In an article for Politico, John J. Lennon engages in a revealing Q&A conversation with former fellow inmate Lawrence Bartley about life after prison and his current work as the director of News Inside, a print publication distributed to 556 facilities in 40 states, in addition to the District of Columbia and Canada.
EXCERPT
In 1990, Lawrence Bartley was hanging out at an intersection with his crew in Jamaica, Queens. A motorcycle revved toward them, and the passenger let off a barrage of shots. It was New York City’s deadliest year on record: 2,245 homicides. It seems odd to call a 16-year-old boy who was shot four times lucky. But Lawrence avoided becoming a murder stat. “Because my assailant had no name, face, or reason,” he wrote in a 2018 piece for The Marshall Project, “he had every name, every face, and every reason.” When Lawrence got out of the hospital, he started packing a gun.
On Christmas, Lawrence and his friends went to see Godfather III. In the Queens movie theater, another crew came in making noise, and Lawrence’s group exchanged insults with them. Then gunfire erupted, a total of 24 shots fired both ways. Lawrence let off one shot. Four bystanders were hit. According to the prosecutor, it was Lawrence’s bullet that hit an innocent 15-year-old boy, Tremain Hall. He was added to the murder tally that year.
At 17, for the murder of Hall, Lawrence Bartley was sentenced to 27 years to life.
In 2016, I transferred from Attica to Sing Sing and met Lawrence.
Read the full story at Politico.