Summary
Chapter Twelve: Mother, Mother
Stevenson discusses Marsha Colbey, a forty-three-year-old white woman from rural Alabama who gave birth to a stillborn son one day in the bath. A nosey neighbor involved the police to investigate the absent infant. Marsha soon found herself charged with capital murder and was taken to the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women.
A new prison opened in the U.S. every ten days between 1990 and 2005. The prison-industrial complex made imprisonment profitable. Lobbying money was spent to create new crime categories and stoke the fear that increased incarceration. The number of women incarcerated increased 646 percent between 1980 and 2010; two-thirds were imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses. When Marsha Colbey was arrested, five women on Alabama’s death row were condemned for the unexplained deaths of infants and other people in their families, or spouses. Presently, pregnant women can even be sent to prison for being on drugs at any point during their pregnancies, rather than getting them the help they need. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children, meaning their children are put at risk. Marsha met other women in Tutwiler who were also threatened with the death penalty for giving birth to stillborn babies.
The EJI began working on Marsha’s case, and the attorneys learned of the sexual harassment and assault at the prison. Even the prison chaplain was assaulting women when they came to the chapel. The EJI interviewed other women and were shocked to hear of the atmosphere of sexual violence. Several women had been raped by guards and then become pregnant. After years of advocating for Marsha, the EJI was able to prove there was no basis to convict her of murder. She was freed in 2012, after ten years of wrongful imprisonment. Marsha visited EJI the day after her release with her husband and two daughters. Her daughter wouldn’t let go of her mother’s leg.
Chapter Thirteen: Recovery
Stevenson discusses the unexpected events of the days following Walter’s release. A front-page story on the New York Times means they are flooded with media requests. Walter was the fiftieth person to be exonerated from death row since 1976, yet few of those cases had drawn media attention. Lately, the media had been covering the rise in executions. And Walter was a man who had nearly been wrongfully executed.
However, Stevenson knows not everyone in Monroe County is happy about Walter’s exoneration, and with the bomb threats, it might not be safe. Walter stays in Montgomery his first week out of prison, then moves to Florida to live with his sister. Stevenson and Walter talk daily. Walter accepted that his wife wanted to move forward without him. But while Walter is hopeful, he opens up about how much the experience of death row had terrified him, and still did even though he was free.
After a few months, he returns to Monroe County. Stevenson plans to file a civil lawsuit against everyone involved in Walter’s wrongful prosecution and conviction. The state offered no money to help Walter get back on his feet, or to make up for the money lost during his years of wrongful imprisonment. Local press reports that he is seeking $9 million from the state, and friends ask him for money. People can’t believe he had been given nothing. After a year, the EJI reaches a settlement with all parties to provide a few hundred thousand dollars. Meanwhile, Tate goes on to be reelected sheriff.
Walter restarts his logging business and enjoys it until a log breaks his neck. He comes to live with Stevenson in Montgomery for a few months to recover, which he takes in stride until he returns to Monroe and starts a car parts resale business. His property becomes littered with old cars. In the late 1990s, Stevenson started teaching at New York University, flying between New York and Montgomery to run EJI. Walter travels to New York once a year to speak publicly about his experience on death row.
In 1994, funding for legal nonprofits is cut by a conservative administration. The EJI stays afloat through private donations. One day, the EJI is selected for an international human rights award. A film crew interviews Stevenson and Walter. Stevenson watches the interview later, in which Walter, surrounded by junked cars, become uncharacteristically emotional, talking about how rough it had been to be on death row for six years.
Chapter Fourteen: Cruel and Unusual
Stevenson visits a prison in Florida to see Joe Sullivan, a man in a wheelchair. He is kept in a shockingly small cage that his wheelchair gets stuck in and needs to be violently dislodged from. Joe is extremely cheerful to see Stevenson, and Stevenson feels as though Joe is a child. When arrested in 1989, Joe, a thirteen-year-old boy with mental disabilities, is convinced to help burgle the home of an older woman, who is raped the day of the burglary. Joe admitted participating in the robbery but knew nothing about the rape. Nonetheless, he was convicted as an adult and sentenced to life without parole.
The State had destroyed the biological evidence that would have allowed the EJI to prove his innocence. Stevenson decides to challenge his sentence as cruel and unusual punishment. In 2005, the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles under the Eighth Amendment. The EJI wanted to challenge juvenile life-without-parole sentences. Stevenson discusses the case of Evan Miller, a fourteen-year-old condemned to life in prison. He, like most juveniles tried as adults, had changed in significant ways and were nothing like the children who had committed violent crimes.
Stevenson recounts being sixteen and living in southern Delaware when his mother receives a call saying her father had been murdered by several teens who had broken into his house to steal his TV. Stevenson and his family couldn’t understand this senseless murder. Decades later, he could understand that cases such as this couldn’t be understood in adult terms. Adolescents are still developing biologically and psychosocially, meaning they weren’t as capable of impulse control. The stress of being a teen, particularly a poor teen in dysfunctional environments, compounded their likelihood to lack the maturity and judgment necessary to make reasoned decisions. Stevenson takes the case to the Supreme Court and asks that life-without-parole sentences for children be ruled unconstitutional. During his oral argument, he says that the U.S. violates international law by imposing such sentences on children.
