#one of my classmates was a convict in Florida for a drug charge at one point and shared some of her experience with us and I’m like girl I’m

[leverage-ot3]

woohoohoo my social work class is KILLING IT today with our peer presentation fucking ROASTING the Prison Industrial System (PIC)

no one:

us in my oppression to empowerment class: PRISONS ARE EMOTIONALLY AND PHYSICALLY TORTURING CONVICTS. THEY ARE LEGAL VERSIONS OF SLAVERY. HERE ARE COMPANIES THAT PROFIT OFF OF THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, CALL THEM OUT. HERE ARE THE ONES WE BULLIED ENOUGH TO MAKE THEM STOP. HERE IS HOW THEY ARE UNETHICAL, HERE ARE ALPHABETIZED READINGS ON IT. HERE ARE FREE PDFS OF THE READINGS.

[deniscollins]

He Committed Murder. Then He Graduated From an Elite Law School. Would You Hire Him as Your Attorney?

In 1992, at age 19, Bruce Reilly killed a community college professor while high on drugs and engaged in sex and was sentenced to 20 years, followed by 25 years of probation. He was paroled in 2005 and graduated from Tulane Law School in 2014, but it’s highly unlikely that he could pass the “character and fitness” portion of the bar admissions process. If you were a law office manager, would you hire Mr. Reilly to do public policy research and advocacy: (1) Yes, (2) No? If yes, would you inform co-workers about his murder background? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decisions?

Last September, a group of academics and activists gathered at Princeton University to discuss the limits of artificial intelligence in public policy.

The longest debate concerned some of the most sensitive decisions in the justice system, like whether to release a person on bail or parole. Many in attendance were queasy about using algorithms to determine prison stays — not least because crime data tends to reflect racial bias. But one conference goer in particular stood out for his skepticism.

His name was Bruce Reilly. The deputy director of a New Orleans organization called VOTE, which advocates for the formerly incarcerated, Mr. Reilly is a minor celebrity in the field. He was a sounding board for the leader of the recent Florida ballot campaign that restored voting rights to up to 1.4 million former felons, and helped lead similar initiatives in Rhode Island and Louisiana.

Mr. Reilly, 45, has playful eyes, weathered skin and a boyish voice, and at Princeton, he wore a dark blazer that did not appear to be his natural uniform. Though it was barely midmorning, his shirt was already threatening to decamp from his pants as he turned to address a Princeton postdoctoral researcher sitting next to him.

“Statistically,” Mr. Reilly told her, “the safest person to let out of prison is a murderer.” The academic, Madelyn Sanfilippo, screwed up her face in apparent disbelief.

“You seem like a person who cares about statistics,” Mr. Reilly continued, arguing that people convicted of lesser crimes often cycle in and out of prison, while someone serving a long sentence for murder has typically matured out of crime by the time he is released.

“That makes sense,” Ms. Sanfilippo said, warming to the claim.

They talked amiably for a few more minutes. When they were done, Mr. Reilly turned and whispered in my ear: “She has no idea.”

‘You need to be broken’

In September 1992, a Rhode Island community college professor named Charles Russell picked up a 19-year-old hitchhiker on an interstate. The two men eventually made it to Mr. Russell’s home, where they smoked marijuana and talked books for hours.

About a week later, the hitchhiker returned. The two men talked and smoked again. But as Mr. Russell performed oral sex on him, the younger man became enraged. He picked up a knife and began stabbing at Mr. Russell’s neck.

Mr. Russell tried to defend himself with a fireplace poker, but the man wrested it from his hand and beat him until he stopped moving. As the younger man was dressing, Mr. Russell rose to his feet, picked up a small statue and charged. The man took the statue away and delivered several more blows, fatally crushing Mr. Russell’s skull.

A year later, acting on a tip, the police arrested Bruce Reilly. He confessed that he had snapped during the sexual encounter, and that the fight had escalated once Mr. Russell fought back.

