BY NOW MANY have read and been moved by the extraordinary mea culpa published in the Shreveport Times by a man named Marty Stroud III, who more than 30 years ago sent Glenn Ford to die for a crime he did not commit.
“How wrong was I,” wrote Stroud, who as a young prosecutor convicted Ford, a black man, with the help of an all-white jury in Louisiana’s Caddo Parish. Stroud’s murder case against Ford was bankrupt on its face — at trial, a key witness admitted in open court that her testimony had been a lie. Yet Ford didn’t stand a chance. His court-appointed lawyers had never handled a criminal trial, let alone a capital case. He was sentenced to die, though fortunately never executed. After decades spent fighting to prove his innocence, Ford was was finally cleared after the DA’s office revealed it had obtained exonerating evidence. But by the time he was released from prison last year, at 64, Ford was sick with cancer. Doctors say he has just months to live. Ford has spent his last days fighting for financial compensation, which the state has so far denied him. In his anguished letter to the Shreveport Times, Stroud said that Ford “deserves every penny” for his lost freedom and expressed deep remorse “for all the misery I have caused him and his family.”
Stroud’s apology made headlines across the country. The National Registry of Exonerations called it “uniquely powerful and moving.” In a culture that shields prosecutors from having to answer for even the most outrageous miscarriages of justice, Stroud’s letter is indeed an astonishing read. Though no substitute for accountability — he denies any intentional misconduct — Stroud lays bare the hubris that drives state actors to aggressively pursue even the most questionable convictions. “In 1984, I was 33 years old,” Stroud writes. “I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning.” Stroud recalls going out for drinks to celebrate Ford’s death sentence, which he labels “sick.” Not only because Ford turned out to be innocent. But because today Stroud believes that, as a fallible human being, he never should have had that kind of power to begin with. The death penalty, he writes, “is an abomination that continues to scar the fibers of this society.”
Stroud’s dramatic conversion, his revulsion at the memory of toasting a death sentence, echoes a story told by a different man, former Florida prison warden Ron McAndrew. On the morning after overseeing his first execution in 1996, McAndrew went out to the “traditional breakfast” with the execution team, at a Shoney’s in Starke, Florida, just 15 miles from the death chamber. “Everyone in the restaurant knew who we were and what we had just done,” he wrote, “there were even a few ‘high five signs.’” He spotted the defense attorney who had tried to save the life of the man he had just helped execute. “I saw my own sickness on her sad face,” McAndrew wrote. The ritual felt wrong. “It was my first and my last traditional death breakfast.” Later, Esquire would publish a profile of the former warden. It was titled “Ron McAndrew Is Done Killing People.”
Others who once operated the machinery of death have reached similar epiphanies. Two years ago the Guardian published a sobering Q&A with Jerry Givens, a retired executioner who killed no fewer than 62 prisoners for the state of Virginia. Givens, a clearly traumatized man, said taking the job was the “biggest mistake I ever made.” Today he serves on the board of Virginians Against the Death Penalty. Former Georgia warden Allen Ault, who presided over five executions and now speaks out against capital punishment, says he has “spent a lifetime regretting every moment and every killing.” Jeanne Woodford, who gave the order for four executions as the warden of San Quentin Prison, later became the executive director of the abolitionist group Death Penalty Focus. In 2013, the New York Times ran an obituary for a warden-turned-academic who oversaw three executions at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm. It included his nagging belief that one of the men may have been innocent. In its headline, the Times remembered him as “Donald Cabana, Warden Who Loathed the Death Penalty.”
These are transformative figures. Their accounts, while powerful on their own, are important in the space they create for others to change as well — perhaps even some still working inside the system they have since disavowed. As Americans increasingly question the death penalty amid new exonerations and botched executions, we can probably expect — and should encourage — more of these stories.
Yet as these narratives become more ubiquitous, they also expose a nagging hypocrisy. If we are drawn to such expressions of penitence and moral clarity, if we see them as brave or enlightened or even noble, why don’t we grant people in prison the same potential for change? Why have we abandoned rehabilitation, once supposedly central to the mission we call “corrections,” and replaced it with the longest sentences on the planet? Why do we give people who do bad things so few pathways toward redemption? Is it too much to consider that murderers in prison are as complex and human as people who kill in the name of the state?
Earlier this month, the state of Georgia came within hours of killing 47-year-old Kelly Gissendaner for the murder of her husband in 1997. Although her degree of culpability made her case controversial — the killing itself was carried out by a boyfriend — there was no question of her guilt. But as her execution neared, it was also clear that Gissendaner was more than the crime that sent her to death row. While incarcerated she became a student of theology and a source of strength to fellow prisoners. If someone was “being escorted across the yard with cut-up or bandaged arms from attempted suicides,” one former prison guard told the New York Times, others “would yell to Kelly about it.” She “could talk to those ladies and offer them some sort of hope and peace.” Yet as a matter of course, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole rejected Gissendaner’s clemency petition. Her contributions behind prison walls held no value to authorities in the outside world. Gissendaner is only alive today because of last-minute concerns over the efficacy of the execution drugs the state was set to use. Georgia still plans to kill her.
