If you’ve read any of this story before now, you’ve probably delved into your own head trying to figure out, at least on the surface, how the law applies to this case. How’d Craig get to be out on bond before sentencing? How’d he only end up with an 18-year sentence? Why was he convicted of second-degree murder instead of first degree? Once he was in prison, how’d he get moved down to lower yards so quickly? Did he ever have an appeal? If so, what didn’t hold up?

And probably so many more questions because anyone who has lived in America for any length of time in the past nearly 30 years and owned a TV is likely to have a Law & Order moment at one point or another. Admit it. You’ve seen part of this case on the show how many times? You know how the system works and why things fell the way they did in his case, right?

Right?

No so fast.

Some of these questions are valid. But the responses, the way the judicial system works in the real world, instead of the one we think of that ends the opening credits with an iconic sound we all know – dun-dun – aren’t always so clear cut. Sometimes, it takes a little peeling back of the layers to see how these legal wranglings really work, and in certain cases, like our boy Craig’s, some angles aren’t revealed for years.

When the murder first happened, the police officers who interrogated Craig probably couldn’t believe their luck. They’d been tipped off about a missing man, found the body in the desert, and, within a short amount of time that same day, brought a suspect into custody. Most of the time, I’m assuming, they expect that’s where the work really begins. With Craig though, it didn’t. To their likely surprise, it was pretty easy. Why? He couldn’t shut up.

From the time he was initially arrested, Craig never said it wasn’t him. Never said he wasn’t guilty. Never said he shouldn’t be in jail. While it’s good on a human level that he owed up to essentially just snapping one day after prolonged antagonism and letting this happen, what it’s probably not good for is as a relationship starter with your lawyer.

“Oh, hey, by the way, yeah, I told them everything and was pretty honest about it, so they know what happened that day. Can you fix that so I don’t go to jail forever? That’d be great.”

That actually was not the conversation Craig had once he obtained legal representation, although, it may have been similar to the way it went in Craig’s head. The response to whatever he did say was pretty straight forward: No. You’re going to jail. Get used to that fact.

That was good for Craig. He knew right where he stood from the moment the law firm came on the case. Clark Derrick was the main lawyer involved in the day-to-day wranglings, although if the case went to trial, Michael Kimerer would have been the lead attorney. In the end, there was nearly no chance Kimerer would see the inside of a court room with Craig. What the firm would do though is set him up for the best possible outcome the situation would allow.

“The very first time I spoke to a lawyer, he looked square in the eye to me and the first thing he said is that it’s not about what’s right and what’s wrong, but about who wins and who loses. The second thing he said is: ‘This isn’t about if you’re going to prison. Because of how things work, we are just working on how long. That’s what this is about. Your case is not about if, but for how long? Get that into your head. It’s going to be no walking away from this. You’re going to prison, and we’re just working on how long.’”

As Craig recently confided, “That’s a pretty square kick in the nuts, but fairly obvious from what I knew.”

That straight-forward approach was just how Craig worked, and it was what he hoped for in a lawyer. As luck would have it, the gesture to hire this firm turned into a blessing in several ways. And all of that came about through the hard work of Craig’s family, but only after he had informed them of what happened.

“After I committed the crime and got arrested, I’m in county lockup. I have to make a collect call home to mom. There’s a conversation you never want to have. Literally, mom dropped the phone and dad came over and picked up the phone and finished the conversation.”

This is the point where his brother, Kirk, became an integral figure in setting much of the legal team in place that would become so important down the road. Kirk was a pilot and took time off to go to Arizona and do all the legwork necessary to give Craig a chance at the best representation possible. As Craig told the story, you could hear the awe a younger brother reserves for his elder sibling, especially one of the same gender. Boys may not get along when they’re younger but there’s always something special about the bond they hold with each other.

Kirk’s attention to detail and Type A personality, as Craig put it, helped the family explore every possibility and situation at hand. Part of that included researching the legal profession for the ones who may fit the bill to help in a murder case that clearly wasn’t going to be a fight for innocence. That’d require lawyers who knew their way around procedures and the legal system, including the backroom dealings and negotiations that may need to be had. You know the ones who are around the courthouse enough to be able to work with public prosecutors, essentially, if not explicitly, saying they’d give a couple years on this guy if he’d take a couple years off on this one. Through some investigative work of his own with friends inside legal networks, Kirk narrowed it down to two candidates, the top two law offices that could handle this case. It all came down to who was more connected, who had the little wink-and-nod approach with enough people who owed them favors and could make things happen. At that point, Craig’s parents, Harlan and Karen, drove up to Minneapolis to meet the head of the law firm to try to induce him into taking the case.  He was there for a conference, even though the firm’s offices were located in Phoenix.

It worked.

Once the legal team was in place, they cut to the chase. Prison time was the only path they were following, although they did go through all the angles, quickly, before focusing their efforts. One requirement early on, so that Craig could be out on bond, was that he saw a psychologist. His legal team was fine with that as it also needed him to see a doctor to assess his mental state to help determine any possible offsets a defense could make.

