Free Valentino Dixon

By Michelle Malkin

Opinion

USA – -(Ammoland.com)- “If it wasn’t for my artwork and God, there’s no way we’d be having this conversation right now.”

I’m in Colorado on a three-way phone call with Valentino Dixon, inmate No. 91B1615 at New York’s Wende Correctional Facility, and his 27-year-old daughter, Tina Dixon, a first-grade teacher in Ohio. Faith, family and drawing — golf courses, jazz musicians, landscapes — have kept him alive and sane behind bars. It has been a long, hard roller-coaster ride with “so many ups and downs” that he has learned to manage expectations while holding on to hope.

Tina was a four-month-old infant when her father was convicted of second-degree murder. That’s “26 lost summer vacations, 26 missed birthdays, 26 years of life,” she recounted earlier this year at an event I attended at Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative class on wrongful convictions.

“I watched him for years studying the case in front of me over trailer visits, showing me all the facts, putting this puzzle together.”

At Attica, the notorious supermax prison where Valentino Dixon spent all but the last eight months of his 33-years-to-life sentence before being transferred to Wende, Tina tells me:

“I would eat …Read the Rest

Source:: AmmoLand