Even as more states abolish the death penalty, we have installed in its place different forms of permanent punishment, astoundingly long sentences that deny people’s ability to evolve — or even the human tendency to “age out” of crime. Today, one in nine U.S. prisoners, including people convicted as juveniles, are currently serving a life sentence, according to the Sentencing Project, and “those with parole-eligible life sentences are increasingly less likely to be released.” More people than ever are serving life with no possibility of parole — including thousands for nonviolent offenses, as the ACLU found in a major study in 2013. In Shreveport, Louisiana, where Glenn Ford was wrongly sentenced to die, a lesser-known man named Sylvester Mead was sentenced to die in prison after he drunkenly threatened a cop while handcuffed in the back of a police car. As I noted at The Nation, Mead’s own trial judge argued that his offense “does not warrant, under any conscionable or constitutional basis, a life sentence.” Yet “Mead’s prosecutor appealed multiple times seeking a harsher sentence because of his old convictions.” We can try to construe this as justice. But like Marty Stroud in 1984, this was a prosecutor bent on winning.
There are some signs that we are moving in a slightly more rational direction. California is releasing “lifers,” only a small fraction of whom are landing back in jail. The Supreme Court is chipping away at permanent sentencing for juveniles. Criminal justice reform is in vogue on Capitol Hill. President Obama recently told the Huffington Post he plans to use his clemency powers “more aggressively” to benefit nonviolent drug offenders. In testimony before Congress last week, before a task force charged with recommending improvements to the federal prison system, Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project said it is time to get past “modest reforms” and boldly proposed that we cap federal sentences at 20 years. “How much punishment is enough?” he asked. “What are we trying to accomplish, and where does redemption come into the picture?”
If there is room for redemption at all — and if we are honest about addressing the crisis of mass incarceration — we must start by recognizing that the 2.3 million people we have put behind bars are no less human than the rest of us. That includes many who have done terrible things. What if we gave more prisoners a second chance, some meaningful shot at parole — an opportunity to redefine their legacy, like Marty Stroud did when he sat down to write to the Shreveport Times? What kind of human potential might they reveal?
Some have made efforts to answer this question. Just a few days before Stroud wrote his letter, the Los Angeles Times profiled a group of men in at San Quentin, who as part of a writing class, were asked to invent their own obituaries. “These were people who were best known for their worst decisions — stabbing a man to death, gunning down a bystander, robbing banks,” the Los Angeles Times reported. But their teacher wanted the group to imagine how they might otherwise be remembered — “What is your real value?” The resulting essays yearned for redemption. One man, convicted for a gang shooting, pictured himself getting stabbed to death while trying to break up a prison fight. Another prisoner, serving more than 30 years on robbery and firearms charges, imagined dying a free man, getting hit by a car when trying to help a stranger with a flat tire. His obituary boasted that he had “finished top of his class in Janitorial duties” at San Quentin, and said that he had spent his time behind bars focused on his future. In real life, the author died less than a year later, at 42, still behind bars.
“Looking back at that period of time in my life, I was not a very nice person,” Marty Stroud admits about the man he was when he sent Glenn Ford to die. Few seem to doubt his sincerity. How many people in prison would say the same about their own worst mistakes? Would we listen?
Photo: Charles Ommanney/Getty Images
No prisoner in this country will ever be treated like a person a gain after conviction. Tom Brocow’s Prison Nation has a good explanation, but seeing how much we pay per prisoner is where the real issue shows itsself.
Why not abolish prisons? Substitute strict probation, fines, restorative justice (apologies), community service (e.g., run daycare centers), required workfare, required high school and college attendance. Most of these guys are harmless anyway.
This is a beautifully written article. As a criminal defense atty, I read a lot of articles and books on this subject and this i e is particulalry moving, effective, and on point.
I’m certain now that the RWNJs in the USA! USA! USA! will be so heartbroken over this that it might take them a whole afternoon to get over it.
The biggest horror shown toward the use of the guillotine during the French Revolution was that it was used on aristocrats instead of the poor. The mindless drool, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” was written by a social-climbing European doochebag trying to brown-nose her way into British society. Such is the attitude of the ‘accomplished’ and the ‘successful’.
And what do we do about the fact that one has ever gotten elected to important office on a platform of showing compassion and leniency and common sense to alleged criminals?
Talk about it; public discourse can change opinions. See my reply to Juan for a book by a political science prof who tells us how difficult it will be. But if no one begins the talk, one person to another, one journalist after another, one voter to one legislator, nothing will change.
