With Its Prisons Dangerously Full, Why Is California Fighting for Custody of a Dying Prisoner Across the Country?

Gloria Johnson-Ester was on her way to church early on November 2, 2008, when she received a phone call telling her that her son's prison sentence had been commuted, and he would be coming home after spending the last 15 years behind bars.

"I just went to church and cried and couldn't sit still. I just got overjoyed," she recalls, beaming. "I thought, 'He's free! He's free!'"

Her son, Montell Johnson, is terminally ill, struggling through the advanced stages of chronic progressive multiple sclerosis. According to the phone call to his mother, his condition had convinced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to grant him a rare executive clemency order, which commuted his sentence to time served.

The day after she got the good news, Johnson-Ester raced to government and social service agencies all over Chicago, applying for social security and Medicare benefits for him and trying to piece together a plan to care for him at her home on the South Side, where she lives alone. She cleared out her dining room to create a makeshift hospital room. When a parole officer called her to find out where Montell was going to live, she gladly reported that he would be staying with his mother.

But no sooner had Johnson-Ester begun her preparations than she was hit with news that would grind her frantic preparations to a halt. Despite the order for his release from the Illinois prison system, officials in California were now saying that rather than go home, her son should be transferred to their custody. As per a ten-year-old agreement between the former governors of Illinois and California, Montell Johnson was to be extradited to California, to finish out the remainder of a life sentence for a different crime. (In April 1997, Johnson was found guilty of murdering an alleged drug dealer during an altercation in a Los Angeles liquor store that took place three years prior. The trial, in which Johnson acted as his own attorney, resulted in a life sentence.)

Montell Johnson, once a stocky man, now weighs 70 lb. and is paralyzed from the waist down. On good days, he is able to move the upper left side of his body. On bad days, he is unable to speak. There is no hope that he will ever be able to rid himself of the feeding tube that provides him with sustenance, or the catheter and fecal bag that replace any modicum of independence. Occasionally, nurses have to use a suction device to remove phlegm from his throat when he is unable to cough or rely on an oxygen tank to help him breathe.

Johnson requires "total care," according to a court statement submitted this summer by Chicago neurologist Dr. Norman Kohn. "He is severely impaired in speech and communication. His speech is almost unintelligible," the statement reads. "He relies on his mother for communication and decision-making." Indeed, his mother has worked out a system in which she goes through the alphabet and he opens and closes his eyes to try to signal the words he is trying to say. She says she is the only person patient enough to walk him through the process.

Despite all this, California officials are pressing forward to take him back -- and the state of Illinois is cooperating. According to a sworn affidavidt by the Chief Legal Counsel for the Illinois Department of Corrections, an "air ambulance company" has already been contacted to arrange the transfer of Johnson to California. On August 5, Judith Harper, Assistant Chief Counsel for the CDCR wrote to James Doran, a lawyer in the llinois Attorney General's office, to "confirm our conversation this morning" that the CDCR "is expecting that [Johnson] will be returned to California to serve out the sentence imposed on him here."