Lost Boys

Sitting on her couch, Chaison nods.

If Reginald had lived, he would have finished his five-year sentence in April and been a free man this summer. Judy tries not to think about that too much, she says. She thinks that if she had visited Reginald more often, the guards would have known that someone cared about him and treated him better. Maybe she could have protected him, but she thought that was the prison's job. So now she visits Robert every weekend at the Darrington Unit in Rosharon. His cousin says a guard harassed Robert once and he threatened to call the Black United Front and get it splashed all over the news.

In appealing Robert's conviction for assaulting Chaison, Robert's attorney argued that not only was there insufficient evidence but the jury should have been instructed in self-defense law since Robert didn't shoot until after he was shot and should have been given the option of charging Robert with a lesser offense since Chaison denied being a cop. Robert's conviction was first overturned, but the opinion was withdrawn when the judges of the 14th Court of Appeals met en banc May 17, 2001, and decided to uphold the original trial court's decision. The judges' opinion declared it wasn't self-defense because what Chaison did was legal -- Robert was the aggressor and Chaison didn't have to wait to be shot before lawfully protecting himself. As for Robert not knowing Chaison was a cop, Justice J. Harvey Hudson wrote in the opinion that Robert "suspected he was a police officer, accused him of being a police officer, and attempted to shoot him because he was a police officer. There is simply no other logical explanation for appellant's conduct." The arguments for appealing the Higgins case were heard in December, but the three-judge panel is still deliberating.

Since she lost the twins, Judy has become more protective of her older sons, aged 23 and 30. Both of those boys have had run-ins with the law, and Judy moved into a larger apartment so they could live with her; she likes to have them near her, where she knows they're safe. Judy works long hours styling hair, reads any religious book she can find and spends most of her time praying -- for a while she went to church five nights a week.

She wishes Reginald were with her, she says. She can't think of anything specific she'd like to do besides just be with him. Since he's gone, she needs to know why. She filed the lawsuit; now she's waiting for the prison to give her an answer she can believe.