It was late on the night of April eleventh, nineteen eighty nine, when a single teenage mother of two, Sabrina Butler, went for a job while her two young boys slept at home. When she returned and checked on her nine month old Walter, he wasn't breathing with no phone in a new apartment building, Sabrina picked him up and banged frantically on her neighbor's doors, begging for help. Finally, a woman let her in and showed Sabrina how to perform
adult CPR on her infant son. At the hospital, they couldn't figure out what was wrong with Walter, and they blamed his internal injuries on child abuse. Sabrina was aggressively interrogated well into the morning hours, and a statement was drafted for her to sign, accounting for the damage to his internal organs, a common result of performing adult CPR
on an infant. Tired alone and scared, Sabrina signed underneath the dotted line as an actor protest a parade of medical professionals, and her core statement made Sabrina's not guilty ply look like a callous lie, sending her to Mississippi's Death Row. Her novice trial lawyer contacted civil rights attorney and death penalty activist Clive Stafford Smith, whose investigation discovered and confirmed why Walter had stopped breathing in the first place.
He suffered from chronic nephrotic syndrome brought on by polcistic kidney disease. Sabrina Butler is the first female death row xonnai in the United States. This is wrongful conviction with Jason Flomer, Welcome back to wrongful conviction. Today we have Sabrina Butler Smith, who is the first woman ever to have been exonerated from death row in the United States. And the story is much deeper than that, but Sabrina welcome.
I'm so glad you're here.
Thank you for having me.
And we have another Smith by Skype. We have a British attorney who specializes in civil rights cases as well as overturning death penalty cases in the US.
Clive Smith, thanks for being here and joining us over the phone. My pleasure, Sabrino. Let's start with you.
I want to go back in time to your life, you know, as a teenager, having a child, having a baby, single mom.
Right back in Mississippi. Yes, Columbus Mississippi, right, correct? And what was that like? How'd you deal with it?
That's a lot of responsibility for a young kid like yourself back then.
Well, actually being that young, I was kind of me and my mom didn't have a really good relationship, and so I think that led me down the path that I traveled on. And actually my son that passed he was my second child. I actually had two at that time on my own since I was fourteen, So basically trying to figure.
Out life from fourteen, you have to grow up fast, Yes, I did. Sabrina was convicted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to death for the murder which we know was not a murder at all of her baby boy, Walter Dean Butler. So let's go back to April eleventh, nineteen eighty nine. You went out for a job, yes, and you returned to find a horrible situation.
My son wasn't breathing, and I panicked, and I didn't know what to do because where I stayed at I'd only been over there a little while, didn't have a phone, I had just got the apartment through hood housing. I was a poor teenager that didn't have a job or money, and the people over there did not know me in that apartment complex, so it was kind of hard, and I didn't have a car or anything like that, and so I just grabbed him and started beating on doors
trying to, you know, get someone to help me. And that was very difficult at that time of night because it was late.
What time was it, almost twelve o'clock.
So I did have a hard time trying to get help. The first lady that opened her door, she said that her kids were sick and she didn't have time to take me to the hospital. So that lady closed the door in my face, and when I ran downstairs, a lady from an inn apartment asked me what was wrong and grabbed my son and we took him in an apartment.
She put him on the floor and started CPR. So I went next door to try to get someone else, and finally I got this couple that was willing to take me, and so when I went back in, she told me to hold his nose, blowing his mouth and pressing his stomach, but she didn't tell me the right way, so I applied adult CPR to my son all the way to the hospital, not knowing that whatever was wrong I probably was making it worse. I didn't know that though.
I was just scared and I was trying to get him to breathe, but he he didn't.
And we know that by the time you got to the hospital it was really too late. They attempted to resuscitate Walter at the hospital unsuccessfully, And then I have to say, there are, unfortunately, tragically a lot of cases like this where people, well meaning people like yourself, apply CPR that they've been taught to do, but they have never been taught the difference between doing it for a
child or an adult. And we know that if you do it the normal CPR techniques to a child, it's virtually impossible to do that without breaking their ribs or causing some other kind of injuries.
