Michael Lehman walks free after 30 years in prison: 'I thought this day would never come'

Mike Argento | York Daily Record

Show Caption Hide Caption Follow juvenile lifer Michael Lehman release day and what is next for him The family of Michael Lehman anticipate the night before, share the moments he is released and hear him talk about what is next.

At 7:24 a.m. June 19, a Tuesday, Michael Lehman emerged from the steel door in the visitor's center at the State Correctional Institute at Rockview, carrying a battered black foot locker that contained everything he owned.

He immediately spotted his sister, Alexis Sipe. He took a deep breath and set the foot locker down gently and approached his sister and embraced her. He picked up the foot locker and walked across the driveway in front of the prison to his parents' Ford Flex.

He hugged his mother, Sharon Swope, who had adopted him at 7 with her ex-husband, and then his stepfather, Don, and nephew Aidan. No words were exchanged. They just looked at each other for a moment.

Finally, Lehman exhaled loudly and said, "Yeah. OK."

It was a day that none of them had ever thought would come. Not long ago, they were resigned to the notion that Rockview, a sprawling correctional facility just east of State College, would be Lehman's final home, that he would grow old and die there.

It was strange. It was the first time he had been outside the fence, outside the walls of prison, without being handcuffed and shackled, in 30 years. It was the first time he had worn civilian clothes – a white polo shirt, gray Dickie's shorts and a pair of gray Vans slip-ons – during those years.

It was the first time in three decades that his sister could recall seeing him not wearing a prison jumpsuit emblazoned with "DOC" – an acronym for Department of Corrections – across the back. She recalled that when she was a kid and would visit, she wondered aloud why all of the men in the visiting room had the nickname "Doc."

Alexis asked him. "Are you OK?"

Lehman blinked and looked around and said, "Yeah."

He climbed into the passenger seat of the Flex, and his sister began the two-hour drive to York County, heading to Route 26 toward breakfast, home and the rest of his life.

"Not so fast," he cautioned his sister. "If you crashed here..."

His voice trailed off as the car approached the entrance to the prison.

***

Several times during the drive home, and throughout his first day outside the prison walls, Lehman said, "I never thought this day would come."

Prison has pretty much been the only home he has ever had, having been behind bars since he was 14, the same age as his nephew. He's 44 now, a man slouching toward middle age, complaining about the stiffness in his back after a long drive.

When he was first incarcerated, he was a skinny teenager, his body swimming in an orange prison jumpsuit with a full head of brown wavy hair. Now. his head is shaved, and he sports a goatee and horn-rimmed glasses.

He had spent two-thirds of his life locked up, deservedly so, he freely admits. He also has freely admitted that he didn't think he deserved to ever walk away from Rockview. He was excited about being out of prison, but at the same time, he feels tremendous guilt and anxiety. That was the only life he knew, and now, in his words, he had to begin "the next chapter" in an unwritten life.

Related: Once serving life in prison without parole, Michael Lehman will soon go home: 'It's scary'

It had been a strange and surreal day for him.

It had been 30 years since he was arrested and locked up, one of four accused of killing Kwame Beatty. Beatty had been a counselor at the Children's Home of York, where Lehman had been placed after running away from home. Lehman was the lookout, sitting in a hallway while the others, an adult and two other juveniles, stabbed Beatty to death in the counselor's room at the home.

He has never minimized his culpability and has always taken responsibility for Beatty's death, saying, on numerous occasions, that he was responsible for the death of a man who was a better man than he will ever be. He says he feels that guilt and shame every day; it is never far from his thoughts. He knows he can never make amends, but he also knows that he wants to do something about it.

What that is remains to be seen.

***

Lehman is one of 517 so-called juvenile lifers in Pennsylvania and the 155th to be released after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that life sentences without the chance for parole for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional.

When he was sentenced to life without the chance for parole – escaping the death penalty by one vote by the jurors who presided over his trial – he didn't know what that meant. Like a lot of juvenile lifers, he believed that he would get out of prison some day, believing that, somehow, life without parole didn't really mean that.

The years passed. And as they rolled by, Lehman was convinced that he would die in prison, that this was his life. He made the most of it. He is remarkably intelligent – his IQ has tested in the 126 to 130 range – and well-read, and he decided in his 20s that if this was going to be his life, he would do something with it, rather than waste away in prison.

