How Kim Kardashian freed woman imprisoned unjustly

On the evening of October 25, 2017, socialite entrepreneur and law student Kimberly Kardashian was scrolling through Twitter. She encountered an impactful four-minute video by Mic reporter Kendall Ciesemier.

The video narrated Alice Marie Johnson’s story. A 62-year-old great-grandmother, who had spent 21 years in prison, for a first-time non-violent drug offence.

Kim contacted her attorney Shawn Holley. She had worked on the grandest court case in American history, the infamous OJ Simpson trial, with Kim's late dad Robert Kardashian, in 1995. Shawn commenced communication on the case with Alice’s attorney.

Kim telephoned her acquaintance and US first daughter Ivanka Trump. She linked Kim to her husband, Jared Kushner, then senior adviser to the US President.

Kushner was passionate about criminal justice reform and compassionate about Alice’s case. There was a unanimous agreement on the only way to free Alice.

She had to be granted clemency. This meant Kim had to regrettably seek direct correspondence with the only person who had the constitutional authority to exonerate Alice—Donald Trump, the US president at the time.

After Life: My Journey from Incarceration to Freedom is a scrutiny of the life of Alice Marie Johnson. Probing her childhood in the racist Jim Crow states of Mississippi and Tennessee, and her emergence as a successful employee of Federal Express (FedEx).

As a 15-year-old outstanding student in an all-black school, Little East Side High, Alice embarked on a relationship with Charles, her high school sweetheart. She fell pregnant and had a baby, Tretessa, on December 20, 1970. Her family arranged for a forced marriage with Charles.

She continued schooling and had a second, third and fourth baby—Catina, Charles Jr and Bryant. In 1979, Alice leased an apartment in Memphis and welcomed her final baby, Cory. He died in a scooter accident.

Alice enrolled in Sawyers Secretarial School, which was teaching typing skills, hoping her proficiency enhancement would boost her income. Her husband Charles objected to the lessons and opposed everything that would lead to advancement. Hostility grew and a separation partly due to Charles' infidelity, eminently led to a divorce.

After Alice graduated, she was interviewed for a secretarial position at Keene Lighting. When her evaluator noticed her dexterity of typing 90 words in a minute, she was hired. She was the first black woman in Olive Branch Mississippi, her residential city, to command an office vocation.

When she wrote the commemoration of a diseased employee's life, she was contacted by America's famous courier company FedEx. She was temporarily placed in the FedEx clerical pool.

After six months, she was promoted to the revenue recovery department. She then ingeniously wrote a grievance that displayed a convergence of discrimination against FedEx women and black employees. This caught the attention of FedEx vice president and the global head of personnel, Jim Perkins.

Thanks to Alice, Jim dispassionately promoted women and blacks from subordinate positions to entry-level exempt positions, in Memphis and all over the US. Alice was expeditiously selected as one of four managers in a new department in computer operations. After three years, she advanced to a senior level of management.

She then met Ted, her lover who coerced her into greyhound gambling. She became addicted to gambling and fell back on her bills, including repayment of a $5,000 FedEx conference debt. This resulted in her dismissal. Her house, which was under foreclosure, was repossessed and the mortgage revoked.

She discovered Ted was a drug dealer. He infused a naive Alice to a deal of receiving calls from various drug mules. Then calling other drug affiliates to relay messages about their presence. He was arrested and snitched on his accomplices, resulting in Alice's apprehension, for money laundering and cocaine conspiracy.

Prosecutors included an assertion called ghost dope in Alice’s six-week trial. Ghost dope was the subterfuge attorneys used to describe drug quantities, based on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, in an alleged conspiracy.

Even if those drugs didn't exist. The unscrupulous prosecutors were also allowed to assign the entire amount of alleged drug weight in a drug operation to a single defendant, although the defendant, Alice, played a relatively minor role in the alleged conspiracy.

The conservative white jury handed Alice a guilty verdict on October 31, 1996. She was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 25 years, without bail or parole on March 21, 1997. She was sent to Federal Medical Centre in Carswell, Texas, for confinement.

Kim Kardashian visited the Oval Office on May 30, 2018, and briefed President Trump on Alice’s desolation. She optimistically left the White House. A week later, on June 6, 2018, she received a call from Trump informing her he would grant Alice a presidential pardon. Kim's criminal justice reform efforts have yielded the freedom of 17 wrongfully imprisoned black inmates.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother