When De Anne Dwight got the news about her presidential pardon in January, she was also told not to tell anyone yet.
This after a 28-page application, a document hunt for decades-old papers, an FBI interview and months of waiting as the end of Barack Obama’s presidency ticked nearer.
So she put on some makeup, donned a huge smile and began her shift as a registered nurse at Banner-University Medical Center.
People wondered why she was so happy. Oh, it’s just a good day, she told them. A very good day.
“I’m always smiling with my cute little makeup,” Dwight, 47, says. “People would never believe I have a mug shot.”
After about 17 years of sobriety, she feels she has lived two lives.
She devotes this life, her second chance, to giving other addicts hope. That’s what this pardon is all about for her. She believes God already forgave her, but the pardon is about showing others that recovery can happen, does happen.
A presidential pardon doesn’t erase the past or imply innocence. But it does remove the civil limitations that can follow a conviction and indicate the president’s recognition of a life turned around and responsibility taken.
Dwight’s first life came sputtering to a halt on the cement floor of a holding cell on the Mexican side of the border. It was June 1999 and she was under arrest with two life sentences potentially headed her way: one for possession with intent to distribute and the other for the importation of a controlled substance.
She got caught smuggling crystal meth across the border — not to share, not to sell. It was all for her, she says.
The end of innocence
Raised by her grandparents in Baltimore, with a father who was basically an alcoholic and a mother who died too soon, Dwight says she threw herself into sports and school.
Everything changed when she attended a party with a different crowd.
“It seemed innocent at the time: Put everything you can find in your grandparents’ liquor cabinet and put it in a Tupperware and bring it to a party,” she recalls.
Dwight had her first drink there and got sick. She was raped at that party.
She was 12.
“I went to this other party the same day, where I was really supposed to be,” she says. “And I went to that party and they were playing spin the bottle. I remember sitting on the steps looking down into the basement thinking I could never play that innocent game again.”
Looking for love, looking for drugs
Sitting today in the kitchen of her Tucson home, sun streaming through a window, Dwight marvels about her 17-year marriage to Jeff Dwight. Every five years, the couple renew their vows.
“I would never have guessed in a million years that I would be faithful to one man and love him, you know?” she says. “That’s a big deal.”
That’s because that first party launched her into years of addiction to alcohol, drugs and relationships.
As a 17-year-old, she ran away and was later emancipated, drinking and partying through her last year of high school.
She began a relationship with an older man, with whom she started doing cocaine.
“Pretty much the first time we were together, he was abusive. We ran out of drugs and he tied me up and put a knife to my neck and said, ‘You better be here when I come back.’”
Despite the abuse, Dwight stayed. At some point, crystal meth entered the picture.
When the couple moved to Florida, Dwight, then 25, fled to a women’s shelter.
“I wanted to join the merchant marines, because my grandmother always talked about the merchant marines, but I couldn’t find their number in the phone book,” Dwight says. “So I called the Marine Corps and said, ‘Do you guys have the number for the merchant marines?’ They said, ‘No, but if you come down here, we’ll help you find it.’ Literally, I was in boot camp three days later.”
“Someday this might save your life”
Dwight loved the Marine Corps.
She graduated from boot camp at the top of her class, was expert with a rifle and was going to be an air traffic controller, she says.
“It was the first time I felt like I belonged, like I had a purpose,” she says. “I felt safe at the time away from him.”
The Marine Corps taught her lessons that would later apply to her recovery.
“In the Marine Corps, you get up and make your bed. Unmake your bed. Polish your boots. Polish your gun. Take your gun apart. Put your gun back together,” she says. “I remember in boot camp you walked around the island for three days. Why did we do that? Because somebody told you to. And someday it might save your life.”
It’s the same thing she tells recovering addicts.
“Read the book. Call a friend. Go to a meeting,” she says. “Why? Because I said so. Because one day it might save your life.”
When Dwight was stationed in Memphis, the man she had escaped found her. She gave him another chance and married him. But life began to unravel again when the Marine Corps moved her to Yuma. She says her husband continue to abuse her and at one point drugged her drink at a party.
The Marine Corps didn’t tolerate drug use.
“It was horrible getting kicked out,” she says. “I wanted more than anything to stay. I always tell people the Marine Corps is what saves my life literally today.”
Crossing the line
The end of Dwight’s career as a Marine also brought an end to her marriage.
Men bounced in and out of her life. And then so did crystal meth.