Because they're so little and so fragile.
Clive, let's turn to you. How did this thing go so wrong so fast? And why was Sabrina convicted when all she was trying to do was help?
Well, I mean, there are several factors. I mean, one is Sabrainer, as she says, was eighteen and panic stricken. Another is that and this was something I didn't know until I got involved in Sabrina's case. Actually that in Mississippi, which is true of all fifty states. If you go to a hospital with a child who's been injured, if the doctors and medical staff report this as child abuse, then they're absolutely immune from being sued or being prosecuted
for anything. If they don't report it as child abuse, then they can be held liable themselves. So what happens when a child is brought in by a terribly panic stricken mother like Sabrina, is there's this osmotic pressure that forces the hospital to look at this and start talking about it as child abuse from the very beginning, whether that's true or false, and their insurance policy makes them do that. And obviously what that does to an eighteen year old Sabrina is make a panic even more. And
then you get this other utterly bizarre thing. I mean, I've done now a lot of shaken baby cases and batter child syndrome cases. There are only two medical diagnoses. They have nothing to do with helping the child to get cured, but everything to do with prosecuting the caregiver.
And that's those two diagnoses. So if you think about it, the diagnosis of that a child syndrome is it looks like the child has been abused, and then there are other elements of this diagnosis that the caregiver changes her story. And this has got nothing to do with treating the child for whatever it is, a broken rib or whatever. It's all to do with prosecuting the parents. So when someone like Sabrina says, you know, I don't know what
happened the child stop breathing. I think he's sick, and then the doctors say, well, I don't think that's true. I think this is abuse. Then someone like Sabrina inevitably starts panicking and saying, well, you know, yesterday he had a little fall, or the other day something else happened. That's then a diagnostic criterion for saying that she abused that child. And then of course the police come in and start getting heavy handed at a young girl la like Sagrina.
When I took my son in, I was panic and I was scared, but I thought about, oh, you're in trouble because you left him at the house by itself. That was my thing. So people were asking me, you know why were there so many statements. Well, the statements was trying to cover up the fact that I had left my son alone for those ten minutes, and so I was trying to explain that away. I knew that I should not have left him at home by myself, but I didn't kill him. I just was trying to
cover that up. And so when we got an interrogation, you know, they asked me a bunch of questions, and I could just remember trying to, you know, say something to that fact.
Did you have a lawyer or anyone to help you as you were there in your most panic state that anyone could ever be in having just lost your child?
The only thing I had With the two detectives that were in the room, and they were dead set on saying, you stump your baby, You beat them. That's what they kept saying.
But how did they finally succeed in their quest to get you to say a bunch of things that not only weren't true, but that you knew weren't true, and that they probably knew weren't true.
Well, the lead investigator kept screaming at me, and when I finally started telling him what exactly what happened, he bought up everything that I had to say, and he threw that in the trash. And after so many hours of him yelling and screaming and looking like he wanted to get up and jump on me, fight me, you know, I was scared. He actually wrote out the statement and
he shoved it in my face. He wrote on the statement that I had punched my son, and I just agreed to everything that they said because I wanted it to end. He kept saying, you know, this is what you did, and we need you to write sign this. You know, they kept screaming at me, and that was like four hours of interrogation with him, and I was just I was tired. I just didn't know how. I just wanted it all to end. So I didn't sign
where he told me to. I signed under the line, hoping that that was my way of saying, look, I didn't do this and that someone would see that.
Well, and at this point, you had been up right, because this started at midnight. This ordeal started at midnight. So now we're talking about a teenage traumatized grieving mother who hasn't slept, who is literally fighting for your life at this point, who knows how you would react. I mean,
we've been talking about false confessions. We of course have our whole new season of the show False Confessions, which is very purposefully highlighting the fact that these false confessions play a role in approximately twenty five percent of wrongful convictions. In your case, the circumstances were even more grave because
we know that ultimately you were sentenced to death. Yes, Clive, howe is it that they did such a ridiculously poor job investigating the medical side of this case, so much so that later on, when Sabrina was finally exonerated, that they basically acknowledge Oh, yeah, didn't really do any work on it. And the doctors were like, yeah, I guess I was wrong about that. I think most people like to think that that couldn't happen in America.
