By David Brand

Stanley Bellamy has never used the internet. Bellamy, most people call him Jamel, has never seen a cell phone, except on TV.

A few years ago, his typewriter broke and he paid about $300 for a new one, which he uses to draft his college papers and to work on his Responsibility Letter, an intimate appeal for clemency, from inside his cell at Sullivan Correctional Facility.

That letter could be Bellamy’s ticket out after more than 33 years in upstate prisons. But it’s also one of the most challenging tasks he has had to complete.

“Jamel is not a big self-promoter,” said his friend and attorney Bahar Ansari, a CUNY Law professor helping Jamel apply for clemency. “There are so many things that he has done and he’d rather help behind the scenes.”

Under a 2015 measure, incarcerated New Yorkers are eligible for clemency through reprieves, commutations and pardons issued by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The measure established the Executive Clemency Board to review applications and recommend commutations or pardons to Cuomo.

The governor has granted clemency to inmates on fewer than ten occasions since forming the clemency board. This year, Cuomo has yet to grant clemency to a single person.

Despite the long odds, a lot of people want to help Bellamy, who was convicted of murder in 1985. In him, they see a mentor and inspiration to the generations of younger inmates who he has helped.

There’s Tajuana Johnson, Ansari’s colleague and the other member of Bellamy’s legal team. Like Bellamy, who is from Corona, Johnson grew up in a tough Queens neighborhood in the late 70s and early 80s.

Their paths diverged as they approached adulthood. While Johnson went to college and eventually studied law, Bellamy got caught up in crime. In 1985, at age 23, he was charged with murder and sentenced to 62 and a half years in prison.

There are the professors from St. Thomas Aquinas College, who have taught Bellamy as he pursues his college degree. He earned his GED and his associate’s degree behind bars and he is now working on a degree in sociology.

And then there are the many people Bellamy has helped lead better, healthier lives inside the prison walls.

“I got a call from a gentleman who was incarcerated with Jamel and he said ‘What can I do to get him out?’” Ansari said. “He was such an inspiration and mentor.’”

Ansari and the others are hoping Cuomo will see that too.

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Bellamy’s voice is faint on the phone.

Each weekend, he calls Ansari using a Securas phone line inside Sullivan. How long he talks depends on how many people are waiting on line to make their own calls.

On a Saturday in November no one is waiting, so Ansari helps Bellamy share the personal accomplishment he seems too humble to bring up, like the research paper he’s working on based on his experiences in the groups and classes he has organized inside the prison.

“The vast majority of adult men return to school because they want to better themselves,” Bellamy said. “I hear them crying and complaining all the time, but when I started doing my paper, I understood that they’re coming to better themselves. When they’re with the group they say they’re bored. They’ve got to project an image in here.”

They fear that losing that image puts them at risk for seeming weak or vulnerable, he said.

“That’s the image thing that we need to get rid of — that’s ‘IEP’,” he continued.