I Never Thought
An Essay By Maurice Antoine Caldwell
I never thought that I would have to grow up fearing for my life. I never thought I’d lose my freedom throughout my life. Yet, as a child—a kid no less—I had first-hand experience with direct bias and prejudice. I experienced reprisal, unlawful beatings, unlawful arrests, had my life threatened, was set up, and then—and then sent to prison for 21 years for a crime that I did not commit.
The knee on my neck was orchestrated by the San Francisco Puppeteers, with the ongoing approval of the Department of Official Police Corruption. Simply for the fact that I have been, throughout my life, a young black man growing up in the housing projects. I know the feeling of losing a close family member or friend. I lost so many, and saw so many people killed in front of me, even as a child and as a teenager. Now, my frame of mind has been colored by hate, especially since the perpetrator has never been found, and the system didn't go the distance to convict someone for the senseless killing of another human being.
No other person should ever take the place of the real perpetrators of crime and punishment. All those who played a part in the corruption that I experienced—by allowing a dirty San Francisco narcotics officer to set me up, and then send me to prison for 21 years—they should all be held accountable. I lost so much—my family, decades of my life, and so many opportunities for joy. Instead, what did I get? I was forced to go into the maximum-security prison system, as an innocent young black boy, and then become somebody different.
My new reality? It was the terror of life or death. My life became everything I never thought it could be.
The setup crime that turned into my wrongful conviction was orchestrated by the San Francisco Police Department of Setup Services and their Legal Henchmen. It was also their newest product for reprisal being used against me in the highest form. Five months before this set up/orchestration took place, I was kidnapped and forcefully taken away from my neighborhood at night by this dirty narcotics officer and his sidekick, the driver. They drove me to a completely darkened area, and then that dirty officer pulled me out of the back seat with handcuffs on my wrist, and threatened me:
(1) If I don't tell him where guns were being stashed in the projects, (2) he was going to fuck me up, (3) or kill me. Since he didn't get what he wanted, he started choking the life out of me, until I made him think, at least temporarily, that I was going to tell him what he wanted to know.
He then drove me back to my housing projects. When his sidekick stopped the car, and the dirty narcotics officer opened the back door, it was my turn. I started screaming for my life, telling everyone on the streets: He just tried to kill me. He just tried to kill me.
That made this dirty-narcotics-police-officer very angry. They then took me to the station, and handcuffed one of my arms to the holding tank bench.
I started hollering that I wanted to file a complaint against this dirty police officer. He then came to the holding tank and verbally threatened to kill me again. After several hours, I was finally released.
The next day I filed an official citizen’s complaint against this dirty-ass-cop.
So that's what I did. Then five months later, that same dirty-ass-narcotics-officer set me up for a murder that happened in the projects—the projects I grew up in, the Alemany Housing Projects in San Francisco, California.
I’m still fighting to gain justice, now 30 years strong.
Maurice Caldwell is an activist, poet, and lecturer (e.g., Stanford Law School, UCLA Law School). He is also a Northern California Innocence Project exoneree. In 1990, Maurice was wrongly convicted of murder. He then spent 21 years incarcerated in Northern California Maximum Security Prisons, finally being released on March 28, 2011. The trial date for Maurice’s civil lawsuit (Maurice Caldwell v. City and County of San Francisco and Kitt Crenshaw, Case No. 12-cv-1892 DMR (N.D. Cal.), is now March 15, 2021 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.