About a year ago, Fulton Leroy Washington was preparing to teach his weekly art class to fellow inmates at Lompoc prison when a guard called him to his office. He panicked. His first thought was that one of his eight children had died. “A whole bunch of people were standing in suits and avoiding looking at me,” the 63-year-old recalled.
“Tell me what it is,” he told them. “Don’t give me the long story.”
The short version was that President Barack Obama had commuted his life sentence.