#279 Maggie Freleng with Sylvia Boykin

A note for listeners, this episode contains discussion of child sexual abuse and attempted suicide. Please listen with caution and care.

Jason, we talk a lot about false confessions, and we know how and why they happen. Is there a scenario in which you would willfully confess to a crime like a murder.

Well, I can envision the scenario which I would confess to a murder that I didn't commit, and that would be if I became so disoriented, scared, confused, lonely, and just terrified of the people who we all believe are there to protect us and to help us and to find the truth when they turn on you. Sometimes people see it as their only way out of that impossible situation.

And he kept saying, well, if you sign this, i'll let you go home, and so I was like, but this is not what happened. So we get me to the chair and he hit me with a phone book to wake me up.

He's like, sign this and we will.

Let you go.

I signed a paper and I never left prison.

From Love of for Good.

This is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today Sylvia Boykin. On May fifteenth, nineteen ninety two, Sylvia Boykin went to collect a drug debt from a woman named Burnetta Pope. Sylvia showed up at the house in North Philadelphia with two men, Lamont Antoine Blackman, and Aaron Major. Burnetta owed Sylvia money, who in turn owed Antoine and Aaron as well as other men who were higher up in the

But Sylvia did not shoot anybody.

I went there with no one chitches that no one would get killed. I didn't kill anyone. I didn't order for anyone to get killed.

I'm Sylvia Boaken, I'm sixty three, I'll be sixty four in two days, and here I said thirty one years later in a prison.

Sylvia Boykin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May twenty sixth, nineteen fifty eight.

She's the youngest of six kids.

So when I was born, all my sisters were grown and they were having babies, so I grew up with my nieces and nephews.

On the surface, Sylvia's life seemed great. She went to Magnet Schools for kids with high IQs, and when she graduated, she moved to Virginia for college, where she studied data entry and medical administrative assistance. She had a good job at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Virginia was on her way to greatness. But Sylvia wound up on a different path, one of substance abuse and addiction.

Somewhere inside of me, I was running.

God always had his hands on me, but I was running, and I was trying to I was trying to find something to fix the pain because I was hurt, like very bad, which is a really tough subject for me.

Sylvia's inner trauma and suffering it started when she was a child and her grandfather sexually assaulted her.

He didn't actually like have sex with me, to penetrate me anything, but he touched me in my private area. But that was just like the beginning, you know, of things that happened in my life.

As a child.

Then, at ten years old, she was raped by her nineteen year old brother.

I had to go to the hospital, and I was a very young girl, and at that time I was stitched up, and I was told by my mother and not to tell the police who did it because that they would arrest my brother.

The assault and rape, plus the fact that her family covered it all up, took a huge.

Toll on Sylvia.

After I was raped by my brother, I took my mother's sleeping hills.

I tried to kill myself when I was ten. Yeah, I took the whole bottle.

Oh my gosh, who found you?

My knee's Valerie, and she's like two years younger than me. She found me and she went and got my sister. They took me to the hospital. They pumped my stomach and they put me in the children psych wood.

Sylvia's older sister, Teresa, was furious at the situation an intent on making sure Sylvia would be safe going forward. The whole family lived in a three story, do you Sylvia lived on the first floor with her mother and brother. Well, the rest of the family lived upstairs. Teresa lived on the second floor.

She took me and wouldn't let me sleep downstairs in my mother's part. She said, I couldn't stay down there. She took me and so I stayed up in her part until I healed up, till I got well.

And this isn't even the extent of Sylvia's suffering. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Sylvia was again molested numerous times by close family friends.

So I went through a lot of.

Being raped and molested that I used to just go, like get in the front of the church for altar prayer and I would just stay there and pray, and you know, I just wanted to like, why why did these people do this to me?

Well, Sylvia's sisters tried to protect her from the sexual abuse. Sylvia sought out coping mechanisms.

My sister she would she started, she would give me beer, and sometimes she would give me strictest liquor called Macnoidan's and she would give me some.

So, you know, do you think your need to escape is kind of what led you to drug use.

Yes, I always felt like I needed to run away. I needed to numb the pain. So I would always be like the life of the party, like everybody wanted like to be around me, And sometimes I think I tried to ship my brain off from it.

Eventually, when she was seventeen years old, Sylvia met the man who would become her first husband. She was motivated to move forward past the trauma and build a normal life.

As a little girl, I'd always dream about just having this beautiful home and children and a husband and just being very happy. I used to always draw pictures like that when I was little, with the sunshine and the house with a talent and trees.

