Essay: The Least of These - 3/22/06
When I was a young reporter, I had the bleeding heart liberal idea that many people in our prisons were victims and martyrs, like Sacco and Vanzetti. Then I covered some trials, and got to know something about the population of our penal institutions.
Sacco, Vanzetti, and Henry David Thoreau were not to be found in the exercise yard. Let me put it this way. Years later, I became friends with an elderly Italian public defender from Brooklyn.
He had spent his career as a court-appointed lawyer for the folks sociologist had taken to calling the “underclass.” “Tony,” I asked him one day, “were any of your clients ever innocent?” He thought about it carefully. “No.” he finally said. “Some didn’t do what they were accused of. But none of them were really innocent, if you know what I mean.”
That’s the skeptical framework I brought with me when I first interviewed Carol Jacobsen about her Battered Women’s Clemency Project. I looked at every one of her cases, and was utterly shaken.
None of these twenty women belong in prison today. The vast majority never should have been in prison at all. They had been brutalized by life, brutalized by parents and husbands and boyfriends, brutalized by the courts and the prison system.
Doreen Washington is in for life. She didn’t kill her husband when he beat her and set her on fire. Her stepson did. But he was only twelve, and they couldn’t then try him as an adult, so they said she put him up to it.
True, Anita Posey did shoot her drug-addicted boyfriend, but only to stop him from smashing her new baby against the wall.
The other cases are pretty much like that. Every one of them ought, I thought, to be released from jail and be given a nice house and a pension, and if they have to raise my taxes to do so, so be it.
A few years ago, Gov. William Milliken, an old Republican guy in his eighties, heard about these women, and became so upset he went to see the current governor, a young Democratic woman. He told her about the cases, and asked her to please do something for them.
Jennifer Granholm smiled warmly, thanked him, and did nothing. Last summer, Governor Milliken told me he had written her more than once asking about clemency for these women. She didn’t even reply. You know what this is all about – politics. Granholm is running for re-election, and her handlers don’t want anyone to say she is soft on crime. So these innocent women sit in jail. I thought of what John F. Kennedy’s enemies used to say, that our politics needed more profile and less courage.
And I wondered what would happen if, on Election Day, every woman who had ever known this kind of fear went to the polls. And wrote in the name of a governor with guts. William G. Milliken.
Whether or not as a women we've known this kind of fear should not be the only qualification to cast a vote against Granholm. Simply being a conscious human being with a sense of what is right warrants reaction come November. To give one's political ambitions priority over another's justice is cowardess.
I did not vote with my party line in 2002, deciding instead to vote for a government official who I thought would be a voice for women's rights. It would appear I have misjudged Gov. Granholm.
Posted by: Kelly DeRidder | March 22, 2006 at 07:38 PM