“I did all the testing. I had to go through the Minneapolis Multiple Personality Inventory, shit like 6 hours of a written test. Stupid questions like, ‘If you see a snake on a sidewalk, will you step over it, walk in the street, or walk in the grass?’ I still don’t know what it tells about your personality but I guess it does.”

It must have told the attorney’s doctor something. His name was Michael Bayless, although he went by Brad, his middle name. After the testing, Craig showed up for an appointment and Brad was sitting at his desk with his feet up. That’s a bit odd for a professional, Craig remembers thinking, but he walked in anyway. Immediately he could tell the psychologist was in an ornery mood as he said to sit down and shut up. He kicked his feet off, spun around on his elbow on the desk and leaned into Craig sitting in the nearby chair, all interrogation style.

“Do you realize you are so sane that with the best training and practice we could possibly get, there is no way on God’s green Earth you can possibly convince a jury that you’re crazy?” he said.

It took Craig a moment to process before replying.

“On one hand, thanks. On the other, I know it limits the defense strategy, so, sorry? But it’s kind of nice to know I’m not crazy.”

From that, he was told to drop the act and they proceeded on with the conversation to extrapolate out all the avenues available before trial.

“We explored if we can blame bad parenting, if I’m crazy, just fucked up, this, that and everything else. But he said, ‘God, you are too normal. You don’t have enough flaws to get out of this.’ Which once again, that kind of falls in, ‘Well, thanks, and I’m sorry I’m not a more fucked up human being to be able to help with my defense.’”

There just wasn’t any way of getting out of it. The lawyer was right: it wasn’t about if, but how long.

From our Law & Order binge watching, we should know that taking a plea bargain, the defendant is essentially signing a contract. It’s written into the contract that he waives his right to object to the contract, and while he can appeal, it’s not likely to bring much weight. Having that contract helped Craig emotionally settle with the outcome. Here was a bill that was due. He knows his debt – 18 years. Now he just had to pay it.

So the decision was made to plead out. Reviewing the U.S. Courts website shows us that Law & Order isn’t reality that often at all. In fact, it says right there under the “Guilty Pleas” section at the bottom of the page on how to report on criminal cases, that:

Nearly 90 percent of federal criminal cases are resolved by a guilty plea. Many of these cases involve a plea agreement: The defendant pleads guilty and forgoes a trial in exchange for the prosecutor’s dropping some charges and/or recommending a more lenient sentence. During the plea bargaining process, prosecutors often require defendants to waive the right to appeal a conviction.

It seems that it’s cheaper and more efficient when the prosecutors can say, we have you on this, this, and this. This was a state crime, but similar statistics apply. If the court can get a criminal off the street for a reasonable amount of time, it’ll do it and move on to the next one. “It’s not the way it was originally designed but it’s the way it works. They talk of justice, but justice goes right out the window the first day in many cases.”

In Craig’s case, the plea bargain was presented and he considered it. It was 15 to 22 years and the judge would decide how many years he would actually get. How’d they come up with this? Defendants are always charged with the worst possible crime, whether it can fully be proven or not. They start high. It’s just negotiating. So the prosecution charged him with first-degree murder which would carry a 25-to-life sentence, and then the bargain was to drop it to second degree, which ranged less than 25. He wasn’t comfortable with that, especially going into sentencing not knowing what he’d get because, depending on the day and temperament of the judge, it could swing in his benefit or against him. Instead, his logical mind said he’d rather know what he was getting straight out and take it out of the judge’s hand. If the prosecution could do that, then he’d sign it. They came back at 18 years.

Once that happened, other things started falling in place. The judge, as Craig has remarked before, was a “decent guy” as he let him stay out on bond a month longer even though when a plea bargain is signed, normally the defendant goes immediately back into custody. Craig signed the contract, there was no getting out of it now, but the judge deferred custody until the day of the sentencing so that Craig could get his affairs in order.

“It gave me a month on the street to get my head around it. There were some long nights sitting up thinking, ‘What the fuck?’”

That judge also did him one more favor, although Craig had no idea at the time. Over the years, he’d occasionally review his legal paperwork and had repeatedly seen the term Non-Dangerous, Non-Repetitive, yet he didn’t know what bearing that had on his case. The Arizona Department of Corrections, however, did. The DOC sent the judge a formal communication for clarification because the plea bargain had included Craig’s crime as ND/NR, and they were saying that couldn’t be right for a murder plea.

“The judge said, ‘This is what I said and this is what I meant.’ Only what the judge says during sentencing applies. Generally, he reads through the plea bargain, cites the important parts, and that gets entered in the record legally. Later on, it was one of the things I found out my lawyers, knowing the system, did in my favor. ND/NR allowed me a better classification in the prison system, allowed me to get better yards, fewer restrictions, and more opportunity. In addition, when I was released, it put me into a different class of the parole system, less restrictive and with more opportunity.

