Detroit

After 31 years, togetherness: Man serving life term for $62 theft comes home to wife

Norman Sinclair / The Detroit News

DETROIT -- Ronald James Coleman Bey was 24 years old when he was sentenced to life in prison for pointing his finger, stuffed in his coat pocket, at a clerk and stealing $62 from a Wayne State University bookstore.

Now, after 31 years behind bars and a Dec. 4 parole, the 55-year-old Coleman Bey celebrates the holidays and his Christmas Day birthday at home with his wife, Judith, his best friend of 40 years. She said his return is a happy ending to a spiritual love story.

He adopted the name Bey in 1976 after his conversion to the Moslem Moorish Science Temple of America, although prison records still list him as James Percy, an alias he was using when he was arrested.

His wife said they began dating three years before he was sent to prison. She said after he went away, she finished school and began her career as a nurse.

Four years ago, on Dec. 1, they were married at the Macomb Correctional Facility. Judith Coleman Bey credits the spiritual nature of their relationship with keeping them together over the decades, even though they once went 10 years without communicating with each other.

"Through the years he was in prison, we were spiritual soul mates," she said. "I've always felt we were in a spiritual marriage for 34 years and legally married for four years," she said.

A December 2003 story in The Detroit News about the high cost of keeping inmates in prison long after they were eligible for parole featured the case of Coleman Bey.

He was then among 834 inmates serving life sentences that made them eligible for release after 10 to 20 years, depending on the crime. The group was being denied parole under revised rules adopted by a new parole system put into place by former Gov. John Engler.

The new board interpreted a life sentence as natural life, drawing protests from judges across the state who never intended for inmates they sentenced under the old law to spend their lives in prison.

Contacted by The News in 2003, retired Recorder's Court Judge John Patrick O'Brien, who sentenced Bey, was stunned to learn he was still in prison.

So far this year, Bey is among 18 lifers paroled as state budgetary shortfalls, a $2 billion corrections budget and an overcrowded prison system forced the governor to order reviews of parole guidelines and policy, resulting in the release of hundreds of nonviolent and older inmates long eligible for parole.

Bey is applying for state identification, a driver's license and a job in the building trades he learned in prison.

He said he survived prison because he took his mother's advice when he was sentenced: Serve the time and not let the prison system wear on him.