Well, I tell you, when you think about what the causes are of illnesses and injuries and children, we're still pretty medieval in that, and you know we're getting better. But the other factor is that you have a GP. I have great sympathy with GPS. I don't know how on earth how some GP who's meant to know everything about everything is possibly going to be able to figure
out what it is that's afflicting the person. And so you have these folk who actually are just not experts, and they're called in and they're asked to say what happened to this child? And again, all of this had been set in motion by what happened in the hospital, where the doctors had this sort of pressure to say
that it was child abuse. And once they say it's child abuse, people professionals don't like to admit they made mistakes, and they really really really don't like to admit they made mistakes in cases where they contribute to an eighteen year old young woman being sent to death for something
she didn't do. So when a doctor takes a position that this looks like abuse, there's this sort of human pressure to stick with it and to then start justifying it using grand delinquent Latin terms that no one else understands. And you know, in that first trial, there was no challenge, no meaningful challenge to these doctors coming in saying this was abuse, and they stated it like it was, you know, on a tablet and Moses in Mount Sinai.
In this trial, from what I've read and seen about it, it's basically a joke. Not a funny joke, but a joke. I mean, this trial, no witnesses were called in your.
Defense, because the disc attorney subpoened every last one of them. And one of myeries was drunk during the whole trial. He was popping cany in his mouth and he kept telling me, you know, we got this thing nipped in the bud, don't you worry about it. And so that's the way it went through the whole trial. I was just told to look at the jury. That was it.
If you're a corporate lawyer in New York and you're representing someone for money, you get one thousand dollars an hour, and yet in Mississippi, for representing someone for their life, you'd get one thousand dollars for the whole case, and you get what you paid for. And there were two lawyers in Sabrina's first case, and one, as she says, I'm afraid it is absolutely true that he was just a drunk, and the other was this young guy who I have great respect for. But he had no idea
what he was doing. He tried, and you know the thing I'll give him most credit for was after they had failed, Sabrina, the first thing he did was give a call to my office to get some help on the appeal. But you kind of wish that that had happened before poorse Sabrina had got sentenced to death.
The trial took how long it took a week? You had now been held in jail awaiting trial for how long?
Did a little bit over year before I went to try on the first trial?
So you'd been in jail for a year. Obviously, that's the traumatic experience piling on top of the other, you know, awful experiences that you've had already. You've got one drunk lawyer and one lawyer who doesn't really know his way around the courtroom. But you know, you didn't do it right.
So when the jury went out, how long did they deliberate for?
I think about an hour or two. I just knew that they were going to come back and say I was guilty because my attorneys they didn't really, you know, stand up and do anything in my behalf. And it was like everything was solely on the district attorney. The jury was not looking at my attorneys at all. They were looking on the floor, they were looking at the ceiling, they was looking everywhere else but when my attorney spoke.
But when the district attorney spoke, they were on the edge of the seats and so me looking at it at that age, I said to myself, I'm done for I mean, I knew that I just had that filming.
I asked you a question on that though, because you know, if it's my son Wilh and he's died through some tragedy and I'm incredibly broken hearted about it. To then have some prosecutors stand up there and say that I'm guilty of murdering my own child, and then going one step further and being all pious and saying I'm so subhuman that I deserve to die when you know that the worst you did was maybe give out for a jog when you shouldn't have.
Glad. They hurt me with every fiber of my being because I kept asking my attorneys to let me take the stand of my own defense, and they wouldn't do it. They kept saying, we got this thing, we got it nipped in the bud, we don't need you to testify. I bade them through the whole thing, and they will not let me testify it.