“My lawyer did a really good job. He knew all this was part of their haggling, the give and take, bartering on the plea bargain. They demanded the crime be classified as non-dangerous, non-repetitive. At the beginning it doesn’t seem to matter, but at the end it matters a lot.”

Allowing for those agreements, his lawyers set him up for the best possible scenario of serving his time. Now it was up to him to get through. What it doesn’t do is set a prisoner up for success when they’re done with their time. What happens when an inmate completes his term? In Craig’s case, it was up to him. He needed to prepare himself for the outside world to come rushing back into his life.

And it was really like a tidal wave with everyday normal things crashing through Craig’s senses. Even little things like a waitress at dinner his first night out coming up to ask if he wanted more water. Her reaching over his shoulder made him look like a nervous mess because, for the past 18 years, if someone was reaching over his shoulder at the chow table, he felt like he was about to be in the middle of a skirmish where someone was going to get crushed. He didn’t want to have his back toward that — or really anywhere that didn’t have a wall behind him.

That really did happen at dinner on his first night of release. We saw it firsthand. Dwin, Aaron, Rush, Carlson, Allan and I, we all went out to Arizona to join his family and get him out on his release day. If you haven’t read it yet, I strongly suggest reading the original blog I posted about it when it happened. One of the things I took away from that time together while we got our friend out of prison was how he wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He had to do things on his own terms, make his own reconciliation that this part of his life was past. Yet, it wasn’t something he’d do all at once.

Craig was unaccustomed to social media and cell phones when he was released in 2013. He knew what they were based on conversations with family and inmates, but had no practical experience with them. He didn’t understand their immediacy. In fact, he didn’t understand immediacy at all. The way the prison system works, nothing is done quickly … at least nothing good. Getting mail takes not just days, but weeks. Even being able to set up a phone call wasn’t as easy as you’d think. So going from a days-long response time to seconds was going to take an adjustment period. He likened it to going from crawling to driving on the freeway in one step.

Once we got him out, Craig started to get settled and make that leap back into society, start the different phases of acclimation. First, the logistics of going from no bank account, no phone, no residence, no electric bill to prove residence, essentially being a non-person as far as paperwork is concerned. It was about three day’s worth of paperwork to get him up and running. One bright spot was the planning they’d made early on before he went in. He’d sold his car back then and his father, Harlan, had seen to putting away all of the money Craig scrapped together into a mutual fund. It grew over time, 18 years to be exact, and it helped him make a new start. Amazingly, he also had a credit card that his parents kept open for him. Because they’d paid the recurring monthly charge of $3.95 for a $10,000 accidental death and dismemberment policy Craig had gotten when he opened the card, it meant he also had an established credit score. He had about a 750 score after 18 years in prison because he had a 27-year-old credit card account that never had a late payment.

Essentially, the start to his new lease on life was better than most anyone could have hoped. He quickly bought a vehicle and trailer to live in, something not too big as he was still adjusting from living within such small and strict confines for so long. He got a job as a motorcycle mechanic so he could have money. All the little things he had planned for in his head he was starting to experience.

While that reconnection to the outside world was quickly evolving, there was still a need for some peace and solitude. Craig has never shied away from being alone, and it’s obvious from many of his mannerisms and attitude that he appreciates his independence from people and the world. That was a perfect situation for the three years that he had to remain in the state of Arizona as a parolee as it allowed him, by himself, to start checking off items on his bucket list.

Much of his general bucket list was added to through reading books and magazines and watching TV shows. He’d see something in National Geographic, maybe a story about Tombstone and the O.K. Corral, or a civil war battle ground, and add it to the list. He liked places that may look very much period-specific, like they did when they were still historically relevant. The list took the form of a folder, 10-12 pages long with about 22 entries per page. Many are riding related, especially now that he’s back working in the profession he has loved for decades, while others are outdoors related, with a few museums and points of interest sprinkled in.

Other items that ended up on the list:

• Joining the Iron Butt Association by doing a Saddlesore 1,000, that is going 1,000 miles on his motorcycle in 24 hours. He made the roundtrip trek to Santa Fe, N.M., on Sept. 15, 2014.
• Viewing the spiral staircases at Lorreto Chapel, also in Santa Fe, and thus the impetus for a two-for-one ride.
• Another double-dip included hitting Promontory Point in Utah, where the Transcontinental railroad joined the Pacific lines and the Midwestern lines, and the Bonneville Salt Flats. It could have been another Saddlesore 1,000 but he didn’t want to file the paperwork again.

As he languished for months and years at a time inside the same facilities, Craig would think about all these trips he’d do when he got out. The ones that were the easiest though were the ones right in front of him every day. From camp, he’d see a mountain peak across the valley and wonder what a weekend trip would be like. How much water and food would he need? What gear should he take? How far can he hike in one day? He’d plan the whole thing in his head, for years. And now he had his chance to do it in person, on his own timeframe without anyone watching.

“To have closure, I needed to actually go do it, to see if my plan would work.”

Now that he was free again, he could do it any time he wanted. So, he did.