redemption. Prop.57 offers Khan and other incarcerated people a second chance by allowing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to increase the percentage of 'good time credit' they can earn.
"It's a bittersweet feeling." Khan said of the possibility of going home sooner. "It would feel great to get out, help my family, chase my dreams, be married, to have kids. But saying all that... my victim doesn't have that opportunity because it's something I took from him."
Khan wasn't always so thoughtful. When he was 18 years old, he didn't think through the consequences of his decisions. He fought at school until he was expelled. He struggled at home with the isolation he felt because his mother moved away with a new family and his uncle threw him out of the house.
"I didn't think I'd end up here," Khan said, sitting in the media center at San Quentin State Prison where he works as a radio journalist and video editor.
Dark eyes set above a strong nose. Khan presents the profile of a Bollywood actor. His short hair is gelled and neat; he tailors his clothes to fit his slim, athletic frame.
"When I got kicked out, I went back to school, applied for jobs, I was homeless, but I thought I'd save a little money, move to Hollywood, become an actor. I wanted to prove I wasn't a fuck up."
Khan didn't go to Hollywood.
The day before he would interview for a job at Office Max, he agreed to help two friends and a third person - one he'd never met - rob a drug dealer. Had Khan known that the third person was bi-polar, schizophrenic, off his medication, and armed with a concealed knife, he would never have lured the drug dealer into the back of the stranger's van
"We thought we'd just take it," Khan said, referring to the four ounces of marijuana that the victim had brought to the drug meet.
"We thought we'd just take it," Khan said, referring to the four ounces of marijuana that the victim had brought to the drug meet.
These days, Khan is adamant he should've known that the kind of decisions he was making - fighting, smoking and selling marijuana - would eventually lead to darker deeds. But Khan also reveals that he and his friends specifically committed themselves to not use a weapon.
"We were in the back of the van and the victim sensed something was wrong." Khan describes what he called the worst decision he's ever made, clasping his hands until his knuckles whiten. He punched his victim and took the drugs. Then the man he'd just met - his mentally ill co-defendanct -- dragged the victim out of the van and stabbed him.
Khan says he didn't know the victim had been murdered until he was later arrested and fingerprinted at the police station.
"It was night time," he said. "I couldn't really see. I thought they were fighting, but he was stabbing him to death, I couldn't believe it when an officer told me. I just started crying."
Khan was convicted under the felony-murder rule, deeming him guilty of premeditated murder.
The rule doesn't require death to be a forseeable consequence of the robbery; a man died during the commission of a felony. After a jury found that he knowingly participated in a robbery wherein someone died, Kahn was sentenced to 25 years to life for first-degree murder. The man who actually stabbed the victim to death is serving 15 years to life for a lesser charge.
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