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With Women In The Lead, Abolishing The Death Penalty Gains Traction

S Sabrina Butler Fresno Ca2

When Sabrina Butler’s baby stopped breathing one day in April of 1989, she tried administering CPR on the way to the hospital, but the baby died shortly after they arrived. Police accused her of beating her baby. After hours of aggressive interrogation, the 17-year-old signed a paper given to her by a hostile detective.

Sent to a county jail where she languished for a year awaiting trial without access to an attorney, she recalls thinking, “How could this be happening? It’s like a bad dream.” During her trial, “the judge overruled everything my attorney said,” she now recalls. “I was called a monster and denied the chance to speak.” After an hour of deliberation, the jury convicted her of capital murder.

At the county jail she was stripped, shackled, sprayed with disinfectant, and threatened by a security guard. Put in a six- by nine-foot cell, she “sat on the floor for weeks crying.” Then she began visiting the prison law library.

Her death sentence was overturned in 1992, but Butler languished in jail for another three years before a second trial proved her baby had died of a genetic kidney disorder. Finally, in 1995, Mississippi’s only female inmate on death row was exonerated.

Butler, who wrote a book in 2011 called Exonerated, now works on behalf of Witness to Innocence—“the only national organization composed of and led by exonerated death row survivors and their loved ones.” She travels widely to share her story, advocating against the death penalty. “It’s my calling,” she says. “I want to tell people that no matter how bad things are, you can effect change.”

In light of recent botched executions, multiple exonerations, and Big Pharma companies abroad refusing to supply lethal drugs for U.S. state executions, abolishing the death penalty has gained notable traction, with women increasingly becoming visible leaders. Called to this work as social activists, family members, organizational leaders, and exonerees like Sabrina Butler, they are changemakers who are educating the public and bringing much-needed reform to a broken justice system.

Even though women constitute less than 2 percent of those on death row, Butler’s story is not as unusual as it might seem. According to the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University’s School of Law, “Innocent women accused of heinous crimes face extraordinary challenges. In many cases, they are suspected of harming their children or other loved ones. As a result, when under investigation, they are coping with deep personal losses, rendering them especially vulnerable to high-pressure interrogation tactics that sometimes lead to false confessions or seemingly inculpatory statements. When women—traditionally viewed as nurturers and protectors—are accused of murdering or sexually abusing children, they are particularly reviled by society, including by police, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and witnesses. In cases in which no crime has occurred—such as those arising from accidental or natural deaths that are mistaken for homicides—convictions are likely to ensue. Because the evidence in such cases is often entirely circumstantial, identifying wrongful convictions is difficult and rectifying them is complicated.” According to the clinic, in 64 percent of female exonerees’ cases, no crime had occurred.

Sister Camille D’Arienzo, an activist with the Sisters of Mercy in Queens, New York, became involved with the issue in 1993, when George Pataki was promising to restore capital punishment while running for governor of New York. D’Arienzo and a group of friends sent then-governor Mario Cuomo the Declaration of Life, an anti-death penalty pledge created by a former Maryknoll priest. Cuomo immediately signed it, and the story was picked up internationally. D’Arienzo started ministering to prisoners on death row, work that continues to this day for the now 81-year-old nun. “My advocacy against the death penalty is constant,” says D’Arienzo, who hosts an annual service for families and friends of murder victims against the death penalty where, she says, “the feminist, maternal bond is very strong.”

Then there’s Bonita Spikes, whose husband, Michael, was killed in a convenience store robbery in Maryland 20 years ago. The life she led with her husband of 23 years and their four sons changed “in a matter of minutes.” But over the years her experience motivated her to “reach out to other families who’ve suffered the traumatic loss of a loved one to murder.” Focusing on African American communities in Baltimore, she knows people “who have little or no access to professional help coping with their overwhelming loss.” Still, she says, for most of these families, the notion of a death sentence for their loved one’s murderer “isn’t even a remote thought.”

Spikes testified before state lawmakers annually for eight years until the death penalty was repealed in May and funds saved were allocated to victims’ needs. “We worked our butts off lobbying, and we changed legislators’ minds,” she says. “I did it in Michael’s name.”

“We know the death penalty costs millions of dollars more than a system that has life without parole as the maximum sentence,” Spikes testified in 2008. “Just a fraction of the savings from repealing the death penalty could impact thousands of people in need of support and grief counseling, and hundreds more who need intensive mental health care. And as a black woman, it is also important for me to point out that the majority of black voters now oppose the death penalty, with three-quarters supporting replacing it with life without parole. This is important from a victim’s perspective because in the vast majority of murders in Maryland, the victims are African American.”

Joyce House worked for years to get her son Paul released from Tennessee’s death row. Wrongfully convicted of rape and murder in 1986, he languished in prison, ill with an untreated neurological disorder, until a semen specimen proved that he had not raped the victim. Prosecutors still tried to convict him on the murder charge. The media picked up the story of Paul’s erroneous arrest, his treatment in prison including serious medical negligence, and the abuse he suffered by a corrupt legal system at the local level. Finally, in 2009 all charges were dropped.

During the ordeal, Joyce proved to be a formidable advocate, alerting the media and writing to the governor to tell him it was “his job to know what was going on.” Now she and Paul, members of Witness to Innocence, continue to speak out at colleges, churches and other venues.

Currently, 32 states have the death penalty. Since 1973, more than 140 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence—an average of three per year between 1973 and 1999, and five per year since 2000.

The women in this story often work closely with organizations working to abolish the death penalty state by state. Sabrina Butler, for example, has joined forces with the ACLU in Kentucky, where a bill to end capital punishment was introduced in August by Republican Rep. David Floyd. According to Kate Miller, program director for the state’s ACLU, Republican sponsorship of the bill was possible “because with more people recognizing the injustices of the death penalty, legislators are willing to speak out about it.” Conservative legislators are also increasingly open to arguments about the cost and inefficiency of the death penalty, she says, realizing it is not a deterrent to violent crime. Among the strategies used to engage conservative groups, Miller and her colleagues organize talks by death row exonerees and have brought still-incarcerated speakers to various audiences. “It’s really compelling to hear their stories. We don’t attack anyone for their views; we just share stories. It’s changed minds.”

In Tennessee, where Stacy Rector is executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, “folks don’t know much about the death penalty,” she says. “We try to get information to people to engage them in the work.” This year, perhaps because the legislature brought back the electric chair, more people are openly discussing the failures of the death penalty. According to Rector, some legislators realize the system is “too far gone to be fixed.” But there is a lot of work yet to do in Tennessee, where ten executions are scheduled to occur between this fall and 2016.

“Women are strong,” says Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “It’s important to have them in the forefront of the movement because they are standard-bearers for our culture.”

Adds Alicia Koutsouliereis, a volunteer with Amnesty International USA, “Listening to some of these folks’ tales, seeing their capacity to forgive, it’s hard not to follow them in knowing that state-sanctioned killing won’t bring closure. What good comes out of the death penalty?”

Bonita Spikes says she found her strength in being with other women in the movement. “I got spit-fired when I met those women!” she recalls. “They were relentless and inspiring. Now I talk to everyone to see what I can do.”


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