He worked as a teacher's aide, leading classes for inmates working on their GEDs, something he earned behind bars. He acted in a play written by a fellow inmate, a man who became a mentor to him. He was active in the lifer's association, serving as the organization's president and helping organize its annual banquets for prisoners' families.

He worked in the prison's furniture factory. He made friends. He became a part of the community, a community composed of lifers, for the most part, men who had killed other human beings.

His appeals had gone nowhere, and he was resigned to dying in prison. He still maintained a little hope that, one day, he could get out. His hope was bolstered in 2012 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case involving a 14-year-old boy named Evan Miller – who, along with another boy, killed a man by setting fire to his trailer – ruled that life sentences without the chance for parole for juvenile offenders violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the decision, called Miller vs. Alabama, was not retroactive.

In other words, it did not apply to Michael Lehman.

Two years later, in January 2016, the Supreme Court in another case ruled that the Miller decision should be applied retroactively, that the decision, called Montgomery vs. Louisiana, should apply to all juvenile offenders sentenced to life.

That meant that Lehman had a chance of getting out of prison.

In early April, at the conclusion of a two-day-long hearing, he was resentenced to 30 years to life, making him eligible for parole on June 19, 30 years and one day after he and the three others – Cornell Mitchell, Dwayne Morningwake and Miguel Yoder – were arrested for Kwame Beatty's murder.

***

It was June 18, 1988. Mitchell, then 25; Morningwake, then 16, and Yoder, then 17, snuck into Beatty's bedroom in the group home and stabbed him to death while Lehman, armed with a steak knife, remained upstairs, instructed to stab anyone who tried to intervene. (Mitchell died in prison from AIDS in 1991. Yoder pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison, making him eligible for parole this year. Like Lehman, Morningwake was tried as an adult, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without the chance for parole. He was resentenced in October 2017 to 46 years to life and won't be eligible for parole until 2043, when he will be 70 years old.)

Lehman thinks about the date of the murder a lot, It's never far from his mind. He says he is shamed by his actions that night, the guilt always there.

***

The night before her brother's release, Alexis Sipe reclined on the bed in her hotel room, her mother sitting on the other bed while her son Aidan lay on the bed. It was strange, she said. She still had a hard time believing her brother would be getting out of prison.

She was 5 when he was arrested and held in York County Prison. She turned 7 when he was convicted and sent to Camp Hill state prison, the state's triage center for incoming inmates. That's where she first visited him.

Most of their visits occurred in the cavernous visiting room at Rockview. The room is almost always noisy. If friends or family want to share a meal, they have to get the food from vending machines, paying for credits to use in the machines at an ATM-like device outside the room.

"It's crazy," said Alexis, who practices law with her stepfather now. "Absolutely insane. He was supposed to die there."

Related: Juvenile lifer: Prisoner of his own conscience

She recalled that she and her brother used to pick on one another. Once, he made fun of her hair, saying, "Remember that time you cut your hair short and dyed it orange?"

She replied, "We all make mistakes. Remember when you were involved in a homicide?"

***

Monday night, Lehman didn't get much sleep. He woke every hour to check the clock, counting down the hours and minutes until he would walk out of prison. He had played the tape of what it would be like over and over again in his head for years. And now, the hour was approaching.

He walked through the prison one last time. At the time, other inmates were lining up to go to breakfast, and as he walked by, many of them, and the corrections officers accompanying them, stopped to shake his hand and congratulate him. "My hand is bruised," he said.

He changed into the civilian clothes his sister had dropped off that morning and waited.

And then he walked out the door, a mostly free man.

He will remain on parole for the rest of his life. As such, he is forbidden from consuming any alcohol or owning a gun. He can vote. He has friends in prison he might never see again; under the conditions of his parole, he cannot visit the prison for at least two years.

He has a job lined up with his step-brother's company, doing re-bar work, and will live in his parent's home in Hallam. He will be able to drive a car, but first he has to learn how to drive. His parents are planning to give him their Hyundai Elantra. The car's license plate includes the number 1575.

Lehman's inmate number was BJ 1575.

***

Just moments after he left prison, Lehman looked around. The colors seemed more vivid. The humid air seemed sweeter. "It looks greener out here," he said. The only other times he had been outside the fence were to go to court dates, transported in the back of the sheriff's windowless van.