Chapter Fifteen: Broken
Walter declines quickly, as he becomes confused, forgetful, and depressed. He is also losing money on his business and drinking heavily. One day he collapses and is taken to a hospital, where he is diagnosed with dementia. Soon he needs to be moved into a facility for the elderly and infirm, but most places won’t take him because of his felony conviction, even though he was proven innocent. Eventually a place takes him in, but only for ninety days. After addressing the Supreme Court, Stevenson goes to visit Walter and is alarmed by how he has deteriorated mentally and physically.
They chat, and Walter eventually says he guesses he is back on death row. He doesn’t understand why he does nothing and then is put on death row. He asks Stevenson to take him off the row again, and Stevenson tries to explain he isn’t in prison, but Walter panics and cries and trembles. Stevenson comforts him until he falls asleep. A nurse says he is usually sweet, but sometimes talks of death row.
Stevenson discusses an execution case the EJI was trying to block for a prisoner named Jimmy Dill. Media coverage of the death penalty had helped lower rates from the nineties on, and many states had taken capital punishment off the books, but by 2009, Alabama still had the highest sentencing rate in the country. Every two months, a person faced execution. Stevenson and the EJI were arguing cases all over the country, simultaneously. He was having difficulty managing the cases, and the EJI was exhausted when Dill’s execution date came up.
Dill was charged after shooting a man during a drug deal gone wrong. The victim died months later after an illness, but Dill was charged with capital murder. Dill had a history of mental disabilities and abuse and drug addiction; he also had a speech impediment that made it nearly impossible to speak. He should have been shielded from the death penalty because capital murder required proving intent. The Supreme Court denied the EJI’s final request for a stay of execution and Stevenson found himself having to tell Dill the news over the phone on the day of the execution.
Stevenson remembers a childhood memory: as a boy, he met a boy with an extreme speech impediment. Stevenson laughed and his mother reprimanded him. His mother told him to apologize, hug the boy, and tell him that he loves him. Stevenson was confused, but he did as she asked. The boy hugged him back and told him he loved him too. Forty years later, this memory comes to him as he is talking to Jimmy Dill on the phone and crying at the injustice of it. People are supposed to judged fairly, considering their life circumstances, but he had been exploited for his inability to pay for legal assistance earlier in his case. Stevenson notes there is no excuse for his having shot someone, but he grows angry as he questions why the State would want to kill all broken people. Dill eventually gets his words out and thanks Stevenson; he says he loves him for having tried to help.
Once he gets off the phone, Stevenson reflects on how he works surrounded by brokenness. A broken system of justice, clients broken by war, mental illness, poverty, disability, and racism, as well as disease, drugs, alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. And these people were judged by others who were them broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice.
He looks around at his files and wonders why he is still doing this. He realizes, after twenty-five years, that he does what he does because he is broken too. One cannot fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. He reflects that being broken is what makes us human—the basis of a shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. The choice was to embrace brokenness and the compassion needed for healing, or to deny it, thereby denying our own humanity. He realizes the people cheering Jimmy Dill’s death are broken too.
Stevenson tells himself that he is more than broken; there is a strength in it. He imagines what would happen if we acknowledged the ways in which we and others are broken, we would no longer take pride in mass incarceration and State execution. He checks the clock and realizes Dill has been executed by now. He leaves his office brokenhearted, but knows he will come back to the office tomorrow; he has more work to do.
Analysis
In the twelfth chapter, Stevenson explains how growing incarceration and the prison-industrial complex led to an explosion in the number of women being imprisoned from the 1980s to the present. The motif of how incarceration affects families arises as Stevenson details how the vast majority of women in prison have minor children, whose lack of parental supervision and trauma suffered from seeing their mothers taken away puts them at risk of developing lasting psychological issues. The theme of inhumane prison conditions is touched on as Stevenson outlines the shocking rates of sexual violence against women in prisons, perpetrated by guards.
Despite the jubilation people felt after Walter’s release, Stevenson worries about how Walter might struggle to recover from his time in prison and reintegrate into society. He is traumatized by the inhumane conditions under which he was kept, and Walter’s wife Minnie has moved on during the time Walter was in jail.
Stevenson also highlights a blind spot in a broken judicial system: even though Walter has been exonerated, the State offers him no financial compensation for his wrongful imprisonment, leaving him reliant on civil lawsuits, which yield less than Stevenson had hoped. Mostly alone and vulnerable, Walter deteriorates mentally and physically.
In the fourteenth chapter, Stevenson further explores the theme of the criminal justice system exploiting vulnerable people. Joe Sullivan is both a child and a person who lives with mental disabilities; nonetheless, he is convicted with little to no evidence and sentenced to life without parole in adult prison. The EJI takes cases like Joe’s and Evan Miller’s to the Supreme Court to challenge the constitutionality of imposing such harsh sentences on children who grow up to be nothing like the children they were when they committed their crimes.
Walter’s dementia and care facilities’ refusal to take in ex-convicts further highlights the judicial system’s blind spots in reintegrating freed people into society. The theme of trauma and the post-traumatic stress Walter experiences arises when Walter believes his temporary care facility is death row. Walter’s vulnerability stands as evidence against the brutality of the treatment he received.
Jimmy Dill’s execution threatens to shake Stevenson’s hope and resilience. He reflects on the stress of dedicating his life to challenging a broken system, concluding that he too has been broken by it. During this epiphanic moment, Stevenson regains his hope and resilience by reasoning that it is necessary to embrace brokenness rather than deny it. Through embracing the viewpoint that all people are broken in their own ways, a person can discover understanding and compassion for other broken people.