“I was reacting — I had stuff built up inside of me,” Mr. Reilly told me. Facing life in prison, he accepted a deal to plead guilty to second-degree murder, and a judge sentenced him to 20 years, followed by 25 years of probation.

Many of Mr. Reilly’s high school friends were shocked, if not entirely surprised. He had always been precocious, but his home life was a mess — his mother was in and out of psychiatric institutions, and he lived in foster care for years as a young child. As a teenager, he dealt drugs and stole license plates. He was accepted to college but didn’t fill out the paperwork in time to qualify for financial aid. He was constantly hustling from one dead-end gig or sketchy apartment to another, until one night he ended up at the home of the man he would kill.

In prison, Mr. Reilly became something of an ascetic. He read and wrote for hours each day and strictly limited his TV intake. He accumulated a small circle of friends who believed he had special insight into surviving incarceration. They would write essays on a chosen topic, like whether democracy was the best form of government, and circulate them for feedback.

When they debated prison reform, their views were a mix of Old Testament justice and New. They came to believe that their dreary sentences were central to their rehabilitation.

“You need to be broken,” Greg Tovmasian, a member of the group, told me. “You need to be completely honest with yourself about why you’re in there. If you’re constantly on the phone, talking to people out there, your head is still in society.” The flip side, they believed, was that if a person had done his grappling and come through it, there ceased to be a point to keeping him locked up.

Mr. Reilly was often the most effective legal adviser his fellow inmates ever consulted. He spent hundreds of hours studying case law in the prison library and wrote dozens of petitions, briefs and motions. He helped at least two fellow prisoners reduce their sentences by several years. “It was like magic to people — like mixing chemicals,” said his friend Steven Parkhurst, who is still in prison.

Mr. Reilly was paroled in 2005. He enrolled at Rhode Island College, worked low-wage jobs and became active in a local civil rights group that’s now known as OpenDoors. The organization was campaigning for a ballot initiative to restore the voting rights of felons after their release, and Mr. Reilly eventually worked as a strategist and volunteer coordinator for the effort, which passed.

To help continue his work on behalf of the formerly incarcerated, Mr. Reilly applied to law school. Although he scored in the top 7 percent on the standardized entrance exam, he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, and only one of more than two dozen schools accepted him. In the fall of 2011, Mr. Reilly arrived on the campus of Tulane University — and almost immediately confronted the question that still dogs him today.

The purest test of mainstreaming

The political consensus for bringing former convicts back into society’s mainstream has shifted faster this decade than at any other moment in modern history. Late last year, President Trump signed into law a watershed bill reducing prison sentences for a range of federal offenders, with backing from a coalition that ranged from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Koch brothers. Numerous cities and states have enacted “ban the box” laws, preventing employers from asking about criminal history on a job application. The Florida initiative whose leader Mr. Reilly counseled passed by a nearly two-to-one ratio.

But many of these recent gains have accrued to nonviolent offenders. What about rehabilitation for those who have committed a brutal crime?

“We as a culture have yet to confront forgiveness for someone who commits a crime that we universally agree�� is abhorrent, Mr. Reilly once told me, using an expletive. “The drug offender — that person should not even be in jail,” he continued. “The hard questions are reintegration for people the criminal justice system was actually designed for.” People like him.

Since I started tracking his career, in 2013, I’ve come to think of Mr. Reilly, whom prosecutors once described as a manipulative “predator,” as the purest test of America’s commitment to mainstreaming ex-felons. Even as Mr. Reilly makes it his life’s work to advance the cause, he finds himself illustrating its limits. That’s both because his crime was so severe and because he is not satisfied merely to be housed or employed. He craves elite credentials and recognition, like advanced degrees and fellowships, and wants to work on cutting-edge legal issues.

Last summer, I attended a Soros Justice Fellowships conference in New Orleans with Mr. Reilly, who had been invited to appear on a panel about solitary confinement. Funded by the liberal billionaire George Soros, the organization behind the conference is one of the country’s largest financial backers of criminal justice reform.

