 12 is Lincoln’s birthday. Darryl noticed.

Since getting out, he went back to school. He took classes in sociology, criminal justice, and restorative justice at the University of Michigan. The governor appointed him to the State Appellate Defender office board, the same office that helped file his commutation. He drove home through Detroit and saw the Cass Corridor, the place his mother had lived when he ran away as a 12-year-old, now redeveloped into something he barely recognized. He saw other neighborhoods that looked like a bomb had hit them.

What I keep coming back to from this conversation is how early Darryl decided who he was going to be inside, and how he never stopped being that. He kept his kids out of the cycle. He helped other men get out. He learned to read off a Bible and a law book. He waited 16 years from the day a judge said he was wrongfully convicted to the day a governor let him walk. And he used every one of those years.