The Tucker redemption
Dennis Young was a cog in the Corrections machine until he heard the story of lifer James Weaver Jr. Even with the tenacious former parole board member pushing for his release, will Weaver ever be free? BY DAVID KOON
R
ight now, on some level, Dennis Young is probably thinking about James Weaver Jr. That’s the kind of guy Young is. You can tell it just by looking at him, the wheels behind his eyes always turning over something like a stone being polished, his demeanor and bearing that of a minorleague baseball coach who once touched The Bigs, perfectly accented by an Ark-LaTex twang. The thing his mind has been tumbling for over a year now is how to keep James Weaver from dying in prison. The first thing you need to know about Young is that he’s no easy touch. As a Democratic state representative from Texarkana from 1993 to 1999, he served as the co-chair of the Joint Penal Committee and co-sponsored the state’s “Three Strikes” law, which sent loads of habitual criminals to prison for long stretches on relatively minor crimes. These days, he unapologetically calls Three Strikes “probably one of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed in Arkansas,” saying it has contributed to the state’s prison overcrowding crisis — something that’s also often on his mind. Maybe that’s what led him to seek a seat on the Arkansas Parole Board: some sense of culpability. If true, though, you’ll probably never get him to admit it. He is also that type of guy. Plays the heart close to the vest. It’s odd then, to hear Young use a fairly squishy word like “fate” to describe what brought him to the Arkansas Department of Correction’s Tucker Maximum Security Unit last June, where he met James Weaver Jr. Convicted of capital murder as an accomplice to a man who bludgeoned their roommate to death in December 1989, Weaver had been in a prison for over 24 years by then. With a sentence of life without parole, he was probably going to die there. The more Young dug into Weaver’s case, however, plowing through dusty
files that hadn’t been cracked since the original trial, the more Young became convinced that Weaver should have long since been allowed to rejoin the world as a free man. The only hope for James Weaver at this point is clemency. His requests to Govs. Mike Huckabee and Mike Beebe for commutation have been unsuccessful, and the clock is ticking on his pending request to Gov. Asa Hutchinson. Hutchinson must decide on Weaver’s petition by July 5, and if Hutchinson turns him down, Weaver will have to wait at least eight years until he can try again. By then, the man who went to prison at 19 will be north of 50 years old.
‘Fate took me there’
Recently retired as an insurance agent, Young was looking for something to occupy his time and energy in late March 2014 when he saw that Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway) had objected to the appointment of Rapert’s former election opponent Linda Tyler to the Parole Board, leading Gov. Mike Beebe to withdraw the appointment. Beebe had wanted Tyler to fill out the term of retiring Parole Board member Joe Peacock, which ran until Jan. 14, 2015, and was suddenly in need of a replacement. “When I saw that in the paper,” Young said, “I picked up the phone, called the governor’s office, and said I was recently retired, and I was a former legislator. I
thought, ‘I know everything about the criminal justice system. I can hit the ground running.’ So on April 1, I got a phone call, and they said, ‘We’d like you to come up to fill this term.’ ” As luck would have it, one of Dennis Young’s favorite movies turns out to be “The Shawshank Redemption,” and one of his favorite scenes in that favorite film is where Morgan Freeman’s character Red, grown old in prison and out of give-a-damn, appears before the dapper parole board, where he finally tells the truth about his remorse, inadvertently talking the board into granting him the freedom that all the bowing and scraping he’d done before never could win him. As Dennis Young will tell you, though, real parole hearings don’t have much in common with Hollywood fantasy. In Arkansas, the way it generally works is one board member, one prison, several file boxes full of old horrors, and the slow parade of inmates. Later, that single board member passes along an up or down parole or clemency recommendation on each inmate to the full parole board (the single-member system is something Young has argued for changing, given how drastically one person’s opinion can impact an inmate’s chances for release). Young calls the 10 months he spent on the parole board one of the most meaningful times of his life. Young wasn’t even supposed to be at Tucker Max the day he interviewed James Weaver. But on June 5, 2014, board member Jimmy Wallace was out, so Tucker Max fell to Young. “Fate took me there,” he said. “It was the only time I went there when I was on the board.” Young had been there awhile that day, asking questions of dangerous men, consulting files and filling out a parole hearing form he had devised himself, when Weaver’s hearing came up. Even though Weaver was in for life without parole, lifers are allowed a hearing every eight years to make their case for clemency from the governor. Young said the first thing he noticed about Weaver was that he had over a
Like a lot of young men out on their own without many prospects, the three led a shabby, hand-tomouth existence. Hubbard and Weaver threw newspapers in the early morning to bring in a little household income.
dozen supporters in the room. “This kid — and I call him a kid, but hell, he’s 44 years old now — this young man comes in, cleancut, no tattoos,” Young said. “He had probably about 20 supporters there, including a minister and a number of other people. It just wasn’t your usual parole hearing.”
ADC No. 093762
When Weaver became Arkansas Department of Correction Inmate No. 093762 he was a 19-year-old. In December 1989, Weaver was living with two roommates, Alan Hubbard and John Rogers, in a house at 6212 Young Road in Southwest Little Rock. Weaver had met and moved in with Hubbard a few months earlier, living first in a trailer on Kanis Road with another roommate before moving into the house with Rogers and Hubbard, who had known each other since the third grade. Hubbard, then 20, was already a felon, convicted in his native Jefferson County in April 1988 of two counts of felony theft of property and two counts of breaking and entering. He’d been sentenced to three year’s probation. Like a lot of young men out on their own without many prospects, the three led a shabby, hand-to-mouth existence. Hubbard and Weaver threw newspapers in the early morning to bring in a little household income. They were taking a lot of drugs, Weaver and Hubbard later said: pot, alcohol and speed, spending most nights cruising Geyer Springs Road in Hubbard’s 1986 Dodge Colt. Weaver had no car and had to rely on Hubbard for transportation. Their dire financial straits were compounded by the fact that Rogers was, by all available accounts, habitually late on paying his third of the rent. While Weaver told detectives he was frustrated with Rogers’ failure to pay, Hubbard was furious. Weaver said that Hubbard’s anger grew until, in early December, Hubbard started talking about beating up Rogers to force him to pay. On Dec. 13, 1989, Hubarktimes.com
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