And I try, and then they impugned your right to.
Not testify her for themendment right, and then the prosecutor got up in her face.
And said it looked like a right. That's what he did.
The Pacers Foundation is a proud supporter of this episode and of the Last Mile organization, which provides business and tech training to help incarcerated individuals successfully.
And permanently re enter the workforce. The Pacers Foundation is committed to improving the lives of Hoosiers across Indiana, supporting organizations dedicated primarily to helping young people and students. For more information on the work of the Pacers Foundation or the Last Mile Program, visit Pacersfoundation dot org or the Lastmile dot org. This episode is sponsored by AIG, a leading global insurance company, and Paul Weiss Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison,
a leading international law firm. The AIG pro Bono Program provides free legal services and other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals most in need, and recently they anounced that working to reform the criminal justice system will become
a key pillar of the program's mission. Paul Weiss has long had an unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members of our society and in support of the public interest, including extensive work in the criminal Justice area.
When I walked into Mississippi's death throw, I was nineteen. I had to walk down this long haul and when I first got there, they put bugs, bread in your hair. They strip you of everything that you have. I sit in this glass tank for like two hours and I'm looking at all the people going around. And they came and a fingerprinted me and they just took all of what I thought was me away. They gave me this name tag. It had murderer on it, it had my
MDOC number on it, and it had death. So I had to walk with my hands shackled around my waist and I had to walk with leg guards. And I had a security guard who's walking next to me, a correction officer, and he said, you see those inmates out there in that field, He said, we tell them when to get up, He said, we tell them when to go to sleep, We tell them what to eat. He said, what you'll die here. And by the time he said that, by the time I got to Maxic Security, because we
had to walk, I was crying. I couldn't think. I was trying to figure out, you know, what was happening to me. So when I got there, they put me in a six by nine cell, no bigger than your bathroom, and shut the door and left. And during that time, that was one of the hardest things to ever have to deal with, knowing that I didn't kill my son, knowing that these people are saying we're going to kill you.
I had a death date at the time, was July the second of nineteen ninety, and I didn't know that the state had to exhaust all state remedies before they could actually carry out his death sentence. So when that day came, that was one of the hardest days.
Man.
I paced the floor. I listened for every sound I listened to all the no was his keys make because I was thinking that they were coming to take me for my depth. So that is very it was very traumatic for me.
That is completely insane.
I mean, talk about psychological torture beside all the physical deprivation, and for you not to even know that you weren't going to be executed, no one bothered to tell you that you.
Have I mean, that's nuts.
I've never heard that before, and I've been doing this stuff for almost three decades.
It's insane.
And the fact that you're sitting here upright again and smiling. Is I you know, now I'm starting to understand why people say all the great things they say about you. So how did you find the strength to persevere? She was the only woman on death row in Mississippi at that time.
No, I was not. It was another girl on death row named Susan Baffer who helped me a lot. But I say to anyone who asked that question, my most basic strength is Clyde. Because when Clyive, Clive was the only one who came to the prison. Clive brought me artwork. He kept talking to me. He kept saying, you know, give me a chance to look at this case. We're going to fix this. That's why I feel so close to him, because he saved my life. Without Clive or Rob McDuff.
The other attorney, right, correct, I.
Don't think I would be sitting here because I mean he was a godsend. Clyde was a godsend. And I thank him one hundredfold for bringing out the evidence in my case. I really do.
And Clyve, so you got a letter one day in the mail from one of her trial attorneys.
Is that how they started?
I think he called me up actually, and I remember coming to see Sabrina, and you know, I was representing Susie Belfo at the time too, And it's sad to say, not the only time that I've heard of someone on the throw whether Lewis didn't even tell him that they weren't going to get executed. And you know, I remember meeting Sabrina for the first time, and you know, she's a kid, right, Sorry about that, Sabrina, that you were a kid, You're right, and you know she's stuck there
all by herself. And you know, I looked at her case and I thought this is going to get reversed. I mean versus the comment on silence, but there's all sorts of other stuff that the Mississippi Supreme Court actually didn't even reach. So I was pretty confident we were going to get a new trial. But then you know, we were going to have to go back and start again. And you were convinced you were going to get executed. I was convinced you weren't, but there was still a
long road ahead of us. Yeah, the case against it was such nonsense. But nevertheless, you know, once someone's been convicted and since to death, there is a huge presumption of guilt and it's going to be really hard to get them out from under it.
