Sacramento Bee
By Cynthia Hubert - Bee Staff Writer
Published 5:58 am PDT Thursday, May 3, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1
From the back seat of a parole officer's car, James Tramel stared at the cinder block buildings that had been his home for so many years.
He watched as California State Prison, Solano, faded into the distance, and he pondered the future.
It was March 2006.
James Russell Tramel was Father Tramel now. The convicted murderer who had spent more than half his life behind bars was an Episcopal priest.
In prison, Tramel had found redemption.
But would the rest of the world forgive him?
***
On a cool April morning more than a year later, Tramel stood before his congregation, resplendent in a white robe and gold stole.
Inside historic Trinity Episcopal Church in San Francisco, with its Tiffany stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings, the choir sounded like a gathering of angels.
From behind the altar, Tramel smiled at faces both new and familiar, including his wife, Stephanie, and their new baby, Liam.
"The Lord be with you," he said, his voice bright and resonant. "Let us pray."
For years, Tramel said in an interview, he thought and prayed about this place, which was founded in 1849 and is the oldest Episcopal church on the West Coast.
While he was in prison, where he spent many hours ministering to inmates with AIDS, he had heard that Trinity was having its own crisis. It had lost dozens of members to the disease. Its surviving congregation was struggling.
A few days after his release in 2006, Tramel said, he visited the church and immediately knew it was his destiny.
Now the Rev. James Tramel's name is on the sign in front of the historic building. By a unanimous vote of the church's vestry and the approval of the bishop of the diocese, he became the church's rector late last year.
"James is a living witness to the fact that there really is hope," said the Rev. Jim Richardson, an Episcopal priest in Sacramento who is chaplain of the California Senate. Richardson and many others served as a powerful support system for Tramel while he was incarcerated.
"He is proof that there can be redemption," Richardson said. "That a person really can turn his life around."
Now Tramel is working to change the lives of others, and not only from the pulpit.
On a recent spring day, wearing a black suit and a white collar, he sat inside a hearing room in the state Capitol.
The Senate Public Safety Committee was discussing a bill about life sentences for juvenile criminals, and human rights groups lobbying for the measure had asked Tramel to tell his story.
As he spoke, the room fell silent.
One night in 1985, when he was 17 years old, Tramel played a role in the stabbing death of a homeless man named Michael Stephenson. A prep school roommate, David Kurtzman, wielded the knife that killed Stephenson while Tramel stood by. Tramel got 15 years to life; Kurtzman got an additional year for use of the weapon.
The youths had sought retaliation against gang members who had roughed up some classmates. Stephenson, who wasn't involved, became their target.
During his incarceration, Tramel started to pursue what he described as a longtime religious calling. He began studying to become an Episcopal priest, and was ordained in an unprecedented ceremony inside the prison in 2005. He fought for his freedom, and finally won. He got married and had a child.
At the time of his crime, Tramel testified, California law barred life sentences for juveniles. Today, youths who commit heinous acts can be ordered to life in prison without possibility of parole. Tramel was trying to persuade the panel to advance Senate Bill 999, a bill that would give these juvenile offenders an opportunity to earn their freedom after 25 years in prison.
Young criminals deserve a second chance, Tramel told the lawmakers.
Without a "glimmer of hope," he said, they "can die a kind of moral death."
"For juveniles, life without parole amounts to a sentence of death without execution," said Tramel. "We lose nothing by holding out hope for such children."
Later that day, Tramel learned that the bill had cleared its first legislative hurdle.
* * *
Tramel lost more than time during the 21 years he spent behind bars.
While he was in prison, both of his maternal grandparents died. So did an uncle who had been a father figure to him when he was a boy. He missed his sister's wedding and the birth of her two children. While Tramel did his time, his friends got their first cars, went to the prom, attended college, started families.
"I was very much aware that the milestones of my life and my family's life were passing me by," he said. "I came to accept that I might never leave this place, but I knew that if that was the case, I could still be a person of God."
Tramel sought forgiveness from Michael Stephenson's relatives, he said, but they rebuffed his gestures. He became a mentor to other prisoners. He kept vigil over sick inmates, and held dying men in his arms. He studied feverishly, and earned bachelor and master of divinity degrees.
But for all his progress, he never allowed himself to dream of having a family of his own. Then he met Stephanie Green.
Green began visiting Tramel with a group from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley who were helping him achieve his goal of becoming an Episcopal priest.
Tramel and Green became close, and started talking about the possibility of one day building a life together.
The circumstances were awkward at best. Every telephone call between them was electronically monitored. Every meeting took place in a visiting area with other inmates and their families. Tramel questioned at times whether it was fair to Green to carry on a relationship that was so abnormal. But Green never gave up on him, encouraging him and visiting him and working behind the scenes for his release.
"He was someone with whom I could share every detail of life," said Green, also an Episcopal priest.
"I truly believed that no one could attend to me like James. He was worth waiting for, and worth working for."
In 2005, the parole board voted to free Tramel, and last year the Governor's Office allowed the decision to stand. Shortly after he got out of prison in March 2006, Tramel and Green got married in a civil ceremony. Later, they held a formal wedding celebration. Tramel was in the delivery room when their first child, Liam, was born this past February.
"Just when you think that your heart can't open anymore, this child comes into your life and takes hold of you," Tramel said, his eyes glistening with tears. "It's such a blessing."
Tramel, 39, who lives in Berkeley and commutes to his parish in San Francisco in a blue 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, said he remains in awe of his new life.
The world no longer is monochromatic. Every tree and flower and sunset is cause for celebration. Friends and family have never been so precious. Food has never tasted so good. Silence, so rare in prison, brings him immense pleasure.
"It's so hard to describe it," he said. "Just waking up in the middle of the night and seeing my son sleeping so peacefully is amazing. I know I have never done anything to deserve that kind of feeling."
Yet Tramel and his loved ones are realistic about the challenges of his dramatically new life.
"This isn't Cinderella," said Green. "One doesn't so easily begin to live happily ever after after so long in prison. It's not the end of something, it's the beginning of a new journey. There will be beautiful views, and there will be steep climbs."
There is, for one, the ghost of Michael Stephenson.
"The grief about what I did to Michael is something I have to live with every day," said Tramel. "I think a lot about him, and about everything the Stephenson family lost."
Stephenson's loved ones are unconvinced of his sincerity. His father, Edward, in previous interviews with The Bee, has called Tramel's transformation a clever ploy to get out of prison, and the Stephensons have shown no interest in having any contact with him.
"I've apologized in the deepest way that I know how," Tramel said. "I respect their wishes to refuse contact with me, but I will always be open to talking to them."
Recent efforts by The Bee to reach Edward Stephenson were unsuccessful.
In February, Tramel traveled to Santa Barbara to meet with Assistant District Attorney Patrick McKinley, who successfully prosecuted his case and later argued for his parole.
After that meeting, Tramel went to the place where Michael Stephenson died, a park frequented by homeless people.
He spoke to a few men at the park, he said, and then laid a bouquet of flowers in the grass.
"I felt that I owed it to Michael to face this place," Tramel said.
"At that park, I saw the ghosts of those teenagers all those years ago. I said a prayer for Michael, and then I left."
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