As he collected his name tag from a table, Mr. Reilly glanced down at the other names and began identifying who had won various fellowships, grants and accolades. “I’ve applied to them all, have not gotten any of them,” he said. And then, referring to his efforts in Louisiana and Rhode Island, he added with a degree of pride: “But apparently you don’t need a fellowship to win voting rights.”

When Mr. Reilly got to Tulane Law School in 2011, he initially fell in with a circle of students interested in civil rights and unfazed by his past. “He straight-up told me he had been convicted of murder,” one classmate, Allyson Page, recalled. “I was like, ‘O.K., that’s cool.’ I wasn’t expecting that, but I didn’t care that much.”

But within a few weeks, another student began to broadcast Mr. Reilly’s criminal record across campus. Some classmates complained that his presence compromised their safety and would make it harder for them to land jobs.

The story — ex-murderer at exclusive law school! — was picked up by the popular legal blog Above the Law. An unnamed student wondered if, “when placed in one of the most stress-inducing environments in the United States, Mr. Reilly will reach his tipping point and live up to his violent past.” Another espoused a form of Nimby-ism: “I think felons should get a second chance. But why at Tulane? What are we, the law school for murderers?”

TV crews turned up near his house. A producer for “Dr. Phil” called Mr. Reilly on his cellphone; a reporter from “Inside Edition” staked out his apartment.

Publicly, David Meyer, the law school’s dean, was statesmanlike. Tulane’s admissions process “allows for the possibility of redemption even in exceptional circumstances of tragedy and hardship,” he told Above the Law. But privately, Mr. Meyer seemed as panicked as anyone. Susan Krinsky, the dean of admissions, said in an interview that Mr. Meyer had told her, “You have endangered this entire community.” (Ms. Krinsky left Tulane about a year later, and Mr. Meyer declined to comment.)

Mr. Reilly, fearing Tulane would revoke his admission, tried to lie low. But he soon realized he had to stop his classmates from getting their information secondhand, off the internet. And he tried to convince his peers, one at a time, that he belonged.

“Bruce was in the hallway — he was friends with people who were conservative, people who were liberals,” recalled Tony Viviani, a close friend. “One of the most staunch conservative guys was an Alabama grad. He was talking football with him, smacking right back.”

Two years later, when I was in New Orleans to give a talk, I arranged to meet Mr. Reilly for coffee. I was fascinated by how someone could live in two completely different worlds, one familiar to me, the other unimaginable. But as the appointment got closer, I started to worry. I had a daughter, a wife. Was it really such a good idea to schmooze with a murderer?

When we did meet, we chatted for nearly an hour about writing and fatherhood. (Mr. Reilly has a daughter from a relationship in Rhode Island.) He was humble and thoughtful, and I was immediately embarrassed by the vague scenarios I had played out in my head.

Still, to this day, I sometimes struggle to shake my mental image of his crime. And I can’t help thinking: If Mr. Reilly worked at, say, a top-shelf law firm, how many partners would claim the office next to his? Bunk with him on a corporate retreat? Introduce him to their spouse and children?

Although Mr. Reilly apologized to the Russell family at his sentencing hearing in 1996, it takes only a little probing to affirm how fresh his crime remains. His victim’s sister-in-law, Marilyn Rodriguez, told me that she and her two children had been especially close to Mr. Russell, and that his death had “made a mess of our whole family.”

“The hurt is still in our family,” she added. “It can’t be undone.”

Confined by his past

Mr. Reilly, who graduated from Tulane in 2014, would like to be able to practice law, but it’s highly unlikely that he could pass the “character and fitness” portion of the bar admissions process. He’s interested in data and internet privacy issues, but he’s hard-pressed to get a foothold in such fields.