Sabrina on death Rout in Mississippi. I know you talk about the one other person who was there with you, Susan.
Yes, Susan baff Did she give.
You hope to persevere?
I mean you talked about Clive and the other attorney who came to your rescue, quite literally, like the Avengers writing it out of nowhere, I guess.
But were there.
Any God, I'd like to be an Avenger? I appreciate it, I got it.
Well, so Brina and I are going to go to a costume store and get your cake when we're done here.
So all right, Yeah, I don't worry about it.
But yeah, was there any Was there any particular moment that you think back on and you go, that was a moment when I found hope.
Well, I can remember going through my deaf date. Before that. We used to get down on the floor and the toilets were connected between walls, and we would have that as our phone, and I started talking to her. She was older than me. I think Susan was like twenty five or twenty six when she got sentenced in the
same county that I was from Columbus, Misissippi. Clyve worked on her case as well, and so we got to know each other like that, you know, And she started talking to me and was trying to explain to me about the death sentence and how it works and stuff like that after the fact. So that's how I had someone to talk to.
So she communicated through the event or through.
Through the vent, through the vent in the toilet. They kept us where we couldn't talk to anyone. They put us down this hall and they put a piece of tape on the floor because they didn't know where to put female death Row inmates. So we were just down a hall and I think it had no one beyond this point. And as far as me and Susan, we had to sign paper saying that we wouldn't kill each other before we could even go on yard all together. Everywhere we went we had to be shackled. We had
no contact. No other inmates could come and touch us or say anything to us. We were locked down twenty three hours a day, and then when they did give us yard call, it was just stand in this bull pen like you do dogs, with no shade, no nothing. It's just standing out there that's the way they had us.
I mean, it was crazy, but now we know you're here, and I want to highlight that the odds changed a lot in court with proper legal representation that everybody should have.
And Clive, when.
Did you that the tide really turned in the retrial.
Well, you have to remember that actually no one ends up in prisoner on death row for something they didn't do without there being a semblance of evidence. First, there was the question of the injuries to little Walter. You had the injuries to his chest, which we could explain through CPR, and that also tied into the statement against Sabrina, because the police had co aster into saying she punched the child, which wasn't that far from the truth. The truth is she had done CPR to the child in
a way that was almost the equivalent. But this was after the child was succumbing to other things, and so we were able to show to the jury the way that the police co asked. Most importantly I think was the medical evidence. I spent many many long hours in the medical library in you Orleans looking for what I thought the real explanation would be for what we saw in this child. And that was when I came across the chronic neuphrotic syndrome, the syndrome that Sabrina's daughter has too.
You know, this seemed clearly to explain everything we were seeing, and that was one part of hope, because we were able to get our own medical examiner who could give an explanation for what really happened, but also get their medical examiner to admit what he didn't know, and their GP also to admit that they simply didn't know that there was this chronic nephrotic syndrome that could explain all of the things they saw, and they just didn't know
about it because that was beyond their exploitise. And then, you know, I think the turning point in the trial was when we had their cup on the stand and I had this really ugly doll, and I wanted him to show the jury how he would do CPR on a little infant. And you know, it didn't really matter what he did because he was a police officer who
was trained in CPR. So if he did it properly with two little fingers on the infant's chest, then that would demonstrate what no one else in the courtroom probably knew, which was how to do it properly. But if he got it wrong, then that was the end of that case. Because if the police officer trained like that would do CPR in the way that we said that Sabrina had done it, in a way that would crush the infant's ribs, then you know, that was an incredibly powerful argument for
what had actually happened. And sure enough, he would have killed that little child the way he did CPR. He put his two hands on it, and he would have crushed the child. And then of course he went out in the hall, and I knew he was going to tell his body in the hall that we just got him.
