the incredible case of Joe Ligon

Everyone accumulates their own existential references. Some people come to a complete stop after overcoming a serious illness or surviving a tragic accident. Joe Ligon he has a measuring stick like no other. No one like him in America and maybe elsewhere.

He knows full well what has happened to each of his days since February 1953, when the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, until February 2021, a few days after Joe Biden arrived in the White House.

Day after day – on his way there were eleven other presidents, different but equal -, Ligon left 68 years in prison. He flourished, as they say in prison slang.

He entered in 1953 at the age of 15. They imposed life imprisonment. He is the longest-serving prisoner in this country, having entered as a minor. It is the symbol of a tragic legacy. The United States has long been a world leader in the incarceration of juveniles sentenced to life imprisonment without review, an issue condemned by human rights groups.

An unknown world

But today, Ligon is an octogenarian who must face a modern world of which he knows very little. He has never owned an apartment, paid a bill or been a father. During these decades, practically his whole family is dead or was murdered. He has a sister and a few nieces and nephews. He has few teeth, little hair, but is in good health. He does not take pills, except vitamins.

After regaining his freedom, Ligon summed up his sentiment in one word as he stepped back into the streets of Philadelphia: “Magnificent”, Handsome. “Now I’m an adult, I’m not that child anymore. I’m a grown man and I’m getting older every day, ”he commented in front of the cameras. “Everything is new to me,” he remarked.

He is the longest-serving inmate in the United States, having entered as a minor.

His experience behind bars is so extensive that he even survived the same prisons. Was locked up half a dozen centers. The oldest prison, Grateford, closed in 2018. In his youth he was at Holmesburg, which also lost his status in 1995. At one point he was transferred to the State Penitentiary of the ‘East, which opened in 1829 and where left his mark on Al Capone or the bank robber Willie Sutton. Closed in 1971, it is today a historic site. Ligon assured that he was not planning to visit her.

Her father, a sharecropper from Alabama, gathered the family and took them north to Philadelphia to work as a mechanic. Joe was 13 and 15 it changed his life. How to forget. According to his version, that February night was his first drink. He and four friends had two bottles of wine.

Then near his home in the southern part of the city of Pennsylvania, they stabbed eight people, two of whom died.

In the press, they dedicated blankets to them and called them “the headhunters”. His lawyer ordered him to plead guilty and ask the judge to determine the crimes. He admitted that he stabbed one of the victims but survived. Never accepted kill someone.

Life imprisonment. One of his colleagues has since died in prison and the other three have already been released. Ligon stayed inside because he refused to accept parole, precisely because of this, because it conditioned his freedom. This would prevent him from visiting his sister in New Jersey without permission.

Bradley Bridge, his current defense attorney, rose to the challenge 15 years ago. Bridge is dedicated to trying to free these types of inmates, who have been minors, a practice he described as cruel and disproportionate.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that these juvenile sentences should be reviewed. Bradley insisted on parole. “I don’t want you to die in prison,” he told her. But Ligon chose to serve four more years.

One of the problems with these institutionalized prisoners is that the change of parameters lead them to depression and suicide. Ligon has his family and old friend John Pace, 52, another former juvenile inmate with whom he was in Grateford and then attended college. He works in an organization that helps back to school. Pace was waiting for him and found him a place in a sheltered apartment.

“It’s not a sad day,” Ligon told the Washington Post, “I think about it from day one.”

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