Clemency gives a renewed sense of hope to a man incarcerated for 39 years

Sitting in the Green Haven Correctional Facility church one Sunday in 2010, Paul Clark couldn’t focus on the conversation around him.

“It sounded like someone was scratching the blackboard,” he said.

Clark had been going to church in Winde Correctional Facility in Alden, NY, since 2003 and continued to attend after he was transferred to Green Haven, 65 miles from NYC. Clark normally chatted with his friends during service but today the conversation was irritating and he had to move to get away from it.

As Clark walked to the front, the choir began to sing Never Would Have Made It by Marvin Sapp. Tears ran down Clark’s face and he quickly wiped them away, hoping no one would see him crying.

He found a seat and watched as service continued. Clark wasn’t sure why but he had a feeling something was different.

Later, back in his cell he decided to sign up to attend church on a regular basis. He says it was then that he decided to dedicate his life to God.

“I used to tell God, even if you’re not going to let me out, I’m going to serve you from this day on,” Clark said.

Clark, 57, is one of the hundreds of prisoners across New York state who will be filing applications for clemency this year. In 1982, he was sentenced to 33 ⅓ years for a crime for which he has long admitted guilt and tried to make amends. But in 1984, he was charged with murder, which added 25 ⅓ years to his original sentence. That charge, Clark insists, was manufactured against him by a corrupt detective later found to be in league with the mafia.

Clemency rests on the governor’s powers to help people get out of prison. However, according to The City, at least 6,489 people have applied for reduced sentences through the governor’s office since 2016. From the time Governor Andrew Cuomo took office, he’s only granted 18 sentence commutations. It’s easier to get into Harvard University than it is to be granted clemency.

Clark understands his chances of being granted clemency are slim but he still feels he should be free because of the change he’s gone through as he’s grown up in prison. He says he is not the same person he was on August 23, 1980.

It was the perfect summer day. Clark and his friends were bouncing from one block party to another in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, drinking Old English and smoking marijuana. At the last party, two of Clark’s friends, got in a fight with 17-year-old Keith Thomas and his cousin Albert McLauren, after one of them made a move to steal Johnson’s chains.

Clark walked over to intervene, but, Clark said, Thomas pulled a gun out and the argument between the five boys escalated. When one of Clark’s pals pulled out a gun, Clark grabbed it and fired two shots in the direction of Thomas and McLauren.

The two bullets hit Thomas, one in his shoulder and the other in the back of his head. As Clark walked over to see if Thomas was okay, he noticed that the gun lying beside Thomas was fake. He was shocked and angry because if he knew that the whole incident could have been avoided.

“I didn’t believe that nobody would try to pull a fake gun on somebody to try to even intimidate them,” Clark said. “We thought the gun was real.”

Thomas begged Clark not to shoot him again and said he was sorry. As Clark watched the blood pulse out of Thomas’s shoulder in time with his breathing, he hoped the 17-year-old would survive, beginning to feel nervous that someone might tell the police it was him.

McLauren took off running and Clark chased him for two blocks, ready for a fight, but was left at ease when McLauren apologized after Clark caught up to him. Tired and nervous that someone would rat him out, Clark headed to a friend’s girlfriend’s house, throwing the gun in a sewer on the way.

The next morning, a friend told Clark Thomas died. Clark never thought that would happen since Thomas had been talking to him the night before. He fled to Florida, scared about what would happen if he was caught.

Clark lived with his cousin for six months, dependent on his family for financial support since he couldn’t find a job that would pay him under the table.

“It felt as if I was stuck in quicksand,” Clark said.

Clark came back to Brooklyn before Christmas after his cousin’s partner threatened to turn him in. It took two more months of his grandmother pleading with him to convince Clark to go to the police and confess. His family paid $15,000 to hire a lawyer who promised Clark he would only get between three to nine years in prison.

Instead, at trial in 1982, the judge sentenced Clark to 33 ⅓ years to life for two counts of second-degree murder, attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon, according to court documents.

Clark had previously been incarcerated at Rikers Island for petty theft charges and had heard from men there that the upstate prisons were violent. He was 5’4” and slim, and wanted to make sure no one would take advantage of him.

“I had made up my mind that I wasn’t gonna be a victim when I go upstate and I was going to do whatever it takes to survive,” Clark said.

Surviving meant picking fights, selling drugs and extorting people, Clark said. He estimates he has at least 40 infractions on his record.

But Clark was also listening to his grandmother, who remained his biggest supporter and continued to visit him even after she had moved to Florida. She encouraged him to participate in the programming and work toward getting his college degree. He received an associate’s degree in business administration at Eastern Correctional Facility in the late 80s.

“She’s always telling me ‘get what you get while you in there because when you get out, you gonna need things for your life to go forward and go to school, get your education,’” he said.

Clark was trying to survive in prison, but a year into his sentence, things became more complicated.

In February 1983, Clark was brought down from Great Meadows Correctional Facility, four hours from the city, to the Brooklyn DA’s office. An eyewitness had placed Clark at the scene of the murder of 60-year-old Oswen Fraser who had been shot while driving his cab in downtown Brooklyn three years earlier, during a botched robbery.

Clark was stunned: “I was like this is unbelievable, I knew I didn’t do nothing else.”

He was placed in a six-person line-up in which he’d initially refused to participate. The witness, Veronique Dowie, IDed Clark and he was arrested 10 days later for a murder he says he never committed. He would learn the facts during the July 1984 trial.

Clark says he was at home on the night of the murder, on “punishment” after his mother had bailed him out for a robbery he’d committed a week earlier. The murder was too far away from where Clark lived with his grandmother and mom. Clark would’ve had to jump out of his second-floor window to get out of the house rather than risk sneaking past both of their rooms on his way out the door.

He told everyone, from his grandmother to his lawyer, that he was innocent.

Dowie, a 37-year-old NYPD Division of Warrants administrator, lived across the street from where the murder took place and was driving home from her night shift in Manhattan. She told police she and Clark had stared at each other through the tinted glass of her car window for 15 seconds where she sat, frozen out of fear.

According to an April 7 New York Daily News account, two other witnesses, Victor Albanese and Jose Solis, told police they had seen two men exit Fraser’s cab. Dowie never mentioned a second man, according to court documents.

Several months later, she recognized Clark from an out-of-circulation photo warrant of him she had discovered in an NYPD warrant book in March 1982 and notified police. The warrant, described Clark as a slim built 5’6” light-skinned black male, matching Dowie’s testimony.

Stephen Caracappa, a major crimes unit detective, who’d been working the case for two years, reached out to Dowie.

When Clark first met Caracappa at the Brooklyn DA’s office. Caracappa had been on the force 11 years, but had initially been denied admission to the police academy due to an arrest for felony grand larceny charge in 1960.

At the time Clark didn’t know that Caracappa would begin working as a hitman for the Luchese crime family in 1985 while still on the force, according to federal court documents.

Clark was found guilty of second-degree murder. At sentencing, Judge Ronald Aiello gave Clark 25 years additional years, bringing his total sentence to 58 years. Addressing the court, Aiello said, “he is a baby-faced killer. I want him to serve every day of his sentence.”

Clark will be 76 when he becomes parole-eligible if he lives that long.

“I became worse because I already had 33 to life at that time,” he said. “If I was going to die in prison, I would rather die young.”

If Clark died young, he knew someone in his family would collect his body, instead of being buried in the prison cemetery, where sometimes ID numbers replace men’s names on headstones. Getting sick and dying in prison with no one to look after him is to this day one of Clark’s worst fears.

Clark continued fighting, selling drugs and collecting contraband. He was often sent to solitary confinement, or SHU. Clark estimates that in the 35 years since his second sentence, he’s spent at least nine years inside SHU, the longest stint being 18 months.

In SHU, he was alone for 23 hours a day. Clark would work out, read his Bible and daily devotionals. He stopped thinking about how his life in prison was affecting his family. Clark had a daughter, who was born a month after he killed Thomas. He had only spent a few moments with her before going to prison.

She would come up with his grandmother or his mother every other week but it was not enough.

“I’m glad that she felt she could talk to me but at the same time, I just wish that relationship was based on more,” he said. “I wish our relationship had more substance.”

It took 20 years for Clark to begin taking responsibility for his actions. He met his wife, Shelia, in 2000 when she was visiting a friend’s husband at Winde Correctional Facility. She came back to visit a few weeks later and then kept visiting him. Sheila said that they were able to bare their souls to each other.

Clark felt he was being pulled in two directions, becoming a bigger part of his family’s life and becoming a role-model for Shelia’s adopted son, David McFarland, or continuing his tough-guy lifestyle. It was time for a change.

“The things I was doing in prison was starting to becoming very distasteful to me,” Clark said. “I wanted something different for my life.”

In 2003, Clark stopped going to SHU for good. He began reading the Bible more often and taking courses on black history and how to handle long sentences.

“By doing that, I started learning more about myself,” Clark said. “I started realizing that I had a lot of issues.”

These programs forced him to reflect on who he had become in prison. Clark had spent his youth pretending to be a tough-guy while really, deep inside he was just scared.

In 2017, Clark found out Caracappa’s mafia past when his lawyers asked his wife to bring in the documents from the second case. From there, his lawyers filed an innocence claim arguing that Caracappa influenced Dowie and she was an unreliable witness, according to court documents.

But a Brooklyn judge threw out the case in September 2017, months after Caracappa had died in federal prison. Judge Matthew Sciarrino said that Caracappa could not have influenced Dowie’s ID because a Brooklyn prosecutor was in the room.

Despite having his case thrown out, Clark hopes he will be released on clemency. He’s gained a new reputation among the men in the prison because of his change.

“They respect my transition,” Clark said. “They talk to me differently, ask me about advice. They even ask me about God.”

During a recent visit, Clark got up to greet another man who was holding his newborn baby. Without hesitating, the man handed his child to Clark to hold and coo at, just like a son would do with their father.

Clark attributes some of his change to his role model and friend Roy Bolus, a man who had 80 years to life and was released on clemency last year.

“He lived this life like he was gonna get out one day,” Clark said. “The way I live now is a direct reflection of what God did for him.”

Clark became less reactive when he sees wrongdoing in the prison because of Bolus’s guidance. When men stole new books from the prison church, Bolus would hold Clark back from putting everyone in their place, telling him not to play God.

Clark wrote an apology letter to the Thomas family. It’s in the New York Apology Bank, where victims’ families can read the letters without contacting the perpetrator. In the letter, he apologized for his actions that night and said he wished he had a do-over button to press.

“Even though I’m in prison and my family still can see me, his family can’t see him,” Clark said. “I took from them [someone] that they’re never going to be able to get back.”

Efforts were made to contact the Thomas family.

Clark has worked hard to ensure that other young men in his family didn’t follow the same path he did. When his stepson, McFarland, was pressured to join a gang in junior high school. Clark did everything in his power to encourage McFarland to stay out of it by having him read Monster by Walter Dean Myers about a 16-year-old on trial for murder

During a family reunion visit, Clark told McFarland he was already part of the Clark Family gang and it was the only one he would ever be in.

McFarland, then 20, wrote a letter in 2016 to Clark expressing his gratitude for that moment and all the conversations they’ve had over the years.

“If it wasn’t for his guidance, I don’t know where I would be,” McFarland said, wiping tears from his face. “I’d probably be in prison or probably dead.”