So I made an argument to the judge in front of the jury that I was afraid that he was going to tell the next police officer how to do it properly, And sure enough, that's what he did, And so we exposed that when the next guy came in, and that just showed that they were all getting together in the whole way and trying to concoct a case against Sabrina. So all of that went really well. But having said that, there were a couple of other things.
Some of the other witnesses, the neighbors and so forth, who corroborated what Sabrina said, which was that she'd run around desperately trying to find people that take her to hospital and help her. You know, this just showed the truth that here was an eighteen year old who was in a massive panic, as opposed to what the prosecutor wanted to say that she was some sort of sociopath
who had beaten up a little baby. Then you come to the verdict, and I've got to say, you know, capital trials, for me as a lawyer, are the greatest laxative known to humanity. If you're not nervous when you're doing those cases, then you just shouldn't be doing them. And I'm not going to admit to my knees knocking all the probably well, I was trying to hold Sabrina out there.
Oh man, Clive now, I mean when we had to stand before the judge, my legs felt like spaghetti noodles and Clive now was holding me on either side. And I when the when the judge came back with that oh not guilty verdict, I just felt because I I was like, finally this is over, and I'm you know, thinking that it's you know, it's okay, I'm free, but you know that wasn't the whole thing. I wasn't. I'm
still not free. I'm still working through that because after I got out and I got a chance to see my oldest son, I had to fight four more years to get him back. And then my daughter, who is seventeen years old, has the same exact disease my son died from so and it was polycistic kidney disease, and both of her kidney's are bad and they're saying that she will lose both and there's no cure. So it's the same thing. I'm fighting, the same, the same thing every day.
It's hard because I've already lost one.
The reason I consider my profession such a privilege is there is no greater privilege, I think, than being able to help just give someone like Sabrina her life back. It's a fantastic thing to be blessed and be able to do.
It would be great if we didn't have to do these things, but those of us who work in this field movement, I couldn't have said it better myself. I mean, the happiest moments of my life putting my kids in a separate category because that is a separate category.
Well, it's true, but let me say this, Well, I've got to you. I mean, I'm really grateful for you doing what you're doing. And let's just get a commitment on the air while we're here that you're going to carry on doing it for the next fifty years.
What age?
I'm not sure.
Yeah, you will, I will, I can't stop, won't stop, not gonna stop. And just getting to now all the amazing things that Sabrina is doing. Not to spoil the surprise, but Sabrina has been a tremendous advocate for change for almost a quarter century.
Now, if you go to Witness to Innocence dot org, we are deathrow survivors. And if you go to that website then you can get me and several others any other speaker that you might like to come and speak for you.
Right.
That's Witness to Innocence dot org. Witness to Innocence dot org, and you can find Sabrina there as well as so many other extraordinary people who I'm very fortunate to call my friends and who I'm proud to work together in this fight to abolish the death penalty. And before we get to closing arguments. One thing I did want to ask you, Clive, is I would like you to talk about what people should look for if they're on a jury, and how to make our listeners be the best jurors that they can be.
There are several things you should bear in mind. The first is what does it really mean to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt? And I'm pretty horrified when I ask judges about that because when I've asked judges to put a number on it, the average judge, both in America and in Britain, and I've done this many times,
that has averaged out at eighty three percent sure. That means they're aiming to be wrong one time in six and with six million Americans in the judicial system, the judges are aiming to put a million innocent people into prison when they take that as their standard. And as Robin Hurd will teach you, if you aim low, you miss. And the other thing to think about as a jura is there are twelve of you, but there's only one of you, and the one of you is the person
who has responsibility for what you do. So very often there's this sort of herd mentality where everyone wants to agree, but you're not responsible for what those other people do, and as an individual juror, you have the right from beginning to end to say, respectfully, I just disagree. And one of the things we never tell jurors is how they can disagree, so they're never told that. At any moment, you as a juror, can send a note out to the judge saying, well, you know, don't really matter what
these other e loving people are doing. I'm telling you we're not no agree because I think that this person is not guilty and you always have that right, and people try to bully you into not doing that.