I used to always draw those pictures in school.

Sylvia ended up having three daughters, Penny, Tsha, and Kimberly. She was seventeen and she had Penny, her oldest. Here's Penny.

She was reay, I would say, into our lives, meaning she was you know that mom that was into you know, the girl scouts, the PTA meetings. She was always you know, into the family functions and you know, everything with us.

Sylvia tried her best to be a good mom and wife, but the damage from her past experiences inevitably disrupted her personal life.

I've been married four times already, but I could never maintain, like keep them a marriage going.

As the distractions from her trauma became increasingly destructive, Sylvia eventually started abusing hard drugs like crack.

Do you remember any of her drug use?

Yes, yes, I remember. She tried to keep it undercover, but as me being the oldest of three girls, I noticed a lot that was going on with her.

For example, Penny says she remembers late nights out and a lot of trips in and out of the house.

She would be late for jobs. She would work jobs, but she would be late or sometimes she would be tired, and so we would have to fund for ourself. And when I say fund for ourselves, get up and get ready for school, I will be responsible making sure that we got up for school, or making sure everything was handled in the household. It was a lot because I felt like it was unfair to me. And I would say at that age, I had a lot of goals for myself, a lot of things I wanted to do

But instead Penny would wind up permanently taking care of her siblings. By nineteen ninety two, Sylvia was suffering from a serious addiction to crack, and to finance her own addiction, she was selling it for a network of street level drug dealers. Sylvia says she sold crack to forty three year old Burnetta Pope on a few occasions, but she also felt sorry for Burnetta. She describes the house Burnetta was staying in.

No furniture, no running water, the bathroom didn't work still TV a few old cheers like Willie Nasby. I bought her a sweatsuit to put on. I took food there and gable food, and I had just recently met them and they were very kind to me.

In May of nineteen ninety two, Sylvia was waiting on seven dollars from Burnetta and then from the network, including one of the bosses, Joseph, demanded she get the money.

I didn't know how the whole operation was working.

Allie knew that he would tell me to take stuff to her and that I would go back to pick up the money.

So she went to the place where she knew Burnetta was staying.

I went around here to collect money for him.

She said that she didn't have the money and she wasn't paying, and so I told him so.

The next day he told me to go back.

On May fifteenth, Sylvia smoked some crack, drank some booze, and returned to the house. This time she brought seventeen year old Lamont Antoine Blagman and nineteen year old Aaron Major. These two were also part of the dealing network, and Sylvia wanted to prove that she had actually been trying to collect the money. She owed them all along. She also thought their mail presence would persuade Burnetta into paying. They all went in the same car together, Sylvia driving.

I went in the house first to ask her for the money. She said she wasn't going to pay the money in whatever, So I went back out and I told Anon Antoine that she said. Aaron Antoine went in and I don't really know exactly what happened, but I guess everybody started arguing and all I heard was a couple of gunshots by Froze. I was scared and I was like what happened, So they ran they left me. I drove and when I went around the block, I seen them. Then they got back in across me.

Even after what had just happened, Antoine and Aaron still demanded their money.

So I went to ATM machine.

And I took the money out of my bank account and I paid them.

Sylvia says she dropped them off and went home.

She had no idea the gunshots she heard were bullets coming at the neck and leg of Burnetta Pope. This episode is underwritten by AIG, a leading global insurance company. AIG is committed to corporate social responsibility and to making a positive difference in the lives of its employees and

When he arrested me, he handcuffed me to a chair for hours, and he kept adding to me what happened, And I told him.

I didn't really know what happened.

And I was talking to him and I was scared and I didn't know, you know, what to say or what to do. And he wouldn't let me go to the bathroom. He let me urinate on myself.

Then, she says, detective Dusak wrote out a statement for her to sign.

I kept telling him I had three children at home, and he kept saying, well, if you sign this, I'll let you go home, and so I was like, but this is not what happened.

So he kept me to the chair and then I kept falling asleep and he hit me with a phone book. There's a.

Paperbag phone book to wake me up. He's like, sign this and we will let you go. I signed the paper and I never left.

Prison after that interaction, Sylvia ended up being charged with first degree murder on top of robbery, conspiracy, and possession of instruments of a crime. Antoine and Aaron were also charged with murder, robbery, and a host of other crimes. The three of them went to trial on March twenty third, nineteen ninety four, and were all tried together. The prosecutor was John Doyle. His argument was that Sylvia ordered Antoine and Aaron to kill both Burnetta and her son Albert.

In fact, because it was.

