MaryAnn Swift lost my case in court, but she never left me behind.

In 1996, MaryAnn was my court-appointed counsel on the case for which I am currently serving 34 to 68 years in a central Pennsylvania prison. For the 15 years following my conviction, she continued to correspond with me, never failing to send birthday and Christmas cards, each with a $10 money order stuffed inside. 

MaryAnn died in 2011 after a long, hard-fought battle with oral cancer — the woman smoked like a steam engine. We kept in touch until shortly before she died. 

Since I am imprisoned more than 200 miles from my hometown of Philadelphia, her letters brought me immense joy. Here, we call them “love.” Typically it doesn’t matter who the love comes from or why. 

“Just please, God, let there be some love waiting for me on my cell floor when I come in from afternoon recreation time or work,” we pray. Letters are one of the few ways we can stay connected to the lives of people on the outside. It’s how we attempt to maintain a sense of community.

And the money? Ten dollars goes a long way in prison. Incarcerated Pennsylvanians make between 23 cents and 50 cents an hour for most jobs. Just last year, for the first time in three decades, the state raised the minimum hourly wage for incarcerated workers; it used to be 19 cents.

Her money orders came at a time when we paid more than $5 for 15-minute phone calls (in 2016, the cost was lowered to about 90 cents), $150 for 13-inch TVs that Wal-Mart sold for $75, and $40 for radios in a rural area where only two FM stations have signals strong enough to penetrate all this brick and steel. That’s not to mention a prison commissary monopoly that constantly gouges its customers. 

Not only has $10 always been hard to come by here, it’s also extremely helpful. I was always grateful for the assistance, and appreciative of the sacrifice it represented.

Over the years, I’ve asked myself what motivated her magnanimity. 

Did she feel guilty for losing my case? 

Did she see me as someone who caught a bad break, and whom she decided to take pity on? 

Was I the only one, or did she have a dozen other convict charity cases out there? 

I never asked her for the whys and wherefores, nor did I really want to know. Look at it too hard or question it too deeply, and it can disappear faster than a ferret on amphetamines. 

It’s a special thing, to have someone who’s not related to you and who never knew you on the street, but who always expressed more kindness to you in prison than those who weren’t strangers. For 15 solid years, MaryAnn never abandoned me. 

She wasn’t trying to achieve sainthood and would have probably cussed out anyone who put her up for consideration. She was a stout 4-foot-11 white woman with bobbed gray hair, a gravelly smoker’s voice and a gritty manner. The vanity plate on her car — “PHL LWYR” — gave fair warning of her profession, which probably intimidated people more than the .38-caliber revolver she told me she carried in her purse. 

She certainly wasn’t charitable in the way she vilified, well, just about everybody. MaryAnn had a pragmatic outlook that did not allow her to suffer fools. It added to the mystery of why she treated me so kindly.

In my case, I do know she admired my intelligence, which was revealed through the content and complexity of our correspondence. She was a teacher, primarily of Spanish, before she became a lawyer. A knuckleheaded move brought us together, but I’m sure she found some redeeming value in the fact that I was at least a knucklehead who was eager to learn and improve myself.

We didn’t share a lot of deeply personal details about our lives. Both of us shied away from them. But maintaining a correspondence with someone over so many years eventually reveals a person. 

In our letters, we expounded on our philosophical and political viewpoints on current events. Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we didn’t; but we were never contentious. There was always something going on in the city for us to chew on: police brutality, political scandals, front-page felonies. 

Animal cruelty was one that always bothered her. MaryAnn was a huge defender of animal rights and loved our canine companions. I remember, back in 2002, there was this kid who got caught on videotape beating a dog with a baseball bat. In her opinion, the judge had been too lenient. MaryAnn wrote a scathing letter to the Philadelphia Daily News that said, in part, “[Dogs] do not rape, rob, murder or degrade society like the way [this guy] is guaranteed to do after he serves four short years in a cushy juvenile facility.”

She called for readers to write the judge’s name down, take it with them to their polling places for the next election, and vote for anybody but that judge. MaryAnn herself kept several dogs and birds whom she called “the kids.” I suppose they took the place of the children she didn’t have, though she never told me if that was by destiny or design.

MaryAnn was my biggest booster. When I was making greeting cards to sell to other prisoners to supplement my income, she downloaded a gang of cartoon characters for me to trace from. When I went through an origami phase, she sent me how-to diagrams. When the creative writing that I started soon after entering prison became serious, she encouraged it in a way my peers were incapable of doing. She told me what she didn’t like about a piece and why, and offered astute suggestions on how to make it better. She had a black belt in constructive criticism.

I received notice of MaryAnn’s death one day after I found out that the best friend I had made in prison killed himself on the street. His quality of life had been diminished by a tragic car accident, and he had been drinking a lot.

That week in June was a very difficult time. I’ve learned to maintain a degree of emotional distance from the people I love and care about out in the world. Chances are they’ll all die before I get back out there, or I’ll die before I get back out there. On the inside you need to keep your head clear to stay sane and keep from crying yourself to sleep at night.

My brothers in prison are always amazed when I tell them that the lawyer who lost my case still sent me cards and money. I don’t know of anyone else who has experienced this. It has been a source of pride for me, an enormous honor. 

For 15 years, I took great privilege in knowing MaryAnn Swift, a woman of indomitable spirit, self-sacrifice and enduring kindness. I pray that where she is now, they don’t hold being a Philadelphia lawyer against her.