After getting his law degree, Mr. Reilly searched unsuccessfully for a position that would suit his qualifications: policy jobs in Washington, entertainment-law gigs in Los Angeles, even a job with the Tribeca Film Institute in New York. He landed only two interviews and struggled to discuss his criminal record with prospective employers.

“Once you let the debate go there,” Mr. Reilly said, “now they’re visualizing you killing someone.”

Finally, after nearly six months piling credit card debt on top of his student loans, he landed a job in New Orleans as a paralegal at the Capital Appeals Project, which represents indigent people on death row. From there he moved to another criminal justice reform organization and eventually to VOTE.

Last summer, Mr. Reilly was part of a small team of activists that met with Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, and executives for the New Orleans Saints. He briefly told his story, explaining how he was an impulsive teenager before committing his crime, but came out of prison an adult. He made a plea for the Saints and the league to throw their weight behind initiatives that would ease assimilation. The executives nodded sympathetically.

Mr. Reilly makes a quick impression with his intellect. When he was a law student, for example, it took him only a few hours of research to conclude that Louisiana’s ban on voting by felons on probation or parole probably violated the state’s Constitution, and a large group of legal scholars agreed. Still, the fact that Mr. Reilly has devoted his professional life to the rights of the formerly incarcerated — as opposed to a less personal issue like genetically modified foods, another law school interest — testifies to the way his past confines him.

In some ways, he confines himself. Mr. Reilly has a habit of leaning into stereotypes about felons, almost as a political protest, and I sometimes wonder if it is self-defeating. The T-shirts he favors do little to conceal his tattoos, and he leans heavily on jailhouse idiom when he speaks. There are frequent allusions to “bids” (tours in prison), “guys in the yard” (fellow prisoners) and “shankings” (stabbings with a makeshift weapon).

Race also complicates his upward trajectory in an uncomfortable way. After Mr. Reilly introduced me as a journalist to fellow reformers at the Soros conference, some responded with a measure of irritation: Criminal justice issues disproportionately affect minorities, and I was going to profile a white guy? From Rhode Island? Who went to a fancy law school?

Mr. Reilly is the first to concede the advantages he has over former inmates who are black or Latino. “I can go incognito as a white guy,” he said. But he is still pained by the skepticism his race sometimes provokes among progressives.

Then there is the continuing threat to his freedom, in which even a seemingly minor political dispute can escalate into a crisis.

In December, a judicial oversight committee in New Orleans ruled that a candidate for a local judgeship had made false statements about Mr. Reilly’s employer, VOTE. On the day of the ruling, the candidate, Marie Williams, applied for a temporary restraining order against Mr. Reilly, saying he had harassed her through social media, filed baseless claims against her and endorsed her opponent.

The temporary order was granted — Louisiana has a low threshold for such actions — and a judge found probable cause to believe that Mr. Reilly violated the order when his lawyer reached out to Ms. Williams to request that she withdraw it. Now a pending warrant for his arrest could send him to jail. Mr. Reilly’s lawyer hopes to resolve the matter this month, when a court will consider the case.

The sheer hysteria of a murder conviction

Mr. Reilly is encouraged by the growing number of formerly incarcerated people who have gained entree into elite professions and rarefied social strata. He cites with pride his friend Andres Idarraga, who spent time in prison for selling drugs and later earned a law degree from Yale and worked for the famed law firm Boies Schiller Flexner; and Reginald Dwayne Betts, an acclaimed poet who graduated from Yale Law after serving time for a carjacking. Neither of them, though, has a murder conviction.

A vanishingly small number of such people have even begun to claw their way toward mainstream respectability after serving their sentences. Michelle Jones, who published original historical research while serving more than 20 years for the murder of her young son, lost out on a place in a Harvard Ph.D. program when the school overruled its own history department. (She gained admission to New York University.)

Mr. Reilly’s prison friend Greg Tovmasian, who was convicted of second-degree murder, abandoned his application to the University of Rhode Island when he was told that he would have to meet with a university official to be considered. “I just wasn’t ready emotionally to face another parole board,” Mr. Tovmasian said. Instead he earned an economics degree at the smaller Rhode Island College.

Mr. Reilly believes that by telling his story, he can help diminish the sheer hysteria a murder conviction can inspire. But while he has been granted more audiences from the likes of Princeton and the New Orleans Saints, Mr. Reilly has not found that organizations outside the criminal justice field are rushing to work alongside him, in close quarters, for sustained periods. They see him as a source of information or a helpful perspective, but rarely as a potential colleague or friend.

At the Princeton A.I. conference, Mr. Reilly had a long and seemingly productive conversation about life after prison with a man named Chuck Howell, who had an impressive job at a company that manages federal research and development centers. But later, as the two men bantered about police departments and the issue of disciplining rogue cops, Mr. Reilly spun out an extended prison metaphor.

If a gang member wrongs an inmate from a different gang, he said, leaders from the offender’s group will typically agree to punish him on their own. From where I stood, Mr. Howell, who had seemed engaged and receptive at the beginning of the exchange, started to look uncomfortable.

“The problem with the cops is they don’t do it,” Mr. Reilly continued, meaning that police departments don’t rein in rogue officers. “If you were a real gang, you’d off that guy. I’m not saying off that guy — but take care of it.”

Mr. Howell went quiet. The conversation was never the same again.

[theconservativebrief]

Monday’s edition of Fox & Friends featured a discussion of marijuana during which hosts and a Florida law enforcement official used superheated, evidence-free rhetoric straight out of the failed “war on drugs” era.

The reason for the segment was a story out of Mulberry, Florida, involving a 12-year-old who handed out THC gummies in a gym class at Mulberry Middle School last Thursday, sending at least five of them to the hospital with symptoms like stomach pain, dizziness, and nausea. According to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, the student who passed out the gummies faces seven felony charges for possessing and distributing marijuana.

During the segment on Monday, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade pivoted from the Florida story to fearmongering about marijuana in general.

“No one talks about this — THC is addicting,” Kilmeade said. “I know so many people, they say they were told one thing and they end up getting addicted to it. That is an addicting substance. There is a price to pay for pot.”

Sheriff Judd expressed his wholehearted agreement.

“There absolutely is a price to pay for pot,” he said. “You know, I spent my entire life in law enforcement, and a lot of it investigating traffickers of drugs, and it is not a minor, nonviolent felony. It is ruining families and killing people every day across the United States and we stand here in denial thinking it is not a gateway drug.”

“You don’t start on cocaine — you probably start with marijuana and it leads to other things, right?” asked host Ainsley Earhardt.

“That is absolutely right,” Judd replied. “And still today we have a meth problem across this state and country. If someone is in possession of meth, they’re in possession of marijuana because it kinda cuts the edge of the meth. And then they use the marijuana and the meth and they go out and kill themselves or overdose or kill someone else.”

Fox & Friends goes full Reefer Madness, claiming that cannabis is:

-“addicting” -“not a minor, non-violent felony” -“killing people every day across the United States” -“a gateway drug” -used by meth addicts to help “kill themselves, or overdose, or kill someone else” pic.twitter.com/euvjB4h3Dr

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) December 3, 2018

But a number of the claims made in that brief clip are controversial at best. Let’s unpack them one by one.

Research indicates that nearly 11 percent of people who smoke marijuana report having problems quitting or controlling their intake, so there is evidence this claim is true, at least for some people.

But marijuana addiction does not involve the same risks as addiction to more dangerous drugs, like cocaine, opiates, or even smoked tobacco.

Furthermore, the fact that THC is addicting for some people isn’t necessarily an argument that decriminalizing or legalizing it is a bad idea. After all, alcohol is more addicting than marijuana, yet nobody cites that as a reason to go back to the days of Prohibition.

Judd’s claim on this score is false.

In Florida, possession of less than 20 grams of cannabis is a misdemeanor, which is a textbook “minor” offense.

