Friend,

From a young age Reco Williams was a star basketball player.

He made the all-city team in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989 as a 13-year-old. Two years later, his junior high school team, the McIntyre Hornets, posted a perfect season. Despite the de facto segregation in the local school districts, a majority-white school outside the city badly wanted him to transfer and play for them.

Had his coach not canceled practice one October day in 1992, Reco would have been there, not at the scene of a murder. “I had everything,” he said. “And in a second, your whole life gets turned around.”

For his part in the events that led up to the murder, however small, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison at 17 years old. Reco has been denied parole four times since. Each denial came despite his dedication to staying out of trouble.

He has so few disciplinary write-ups, he said, that it “must be some kind of record.” He has completed a long list of education and trade programs. Still, Alabama’s Parole Board has reset his new parole consideration date four or five years in the future each time it has declined to release him. Five years is the greatest reset time allowed. “I’ve been locked up so long that the only memories I have are as a teenager,” said Reco, now 45.

Many of those memories were made with Tywanna, his childhood friend who would become his girlfriend and eventually his wife. The two married in 2009 while Reco was at Ventress Correctional Facility. As Reco has worked to maintain a stellar record inside prison, Tywanna has worked on the outside. Before the coronavirus pandemic made parole hearings remote, she spoke before the board for her husband when they placed him on the docket.

Reco said he wants to be free in part to show Tywanna gratitude for it all. “I tell her, I want to buy you a house, I want to take care of you. I want to do what a husband is supposed to do for their wife,” he said.

His next chance will be in 2025 at the earliest.

“I’m still being punished like I’m the one who pulled the trigger. And I ain’t did that to nobody. I just was there,” Reco said of the crime. “I got 50 years and it looks like they’re trying to make me do all that time.”

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Sincerely,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center