Well said, and I'm glad you brought that up.
That's actually a new point I think for a lot of our listeners, and it's super important for everyone to know.
That if you're on a jury, you have that right.
You can just basically say, hey, this is going to end in a hung jury or an acquittal because I'm not voting guilty. And if that's how you feel, don't be bullied. I've heard too many stories, as you have, people who finally just got tired and they wanted to go home and they threw somebody life away literally because of pure pressure.
And it's also because no one told them that is you're right. No one told them that you can say enough is enough now? And I think that's just very unfair on jurist that we don't say that.
No. I think a lot of jurors also aren't told that.
Actually therefore is the only one that really matters because we have to have unanimous jury verdicts in this country. Okay, so now comes the featured part of our show, where I thank both of you profusely for coming in and well, Sabrina for you sharing your story and your remarkable journey. And Clive, of course, thank you for calling in and for all the amazing work that you've been doing.
And so now in.
Order because we save the best for last, with all due respect to you, sir Clive, we're going to save Sabrina for last.
All right, very good? I will. I've been doing death penalty work since I was about twenty, which is a long long time ago, and I do it because of what my mother said to me, which is, there's no point you having a law degree if you don't look at the people that we as a society most hate, and you get between them and the people doing the hating.
And you know, when you think about the death penalty, it's extraordinary in theory, but in practice, when that jury and that judge came back to say to Sabrina, who I count as a dear friend and I count as a very valuable human being, when they came back and said to her that we are going to take your life away. We're going to sacrifice you on the altar to some mythological god of deterrence because we're going to do that to pretend that we're doing something meaningful about crime.
That's just terrific to me. I've watched six of my clients die in the electric, the gas chamber, and the leafl injection gurny, and it's always in the middle of the night for whatever reason, and it's because I think we're deeply ashamed of what we're doing. And each time I have come out of the death chamber and I've looked up at the stars above and I've thought to myself, my God, did that really make the world a better place? And you know, the bottom line is it sure didn't.
And I'm so glad that in Sabrina's case, not only did she not end up on the leafl injection gurney. But she ended up getting her life back and making so much of it, and that's just a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Sabrina Well.
I basically want to say that the journey was not easy. I had to do a lot of growing up going through this trial and tragedy of losing my son. Today I still fight the state of Mississippi where my son is buried. It took me two years to find him. When I did find him, he was buried on a dark gravel road in the woods, on a hill, under a tree, no marker except the little bitty marker that they have. I am trying to fight them because I found out that the death certificate still says today that
he was murdered. Okay, So when I found that out, that was another blow to me as a person, because I'm trying to say, you still have this out here. I was found not guilty. The system of Mississippi paid me for wrongful conviction what they thought it was worth, but you still are convicting me in some sort of way. How could I ever be a nurse or doctor anything
with death certificate that stated that. So the attorney is now working in the process of trying to get the State Examiner's office to change the death certificate in itself. They refused to do that, so now we have to go to That is another battle that I am currently in the process of trying to do. I said that in a sense to say that we are all human beings, we do not have the right as each individual to
take a person's redemptive period. That's my belief. I feel that as long as God has me here, I am going to fight till I can't fight anymore, because that's what I'm here for. I feel like I can go all over the world and talk about this case until I'm blue in the face. If it changed one mind, one heart, then I feel like I'm doing my job. And I just thank God and for all the people that were involved in my case that he gave me
a second chance to try to help someone else. And that's what I'm here for.
Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts.
It really helps.
And I'm a proud donor to the Nisis Project, and I really hope you'll join me and supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future Wrongful Convictions. Go to innisonsproject dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at.
Wrongful Conviction Podcast.
Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one