"Everything feels lighter," he said. "It's overwhelming."

In the car, on the way to breakfast at Rony's Place, a little diner just a few miles east of the prison on Route 26 at a mountain crossroads called Pleasant Gap, Lehman noted that he left prison with everything he owned locked in the foot locker.

He had given away a lot of his possessions and donated his many books to the prison library. He had $27 in cash left over from his commissary, and a check for $100, money he had earned making 42 cents an hour in the prison's furniture factory. He showed his Pennsylvania ID card. It listed his address as 1 Rockview Place, the prison.

His sister eased the Flex into a parking space, and Lehman climbed out. He and his family stood around the parking lot for a moment, waiting for Lehman to begin walking into the restaurant.

"Well?" his sister asked.

He started walking. He had been waiting for someone to tell him what to do. That's how things worked the past 30 years. He's become used to people telling him what to do every minute of the day.

Inside, he proclaimed the restaurant "awesome." He gazed at the menu and wanted to order everything. In the end, he ordered French toast, two eggs over easy, home fries, four strips of bacon and wheat toast.

"They have Tabasco on the table!" he marveled.

The food arrived – the only non-institutional food he has eaten in 30 years – and after shaking a few drops of hot sauce on his eggs, he dug in, putting a forkful of egg in his mouth, the first fried egg he has eaten in 25 years. "Mmmmmmm," he said. "It tastes like food. It's not soggy or cold or overcooked. It's awesome."

His nephew said, "It's bangin'."

"Bangin'?" Lehman responded. "Is that what the kids are saying nowadays?"

He ate nearly everything on the two plates, savoring every bite. He apologized for holding up his parents. They said it was OK, to take his time. As he left, he thanked the waitress and told her that everything was "awesome." The waitress asked him, "Are you from around here?"

"No," he said. "York."

***

Not everybody is pleased that Lehman made parole. Beatty's family opposed his release and testified at his resentencing hearing about the pain and suffering he had caused their family, the empty chair at Thanksgiving and Christmas, the hole it left in their hearts. They had hoped that the judge, Michael Bortner, would have taken the advice of the psychiatrist who testified for the commonwealth and said he should be kept locked up until he was at least 60.

Related: Kwame Beatty was more than just 'the victim' (column)

They believe that if it weren't for Lehman, Kwame Beatty would still be alive, that he instigated the homicide, telling the others about an earlier beef with the counselor, and that he devised the plan, sneaking back into the building and letting the others in when they returned in the dead of night to kill Beatty.

"It's a smack in the face, coming the day after my brother's death date," Beatty's brother, Jomo, said. He knew Lehman's parole date was coming up, but it still struck him by surprise. He received no notice and only learned about Lehman's release from a reporter.

"I still believe he should be behind bars," Jomo Beatty said. "As far as I'm concerned, he should have been in prison the rest of his life."

***

Lehman feels the same.

He has said that he doesn't think that he deserves to get out of prison, that his crime called for harsh punishment, that he will have to live with the guilt he feels for the rest of his days.

So while he is glad he is out, it is tempered by his knowledge that he was responsible for another man's death and that there is nothing he can do to make that better.

He knows he has to do something. He plans to do some advocacy. He just wanted to live a quiet life, but he realizes he has a responsibility to do something, to be an advocate for criminal justice or prison reform, to help others in his position try to find peace and make amends.

And the most important thing he can do, he said, is live a decent life and show that former offenders, even murderers, can be rehabilitated and contribute to society.

Sitting on the couch in his sister's Marietta, Pennsylvania, home, he spoke about a lot of different topics, stopping briefly to check the time, making sure he had plenty of time to check in with his parole officer in York. It was 12:26 p.m. "Right now, I'd be in my bunk," he said. "Count time."

His sister stood in the dining room doorway, looked at Lehman and said, "My brother's actually in my house," her voice laced with disbelief.

Lehman said he couldn't believe he was in his sister's house.

"It's nice," he said. "I thought it would be bigger. Don't get me wrong. It's still a lot bigger than my cell."

Reach Mike Argento at 717-771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.

A different case: He killed at 17. Now, he faces life outside prison 42 years after a fatal robbery in York.