Agreed that Sylvia was unarmed, Albert's statements were the main reason prosecutors could even charge Sylvia with murder in the first place. Prosecutor Doyle also presented Sylvia's signed statement, as well as one from Aaron Major. There's no evidence that Antoine Blackman signed a statement, but the defense council said that the two statements that were presented were coerced. In fact, on the stand, both Antoine and Aaron said that Sylvia did not have a gun and did not order anyone to shoot.

All three also.

Contended that Albert actually threatened them with a gun. First forensics showed that Burnetta was shot by two different guns. Although accounts of very the defense and prosecution agreed on one thing. Sylvia did not have a gun and did not shoot anyone. What was that like to see your mom in cuffs and facing a murder trial?

I mean, that's I imagine it's really traumatizing.

Yes, it was, you know, not being able to touch her or talk to her and seeing them question her. And for me most because my grandmother was there and at the time, my grandmother was starting to go through dementia,

On April first, nineteen ninety four, Sylvia, along with Antoine and Aaron, was convicted of first degree murder. Sixteen year old Penny was now in charge of taking care of her younger siblings, and it was hard.

I would tell friends like far as school jobs. When they would asks about my mother, I would say that my mother is still live in Virginia, so that did not know that my mother was incarcerated. And I'm gonna be honest, it was that love hate relationship.

Penny says it's been difficult to visit her mom in prison over the years.

So to be honest. As a kid, we did go a lot. It was a group that went up and they took the children all the time. But as I got older, I stopped going because I didn't like it at all. I didn't like the way it felt to me. I didn't like seeing my mother like that, so I really didn't. I stop going a lot.

But now that she's an adult with children, Penny wants her kids to have a relationship with their grandma, so they visit her.

It's the only way for her to have a relationship with them since the sac You know, she is a lifer and unfortunately we grew up and we had kids of our own, and that's the only way she would have a bond with them and see them.

Meanwhile, Sylvia filed appeal after appeal to no avail. Neither of her two attorneys were effective. Sylvia's trial attorney, Michael Wallace, failed to file her appeal in a timely manner, so he was unable to appeal to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Eventually, her rights to appeal were reinstated and she got a new attorney, James Bruno, But the appeals that Bruno filed were all denied and exhausted, leaving Sylvia very few options

One of the tragedies in this particular case is that she never had adequate legal representation.

This is doctor Jill mccorkyl.

I'm a professor of sociology and criminology, at Villanova University, and I'm also the founder and the executive director of the Philadelphia Justice Project for Women and Girls.

Doctor McCorkle studies how mass incarceration intersects with gender and poverty. She was looking into another similar case, a woman who is not the shooter in a crime and also got a life sentence when she came across Sylvia's case.

There are a number of women with similar kinds of scenarios where it's the principal offender is a man.

She says, women are often at a unique disadvantage in this situation.

They're unable to cooperate with police because usually they're scared of retaliatory violence, and then you know, police and prosecutors engage in a malicious prosecution. And so that's really how I got to Sylvia.

Doctor mccorkyl believes that Sylvia would have and should have been treated as a witness, and that it was Sylvia's hesitancy to cooperate with police that got her the murder charge. Remember when the police asked Sylvia what she knew about the crime and if she knew Antoine and Aaron, she said no.

I was scared, and I was like, what did they go do something to my girls if I go tell on him what happened. I was scared, like, I got three girls at home that's alone, and I was afraid that if I told on him, like it's something that might happen to my daughters.

Doctor mccorkyl says that a lot of women like Sylvia, who are vulnerable because of poverty, precarious lifestyles, drug and alcohol abuse, and her domestic violence, are not in a position where they can cooperate with police and prosecutors.

Puts them at risk. It often puts family members at risk, and police and prosecutors, I'll say, I'll be as generous as possible, misinterpret that hesitancy, and I think in some cases honestly take that unwillingness to cooperate as an indicator of criminal culpability and then hit them with elevated charges

Sylvia took those chances and they didn't land in her favor. Albert's contention that Sylvia ordered the hit ended up being her downfall, and doctor mccorky believes that Albert testified to this because of pressure.

He faced at the time.

He had an open drug charge, and after he offered up this information, he was able to plead a very favorable and short sentence to his own case, even though he never initially said that Sylvia ordered the shooting. But doctor mccorky believes that Albert's testimony about Sylvia during the trial is actually one of the most preposterous things about Sylvia's case.

