Ian Manuel papers

Ian Manuel, an African American male born in 1977 in Tampa (Fla.), was raised in poverty with experience of violence and abuse. During the two and a half years he spent at St. Peter Claver Catholic School, a historically Black grade school in Tampa that he attended with the support of his paternal grandmother, Linda Johnson, he received awards for excellence in writing. His attendance at St. Peter Claver ended when Linda developed dementia; he attended four public schools in four years and was ultimately labeled "emotionally handicapped". In 1990, with three older boys, he was involved in the attempted robbery of a man and woman in a downtown Tampa parking lot. He was holding a gun, and in the course of the robbery, shot the woman, Debbie Baigrie, in the face. She survived; he turned himself in to the police. He was charged with armed robbery and attempted murder and pleaded guilty on the advice of his court-appointed attorney; at age 14 he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He spent the next 26 years in the Florida state prison system, 18 of them in solitary confinement.

Manuel's interest in writing resurfaced in 1992, the year after his sentencing. He began to write more seriously around 2006, while still held in solitary confinement, producing a body of poetry and longer autobiographical prose pieces. He first appeared in print before his release.

In 2006, Bryan Stevenson, an attorney with the Equal Justive Initiative (EJI), took on Manuel's case in a challenge to the practice of sentencing minors to life without parole. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2010 in Graham v. Florida that such practice for a non-homicide crime violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The EJI consequently appealed Manuel's sentence, but the state of Florida claimed that the ruling did not apply on the basis that attempted homicide should be equated with homicide. Eventually the Florida Court of Appeal ruled in Manuel's favor and granted a resentencing; the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling. At the resentencing, however, the judge sentenced him to the maximum for attempted murder, 40 years, and a concurrent 65 years for the lesser crime of armed robbery.

The disparity between the sentences was not redressed for five years; finally held to be unconstitutional in 2016, Manuel's sentence was amended to 40 years for armed robbery and, on November 10, Manuel was released when his "gain time" in prison reduced the sentence to less than 26 years.

He subsequently spent 10 months in EJI's re-entry program in Montgomery (Ala.) for people incarcerated as minors. In late 2017 he moved to New York (N.Y.) where he worked at Chelsea Piers and then, after the onset of the COVID pandemic, as a contact tracer for the city. By 2021 he was employed in the NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice as a program manager for at-risk criminal justice-impacted youth, advocating for policy change around incarceration, solitary confinement, and mental health.

After his release, Manuel began work on a memoir with editor Erroll McDonald; this work, My Time Will Come, was published in 2021, and as of this writing, the film rights are under option to a Hollywood production company. Manuel received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2017. His and Debbie Baigrie's story was documented the same year as part of the Upstanders series produced for the company Starbucks. in 2019 he performed The Diamond in the Dirt, a one-man show, at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, a performance he reprised in 2023.