I am happy to see this article approaching the idea of mercy and redemption; I’d like to see it spread further. I found it on Prison Legal News. I did not know The Intecept; I’ll visit it regularly now. Change is slow, but without individual action nothing will happen.
I’d like to see this discussion focus on those long sentences, including life without parole and natural life. There are far too many of them, mostly for murder but also other crimes. These sentences are especially popular as alternatives for the death penalty; LWOP is often called the Other Death Penalty. These sentences grew up in the 80s and 90s, being used in ways they never were before. We need public discourse about who gets them, why, why some sentences are lesser – it’s a long-needed public consideration of just what these sentences mean.
I’d like to recommend two books – Mother California, by Kenneth Hartman, and Too Cruel, Not Unusual Enough. Both have changed my way of thinking. Hartman is sentenced to LWOP in California; his memoir demonstrated the process of redemption.
So true we imprison for far too long in this country. That issue isn’t discussed nearly enough.
Yeah, all the talk is about exoneration, the death penalty, and what are termed non-violent crimes. Everyone avoids the big issues; politics and perceived public opinion are limiting the discussion, but only by public discussion will opinion change. I have another book to recommend.
Caught; the prison state and the lockdown of American politics by Marie Gottschalk. I believe it should be as widely read as The New Jim Crow. It’s longer, more dense, but very revealing about how our criminal justice system got where it is. There’s a chapter with a title containing many non-s that is all about politics, perceived public opinion and LWOP. I recommend reading at least that and the opening chapter.
Our society thinks itself so enlightened that it has left religion behind. The frustration is that people think something isn’t “religion” as long as they don’t say it is. To illustrate, consider the Russians: whenever they are allowed to be Christian, their anti-gay attitudes are religion; but when they are Communist, the same attitudes are… what?
The same holds with executions. A State can erect an elaborate, special edifice for shooting a man to death, acknowledging that it is guided by the doctrine of blood atonement, and acting in accordance with scripture that a murderer shall die. The State can know that the People’s Republic of China conducts the same executions far more efficiently by a slightly different ritual, but would reject the suggestion to follow their lead with sectarian fervor. It can know that the killing serves no social purpose, not to deter crime, nor to save money, and that it can kill its innocent citizens. Yet they feel they must do it… why?
Whether ISIS puts a prisoner in a cage to burn, or U.S. slowly poisons one or shoots him down, the same Angel Moloch is the sole beneficiary.
Why do we always focus on the innocent and the death penalty? I am pleased to see this article mention long sentences, life without parole for example, but so much of the article, and the comments, talk about the innocent and the death penalty We need more talk about long sentences, we need more talk about redemption ( which, by the way, is always ultimately the achievement of the person, not some training process) and more public discourse and legislative action about those long sentences, and the lack of parole in many states and the federal system.
I have two books to recommend. Mother California, by Kenneth Hartman, a man sentences to life without parole, shows how personal redemption comes about. Too Cruel, Not Unusual Enough is a collection of essays by people with very long sentences throughout the US. This is published by a group taking action against life without parole from behind bars; the essays are varied, and astonishing. Reading those books did a lot to change my thinking.
Shaun King has more on this subject
King’s article presses the point that these wrongful convictions are not by accident and not (only) because the justice (sic) system is overloaded. It is because the system is polluted with vile people who are in a position to carry out their vile desires of ruining or ending the lives of others. And, of course, bigotry plays a large part in these injustices, same as bigotry plays a large part in how often police harass, brutally attack and, of course, kill people. And those killings are almost always immediately excused by five words the killer cop will scrawl into his or her report: “I feared for my life.” The same nationwide team of corrupt prosecutors, investigators, clerks, stenographers, judges, media stars and everyday citizens go along with that excuse over and over again, no matter how obvious the evidence shows otherwise.
“According to the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of Michigan, 1,569 men and women in the United States, most of them African American, have been completely exonerated after being wrongfully convicted and sent to prison. The number of people exonerated for wrongful convictions actually broke a record high in 2014 with 125 exonerations, including six people who were actually on death row awaiting execution.”
—
“But the conversation should not end at our conclusion that these wrongful convictions are a travesty. It appears, though, that an entire section of America refuses to believe that police or prosecutors can ever do any wrong at all. Except they do. Often.
“Detective Louis Scarcella of the NYPD is accused of framing suspects, forcing fake confessions, and using the same single eyewitness for multiple murders. Many men who were wrongfully convicted under his watch have recently been exonerated and 50 of his cases are under review.” –Shaun King
The best satire on the American death penalty was written by H.L.Mencken. In fact, you have to read it twice to make sure it is satire. Excerpt:
There is no mystery why we have long sentences and keep our prisons full: money. It’s as simple as that. As with all things involving the government, follow the money and all will be revealed.