Florida has legalized medical marijuana but hasn’t legalized or decriminalized recreational use. Ten states and Washington, DC, have legalized marijuana for recreational purposes, but even in those jurisdictions, it’s illegal for kids to possess or use cannabis.

While the students in Florida who ingested edibles were sent to the hospital because they felt ill, nobody has ever died from a marijuana overdose.

There also is no evidence that marijuana use is correlated with violent behavior. Although former Attorney General Jeff Sessions claimed last year that “current levels of THC in marijuana are very high compared to what they were a few years ago, and we’re seeing real violence around that,” studies have indicated that for the general population, there is no link between marijuana consumption and increased aggression.

In fact, research indicates that violent crime has gone down in states that have legalized marijuana, in part because the distribution of sale of it is largely pushed from black markets into regulated ones.

While it is true that there is a correlation between marijuana use and harder drug use, that isn’t necessarily because of anything specifically having to do with marijuana use. It may be that marijuana is simply more accessible than other drugs, so people predisposed to use drugs start with pot — just like they often start with other accessible drugs like alcohol and tobacco.

As Vox’s German Lopez has written, “[t]o the extent there is any gateway effect, it might be due to marijuana’s illegality”:

As drug policy experts Jon Caulkins, Beau Kilmer, and Mark Kleiman explained in their newly released book, Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, it’s possible that people may be exposed to harder drugs when they, for example, interact with their pot dealer. Once that dealer knows a marijuana user is a reliable customer, he may push his customer to trying harder drugs, such as heroin or cocaine.

Studies have also shown that the availability of legal medical marijuana correlates with less opioid abuse.

Using meth and marijuana in tandem is dangerous, but that’s mainly because of the dangers of meth, not of marijuana.

There is no precedent for someone going on a violent crime spree because of marijuana use, or of a person experiencing a THC overdose.

It is true that driving while stoned isn’t safe. But researchers in Canada who recently studied accident rates in US states that legalized marijuana didn’t find a meaningful increase in accidents.

While Sessions was fiercely opposed to decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana, there are indications that President Donald Trump is open to a different approach now that Sessions is gone.

Trump has thrown his support behind the First Step Act, a bill that would ease mandatory minimums for drug offense convictions like the ones Sheriff Judd apparently hopes to secure against the 12-year-old responsible for bringing THC gummies to school and giving them to classmates.

Original Source -> Fox & Friends wants you to be very afraid of THC gummies

via The Conservative Brief

[yahoo-shutdown-corner-blog]

It's hard to reconcile two sides of Aaron Hernandez

The lasting image that many Americans have of Aaron Hernandez is of the budding New England Patriots star, his white T-shirt stretched over his upper body and handcuffed arms, as he was taken from the large house he shared with his fiancée and baby daughter in North Attleborough, Mass., on the morning of June 26, 2013.

It’s the image of when he was being arrested for the murder of Odin Lloyd, a friend and semi-pro football player from Boston.

Police escort Aaron Hernandez from his home in handcuffs in 2013. (AP)

But as a former Patriots beat writer, there are other images I have in my mind, and whenever Hernandez’s name is brought up, they begin to replay: of a smiling Hernandez, his white Patriots practice jersey wet with the sweat of a training camp workout, wrestling with the young sons of a team staffer. It’s clear the boys adore Hernandez, and he loves every minute of playing with them.

It’s almost four years later, and it’s still hard to reconcile those two mental films, those seemingly polar opposite men.

The assassin and the animated big brother.

The convicted killer and the charming buddy.

Early on Wednesday morning, Massachusetts State Corrections officials say Hernandez committed suicide in his prison cell, hanging himself with his bed sheet. It was just a few days after a jury declared Hernandez not guilty of killing Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu in a drive-by shooting in 2012, though Hernandez was still set to spend the rest of his life in prison for his conviction in the Lloyd case.