When Sylvia is initially arrested, she's arrested for robbery, maybe simple assaul or aggravated assaults, nothing about murder. So even when the police pick her up, there's no you know, kind of framing of Sylvia as somehow this you know, criminal master mind or street heavy ordering the execution of the people in this house. Now, Albert testifies to that, and I think probably does so because that's the only way that prosecutors can can hook Sylvia on in any

Doctor McCorkle has studied crack cocaine markets in depth. She says knowing their structure is key to understanding the forces that led to Sylvia's conviction.

These markets are organized hierarchically and by gender. You know, Sylvia is in her thirties at the time this goes down, and so one of the things that prosecutors are doing at trial is saying, here's this woman in her thirties and she's got these two you know, teenagers, so she's the adult, so therefore, you know, she must have been in charge of this. But that's not how crack cocaine markets work. These markets and particularly the responsibility for retaliation

That's men.

Even though Antoine Blackman was eventually released from prison, doctor mccorko believes him to be the likeliest shooter in this case.

The mythology on the street is, yeah, you give a teenager the gun because they're not going to get as lengthy a sentence as an adult Wood, Which is the other reason that it's entirely plausible to me that blackman is the shooter. He's the juvenile, and so that's certainly not unusual. It was the norm to have a juvenile be the shooter. So I can see major handing that gun to blackmen.

Sylvia was left with a life without parole sentence, and now with her appeals exhausted.

Where we're really left here is commutation. And I think she deserves commutation on her merits, you know, without even looking into the kind of specifics of all, right, well, how culpable was she in this particular case. But I think on her own merits, she deserves to have a sentence commutation, which would release her from life in prison without possibility of parole. It would allow her to go home to her family.

Sylvia has made the best of her time in prison.

However, She's gotten, you know, multiple certifications, and she's got three decades in Certainly, Sylvia has done everything that we would expect someone to do over the duration of such a long period of time.

Sylvia goes to church for weekly services, Bible study and prayer. She has continued to develop her computer skills and she studies entrepreneurship, but she especially enjoys being a certified peer specialist.

Train us to like sit down and to listen to people, you know, so it's not like to tell them what to do, but just to be listening and caring and helping them to find their own answer.

And it makes you feel good.

Also, I try to help, like a lot of the young people, I try to guide them. I try to talk to them a lot about being here and going home and making a change in their life.

Sylvia loves doing this and this is what she wants to continue to do. Doctor McCorkle has also offered her a position with the Philadelphia Justice Project for Women and Girls.

When she gets out.

We're going to have her be our ambassador and do a lot of outreach to other incarcerated women. And certainly, you know, there's there's no better expert both with respect to these kinds of prosecutions, as well as you know, an expert in what it means to be a woman, to be a mother, to be a grandmother, Navigating decades in prison.

I feel like after thirty one years in here that I've came to know myself. I have so much that I want to give back. I want to be able to go out and to help young people. I want to be able to tell my story that helps some young girl know that no matter what happened in her life, no matter if she was molested, no matter if somebody you know led her down the wrong road to get on drugs or to drink, that she can't change.

Sylvia is now sixty four and in declining health. Among her ailments is psiatic nerve damage, arthritis, and herniated disks, all of which cause her daily pain.

It is costing Pennsylvania taxpayers so much to lock up a prison population that you know, twenty five percent of them are fifty and older, and it's just incredibly expensive, and so regardless of sort of where you're situated politically, there's a recognition that we have got to get aging people out of prison.

While Sylvia knows she's not directly responsible for Brunetta's death, she still feels regret over what happened.

And I'm just so so sorry everyone that I heard for a paid that I cost.

I'm very sorry for that. I wish I could take it all back. I wish I could go back to that day and two things are different. I would just wish I could just go back.

In July twenty twenty one, doctor mccorkyl submitted a letter to the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons urging them to grant Sylvia commutation. Sylvia's case is up for review in October twenty twenty two. She needs a majority of a five person panel to move to the next round of voting, where she will need all five votes to be free. If you'd like to show your support for Sylvia, go to free Sylvia boycrind dot com to sign a petition calling for her commutation.

Next time.

On Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling, Troy Berner.

You know I didn't have nothing to do with it, so you know, and they're not going to be to find nobody to say I had nothing to do with it, so you know, I held on to that, you know, that belief on where they say the truth says you're free.

Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in our bio to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our executive producers Jason Flahm and Kevin Wurtis, as well as our senior producer Annie Chelsea, researcher Lila Robinson, story editor Sonya Paul, with additional production by Jeff Clyburn and Connor Hall. The music in this production is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph.