Free Greg Ott!
Twenty-two years ago a Texas Ranger was shot and killed during a drug raid on the home of a philosophy graduate student. even today, no one really knows what happened on that tragic night.
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Attorney Bill Habern of Riverside, who specializes in parole matters and has represented Ott before the board, told me of incidents in which pages of criminal histories ended up in the wrong inmates' files. "The process has become highly politicized," Habern said. "I don't mean that the governor influences the outcome of parole votes, but so long as board members serve at his will, they are limited in voting their conscience." All eighteen members of the current board are Bush appointees. The parole rate has dropped steadily, from a high of 79 percent during the prison-overcrowding crisis of 1990. By the end of Ann Richards' term, it was down to 28 percent; under Bush it has hovered around 20 percent. Legislative changes have contributed to the drop in parole rates: For example, inmates who commit violent crimes must serve 50 percent of their sentences instead of the previous 25 percent.
Board members have little time for deliberations: A prisoner's file can contain hundreds of pages. Last year more than 100,000 cases came up for vote, which computes to about seven or eight minutes of attention to each file per board member based on a forty-hour week. In most cases inmates don't get an opportunity to appear before the board. Jack Kyle, the chairman of the board under Ann Richards, believes that the flaws in the process could be largely corrected if the Legislature would do away with the secrecy requirements. "They are unfair," Kyle told me, "not only to the inmates, but to the board as well. People who know nothing about a case can protest by signing a petition in a Wal-Mart parking lot."
Some of Ott's supporters hope that the vote will be delayed until after the election. Tauss and Garcia both assured me that politics will play no role in how they vote. I believe them. They have clearly agonized over this case. "My reputation is at stake," Tauss told me, confessing that she has had nightmares over her previous Ott vote. Garcia told me, "It's hard to take the position that he hasn't earned parole, but the million-dollar question is, Has someone been punished enough?" The board is not an appellate court; it doesn't decide guilt or innocence or whether a trial was fair. It does look at such factors as whether an inmate has been punished enough or is a continued threat to society.
Carolyn brick home in Azle where we met 22 years ago. Her daughter, Kelly, is married now and lives next door with her own pair of teenagers. Buster lives in another part of town and works at the local hospital. He wanted to go into law enforcement but worried how his mother would react and found a safer occupation. Buster's wife delivered twin boys last year, named after a grandfather they will never know—Bobby Tavish Doherty and Brodie Paul Doherty. "Doherty is an Irish name," Carolyn reminds me. "'Tavish' is the Gaelic word for twin, and 'Brodie' means brother." Though another protest crusade is imminent, she dreads it. "Every time this comes up, they want me to write a letter," she says, her voice strained from an ordeal that cannot be avoided. "It happens every year, and every time, it opens old wounds. I've always gone along because I owe it to Bob. But now I have two one-year-old grandsons in the house and they are a handful." Carolyn tells me, as she has told others, that she knows that Ott will eventually be paroled. When that happens, she will be relieved, not because he is free but because she will know that she did everything she could to honor her husband's memory.Ott's family lives with its own tortured memories, praying that Greg will be released while his parents are still alive. "What hurts is how they portray him as less than human," says Bruce Dennis Ott, who still flies for American Airlines. We are seated at his dining room table, at his home in Plano, sifting through letters and newspaper clippings. He points to a newspaper photograph of the Doherty family and tells me, "People don't accept that Greg also has a loving family that suffers every day for what happened. I understand their grief, but if the lawmen had done their job right the first time, none of this would have happened."
Bruce is two years older than Greg and, in some ways, his brother's spiritual opposite. Greg was the nonconformist, always seeking new answers to old questions, but Bruce knew exactly what he wanted—he wanted to fly. Bruce, his wife Cynde, and their sons, Dennis and Chris, speak of Greg not as someone who has been away but as a living presence in their home. "He never misses my birthday," says Chris, who wasn't born when his uncle went to prison.
I leaf through dozens of letters detailing the shattered dreams of the Otts. Greg's favorite phrase is the French expression "c'est la vie"—an ironic reflection on life from a lifer. James Althaus, the old college friend who used to argue existentialism with Greg, tells me: "I've come to realize that his belief in existentialism is what got him through all these years." The most agonizing letter is one from March 1990, written a few days after Greg's parole was first approved and then rescinded mere hours before he expected to go free. "Drained by a demise of a thousand lacerations I struggle to find words," he tells his family. "A new birth . . . a new death . . . a new emptiness—yet each day must be met with a best effort, if only because it is all that remains." In a letter to Helen Copitka, a former member of the parole board who took up his cause years ago, he wrote of the terminal illness of one of his few inmate friends, Steve Broom: "You see, I don't enjoy my peers, especially those of my race that fill these halls. Never have. Always, for nearly twenty years, I've done these days alone. Along comes Broom and he is likable and he becomes my friend and now I watch him dying—dying with an inner strength that I'm not sure I would be able to muster. I guess this is how we grow old."
On September 14 Greg Ott will turn fifty, an age when most people begin to think of retirement. He thinks only of freedom. Looking at him through the mesh cage of the visitors' room at Darrington, I am struck by how he has changed since I last saw him, in 1978. He's heavier, and his hairline is receding, but there is something else, something cerebral and yet chilling—an attitude numbed down. I sense the deep-seated submission that you see in people whose future is their past. The arrogance of youth has slipped away without disturbing the philosophical imperative that sent him in search of the nature of absurdity. "After all these years I accept my share of the blame for what happened," Ott tells me, his voice so soft I have to strain to hear. "I wasn't actively engaged in marketing illegal substances. I was going to college. I smoked marijuana, and I freely chose the road that led me here, but I didn't knowingly, willfully shoot anybody."
Ott didn't testify at his trial, but before sentencing, he was allowed to address the court. He said, "You can put me in a tiny cage, but you can't take the goodness of my being away from me. You cannot make me bitter or hateful. You have done what you needed to do; I will remain good and in so doing, honor the orders of the courts." That's exactly what he has done. Mistakes were made years ago, both by Ott and by the lawmen. It is time for everyone to concede that. This time, I truly pray, that the parole board will do the right thing and set Greg Ott free.
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