“But this time it was different,” she says. “It was like I couldn’t stop doing it. There wasn’t enough to keep me high enough.”
She stopped sleeping and lost her car. She stopped showing up to work.
Dwight became frustrated waiting for someone else to supply her the drug. Mexico, she thought, was the answer.
She remembers sitting in her closet during a party at her apartment, saying, “God, I’m tired.”
“I hadn’t thought about God at all in the picture,” she says. “And then I joke that two days later, I was resting on the floor of a holding cell in Mexico.”
The next right thing
When law enforcement stopped her at the border and discovered the drugs, they locked her up on the Mexican side, she says. It almost came as a relief to Dwight, then 29, who guesses she was awake for around 11 days on her last high. She crashed on the cement floor.
“Nowhere in my mind did I think, ‘What if Mexico keeps me? That would really suck,’” she says. “I literally wasn’t even in touch with reality.”
She was taken to Yuma’s county jail before being moved to federal prison.
At the now-closed Vida Serena rehabilitation center in Tucson, her life began anew.
“In treatment is where I started living and learning life lessons like you have to be flexible,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what one person says; is it the right thing to do?”
Eventually, a judge dropped the first sentence, and in treatment, Dwight began learning about her fears and anger issues and meeting with a 12-step program sponsor. She started going to church.
She began doing the next right thing and the next right thing. Just like in the Marine Corps.
“People forget it’s that simple,” she says. “They are so worried about the steps and worried about what they have to do on the ninth step that they don’t take time to do the first one: Just don’t drink. Just don’t do drugs.”
A judge sentenced her to time served plus five years of supervised release. That meant the two weeks she spent in jail and the year and seven days she spent in treatment counted as her sentence. That was it.
“When I look back on it, it makes me cry,” Dwight says.
Relapsing was
not an option
The Dwights own a home in an area that De Anne describes as “drug central.” People know that at the Dwights, they can find help.
“I just hate that people relapse,” she says. “They keep putting themselves in that situation when there’s hope and there’s help.”
Dwight never allowed herself to relapse. She fought the temptation during treatment by walking her “prison circle” — a space about the size of a jail cell. She repeated her mantra: “Drinking and using are not an option.”
She met her husband, Jeff, in a 12-step program.
“The truth is no one can understand the life that we have to live to keep this life other than someone who’s living it,” she says. “I always say you either get drunk together or you stay clean together, so for 17 years, we’ve been clean together.”
She started working in radio, going to Pima Community College, and working at her church.
Dwight comes from a family of nurses and earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Grand Canyon University. She was licensed as a registered nurse in 2010 and later earned a master’s degree.
But still she has to check that box on applications. Yes, she is a convicted felon.
The presidential pardon doesn’t change that — she still has to check the box — but now she has a powerful stamp of approval.
Paying freedom forward
Since leaving treatment, Dwight has always volunteered with people, especially women, in recovery.
“It’s what she does in her everyday life now,” says her friend Karen Wendling, a former children’s minister at her church.
Dwight invites the women she mentors into her home so they can see normal life — dirty dishes in the sink, two crazy dogs, walls that will never quite be white. No drugs, no alcohol, no addiction. Hope.
“She was bringing me over to her house, which was just amazing, because I just got released from prison,” says Jennifer McPheron, who is now director of Miracle Center, a Christian nonprofit that supports homeless adults. “It helped to save my life, and she didn’t think twice about it.”
McPheron, 38, approached Dwight at an AA meeting after the older woman shared her story. “I was still on parole and knew if I used again, life would be easier in prison: They told you what to do and how to live. But when I heard D talk, I thought, ‘Okay, if there is any hope that I could be like her, then maybe this is worth it and I can give it a shot,’” McPheron says.
Rachel Redman, a special education teacher in Sahuarita, is another woman who approached Dwight after hearing her story.
“When I was coming out of one of the darkest times in my life, she really helped to guide me on to a path of integrity, where I was able to face my past and deal with the consequences of it and then grow,” says Redman, 35.
Pardoned
Dwight hopes the other 63 men and women who received a presidential pardon on Jan. 17, 2017 take advantage of the opportunity to give someone else hope.
“She is almost the poster child of someone who deserves this pardon, because she is a completely different person than she was when she committed those crimes,” Redman says.
The formal letter Dwight received from the White House concluded with Obama’s signature and these words: “I applaud your ability to prove the doubters wrong, and to change your life for the better. So good luck, and Godspeed.”
This is life forgiven.
