Berna Lang, a Sodexo employee at the Cyber Café in Ben M. Cherrington Hall, was recently married to Billy Ray Wheelock, who was serving a life sentence in prison until President Barack Obama recently granted him clemency.

Wheelock was imprisoned in 1993 for possession of and conspiracy to distribute 99.62 grams of crack cocaine. According to the Denver Post, this was during the war on drugs, when crack was perceived as more addictive and dangerous than other drugs, so crack-related sentences treated one gram of crack the same as 100 grams of powder cocaine. In 2010, Obama passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which now treats one gram of crack as 18 grams of cocaine.

On Dec. 19, 2013, Obama granted clemency to Wheelock and seven other non-violent drug offenders sent to prison in the late 1980s and 1990s, in an effort to address the disparity in the law. Wheelock was immediately released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Florence, Colorado to a halfway house in Denver.

“When he called, I was just getting off of work,” said Lang. “I thought he was playing a joke on me. I kept saying, ‘Billy, stop playing,’ and he said, ‘I’m not playing. Haven’t you seen the news? Obama pardoned me.’ I was at a loss for words. When I got home I went on the Internet and saw for myself and I just couldn’t believe it.”

Wheelock was officially released on April 17, and he and Lang were married on April 19 at the Northeast Denver Islamic Center. Wheelock and Lang, both Muslim converts, had met about a year and a half before on a Muslim marriage website called Muslima. They had been engaged for about a year when they found out Wheelock would not have to finish his life sentence.

“I read his profile and I thought, ‘What an interesting profile.’ It was unbelievable to my ears that he was such an upstanding brother to be incarcerated,” said Lang. “I think within three months I said okay, I’ll marry you, even under the conditions that he was given a life sentence. He always had the faith that he wouldn’t be in there long.”

Lang said that she had felt she was reaching retirement age, and she didn’t want to be by herself, so she told her two grown daughters that she was looking to get married again.

“I said once I find a husband I’m gonna retire and just be a wife,” said Lang. “What was so amazing, and what made me accept [Wheelock’s] hand in marriage, was that he never saw what I looked like before he asked me to marry him. He said, ‘It don’t matter. I can tell you’re the kind of person I could fall in love with.’ He told his mother he thought he had found his wife.”

Wheelock grew up in Temple, Texas, and his family still lives in Texas, but Lang told him she could not move there because she had to finish working here. In addition to working at the Cyber Café, Lang bartends at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House and runs her own cheesecake business. According to Lang, Wheelock said he wanted a fresh start and he would love to come to Denver. That was when he put in for a transfer to Florence, his fourth federal prison.

“I think it was October 8, 2013 [that I met him in person], and boy was that something,” said Lang. “He was immaculate. A gentleman. You know how you meet somebody and you try to find something wrong? I couldn’t find anything wrong with him. We had a great time, we had lunch and I spent seven hours with him.”

According to Arthur Gilbert, professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, Wheelock kept clean in jail and never got into fights. During his time in jail, he worked as a cook and educated himself, taking every course he could.

“He survived because of his refusal to get into fights and his ability to stand above the fray,” said Gilbert. “Because if you don’t, you’ll be punished by the system or you’ll die.”

Gilbert met Lang last fall when he was running a speaker series on religion and violence and he was looking for someone to cater the event. He said he became friends with Lang and started talking to her on a daily basis.

“Out of that, I learned her story, and I found it incredibly compelling,” said Gilbert. “I personally knew that I would never agree to marry someone who was a lifer without possibility of parole. She committed before there was any hope of getting out of jail.”

Lang said that Wheelock’s family had been sending letters to Congress for years, but they kept hearing that they had to wait, and there was never a date for when to expect anything until last December.

“We don’t know how Obama picked him. I would love to know how he found his name,” said Lang. “Billy never thought he should not have been punished, he just thought it was overkill. That’s what Obama said too. He said, here’s a man who’s spent two decades of his life locked up for a crime that didn’t warrant the punishment.”

Gilbert has been teaching a class at DU on the international and domestic consequences of the drug war since the early 1990s. He said he became interested in why the U.S. has the largest percent of prison population in the world.

“We have over two million people in jail, mostly people of color, mostly for drug charges, with sentences that are obscenely long,” said Gilbert. “The image of democracy is floating on the substructure of a huge prison industry.”

Lang said now that Wheelock is out, they have been adjusting to having each other there. She has also been helping him adjust to life out of prison.

“Teaching him how to go from a prison lifestyle to a freedom lifestyle, it’s like teaching a child,” said Lang. “He’s still amazed at different things that he sees, but he’s adjusting and he loves it. Every day when I get home he has a story about something.”

Gilbert also highlighted the difference between being imprisoned and free.
“Those of us who have never been to jail don’t have a clue about what it must be like,” he said. “It’s a world that you don’t know and I don’t know.”

According to Lang, Wheelock now wants to become an inspirational speaker. He wants to help people avoid the temptation of money and drugs, and if they get locked up, he wants to help them learn how to use that time positively. Wheelock is also working on his memoirs, which he has titled “Faith Without a Date.”

Wheelock will be speaking to Gilbert’s class, The Domestic and International Consequences of the Drug War, on May 14.

“They will be able to meet someone who is a process of justice in America,” said Gilbert. “I am so proud to be friends with someone who has one of the greatest stories to tell about faith and love and the horror of the drug war. It’s got everything. It’s like a movie.”