I covered the Patriots for almost a decade; in 2010, I was with the Boston Globe when the Patriots drafted Hernandez in the fourth round of the draft. Hernandez’s NFL career was short – he played three seasons before his arrest – but I was there for it all.

As a reporter, I wasn’t close to Hernandez, but really no one was. He spent little to no time with his New England teammates outside of the team facility, opting to flee to his hometown of Bristol, Conn., a two-plus hour drive to the west, whenever he could.

When he was drafted, it was clear that Hernandez was immature. He was 20 at the time, one of the youngest players ever drafted into the NFL. But still, he had significant question marks that caused him to fall in the draft: multiple failed drug tests with the Florida Gators, the nightclub bouncer he allegedly punched in the head, a shooting outside of a Gainesville, Fla., nightclub he was tied to but never charged in.

But his talent was undeniable, and the Patriots felt like they’d gotten a bargain, snagging a first-round talent with a fourth-round pick.

Hernandez could be moody, and in public anyway, he certainly wasn’t like up-for-anything party boy Rob Gronkowski, his draft classmate and fellow tight end. In 2012, after Gronkowski had appeared on the cover of ESPN the Magazine’s Body Issue in nothing but giant Hulk hands and a smile, one of his many adventures that led to many of us calling it the “Summer of Gronk,” Hernandez was asked how he spent his free time and quipped, “I had my own kind of fun.”

As it turns out, that was just a few weeks after Furtado and Abreu died. Hernandez may not have been their killer, but there seems no doubt he was present when they were shot.

There were yellow flags on Aaron Hernandez heading into the 2010 NFL draft. (AP)

In August that year, at the Patriots’ huge annual fundraiser in the closing days of training camp, the team announced a contract extension for Hernandez, rewarding him and ensuring he and Gronkowski would be playing together for years to come.

That night, with a small circle of reporters and cameras surrounding him, Hernandez was emotional. He spoke of the gratitude he felt toward Patriots owner Robert Kraft, head coach Bill Belichick and the entire organization for taking a chance on him. He told us his longtime girlfriend was pregnant. He said it was time to leave the old Aaron behind, to become a role model for the Hispanic community. He donated $50,000 of his new money to Kraft’s family foundation in appreciation.

As he spoke, he kept trying to hold eye contact with me, as though he needed assurance that it was OK to be emotional, to show a vulnerable side of himself.

His daughter, Avielle, was born on his 23rd birthday, in November. Chatting at his locker a couple of days after she made her arrival, Hernandez told me he couldn’t ask for his life to be much better, and again said it was time to put his “young and reckless” days behind him.

Seven months later, Hernandez was arrested in the death of Lloyd, who was shot in an industrial park not far from Hernandez’s home.

Sad is a small word, but there aren’t many other words that fit the entire scope of the Hernandez situation better.

Sad for beautiful little Avielle, who will one day read the stories of her father’s terrible misdeeds and the end of his life in a prison cell.

Sad for his older brother, D.J., and mother, Terri, who must have so many questions about what went wrong and whether either of them could have done anything to save their brother and son.

Sad for the friends and families of Odin Lloyd, Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu, who will spend the rest of their days grieving men who were violently taken from them.

And, yes, sad for Aaron Hernandez. It is possible to abhor and condemn the things he did and feel some sympathy for him – after Hernandez’s father, Dennis, died unexpectedly of surgical complications when Hernandez was 16, he lost his way and never regained it. He acknowledged that he had everything and still couldn’t stop himself from throwing it all away and ruining innumerable lives in the process. What if he’d gotten grief counseling or hadn’t fallen in with an awful crowd after Dennis died?

Maybe things would have been different. Maybe they wouldn’t have.

More Aaron Hernandez coverage from Yahoo Sports: • Hernandez commits suicide in prison cell • Dan Wetzel: Slight change in Hernandez during his final days • Hernandez’s agent skeptical of prison suicide • Prison: Hernandez showed no suicidal signs, left no note • Watch: The life and death of Aaron Hernandez