Very thought-provoking juxtaposition.
Mercy is among the qualities that uplifts humanity from the level of a mere dumb animal existence or worse. The philosophy behind the utilitarian dogma of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, et al. that assumes human society to be based upon the rule of arbitrary power is what has brought us the current nightmare. The principles of our constitutional republic have now largely been turned inside out. It is very late in the game to attempt to salvage our waning humanity, precisely why we must lift our voices urgently as this article has done.
Early in my legal career I concluded that prosecutors were the very worst of my colleagues. The majority get hardons (including the women) by locking people in cages or killing them. They bribe witnesses — legally — and employ snitches and others to testify when a reasonable person would or should know they are lying. How is this not sociopathic?
When someone has done something heinous and for the protection of us all must be removed from society, that is a tragedy; it isn’t a procedure or outcome that should inspire satisfaction, much less glee. (Victims and their families understandably might have these feelings, but even there, indulging such emotions can destroy one’s personality and/or life.)
Marty Stroud turns out not to be a sociopath (a bit late for Glenn Ford), but all too many prosecutors are.
Yet another excellent thought provoking literary masterpiece Ms. Segura.
The comments on this one should be interesting and revealing.
“Would we listen?”
I believe that individuals would absolutely listen but not enough to change the nature of a society which is dominated and controlled by a few for the profit of the few.
The challenge then is to change the society view to one which is dictated by higher values of tolerance as opposed to one which is dominated by lower ones like absolute economic and political control.
In the United States, we no longer have a government of, for, and by the people. This is why the citizens are largely living in a sick environment of fear resulting from prolonged denial of basic needs (such as food, water, shelter, energy, clothing) and other material denial resulting in spiritual deprivation. This is what must change before we examine the symptoms of injustice in sociological issues that have arisen directly from the results of allowing a representative republic to be confiscated by economic coup; into a totalitarian model.
In other words we must first form a society is that representative of the masses not the 0.01% elite; that is eliminate the element of total economic control. Once that is accomplished many sociological problems arising from injustice will cease to exist.
State ordered execution is neither reasonable nor necessary in a society driven by higher values. It is; in itself a crime against humanity.
The only thing more evil than convicting an innocent man to be punished would be subjecting any man to “rehabilitation”. No man deserves that because desert is the result of justice. Rehabilitation is the result of experts doing monstrously cruel things in the name of fixing a condition.
As C. S. Lewis noted:
http://www.angelfire.com/pro/lewiscs/humanitarian.html
The reason is this. The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. I do not here contend that the question ‘Is it deserved?’ is the only one we can reasonably ask about a punishment. We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these two last questions is a question about justice. There is no sense in talking about a ‘just deterrent’ or a ‘just cure’. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.
The distinction will become clearer if we ask who will be qualified to determine sentences when sentences are no longer held to derive their propriety from the criminal’s deservings. On the old view the problem of fixing the right sentence was a moral problem. Accordingly, the judge who did it was a person trained in jurisprudence; trained, that is, in a science which deals with rights and duties, and which, in origin at least, was consciously accepting guidance from the Law of Nature, and from Scripture. We must admit that in the actual penal code of most countries at most times these high originals were so much modified by local custom, class interests, and utilitarian concessions, as to be very imperfectly recognizable. But the code was never in principle, and not always in fact, beyond the control of the conscience of the society. And when (say, in eighteenth-century England) actual punishments conflicted too violently with the moral sense of the community, juries refused to convict and reform was finally brought about. This was possible because, so long as we are thinking in terms of Desert, the propriety of the penal code, being a moral question, is a question n which every man has the right to an opinion, not because he follows this or that profession, but because he is simply a man, a rational animal enjoying the Natural Light. But all this is changed when we drop the concept of Desert. The only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures. But these are not questions on which anyone is entitled to have an opinion simply because he is a man. He is not entitled to an opinion even if, in addition to being a man, he should happen also to be a jurist, a Christian, and a moral theologian. For they are not question about principle but about matter of fact; and for such cuiquam in sua arte credendum. Only the expert ‘penologist’ (let barbarous things have barbarous names), in the light of previous experiment, can tell us what is likely to deter: only the psychotherapist can tell us what is likely to cure. It will be in vain for the rest of us, speaking simply as men, to say, ‘but this punishment is hideously unjust, hideously disproportionate to the criminal’s deserts’. The experts with perfect logic will reply, ‘but nobody was talking about deserts. No one was talking about punishment in your archaic vindictive sense of the word. Here are the statistics proving that this treatment deters. Here are the statistics proving that this other treatment cures. What is your trouble?
The Humanitarian theory, then, removes sentences from the hands of jurists whom the public conscience is entitled to criticize and places them in the hands of technical experts whose special sciences do not even employ such categories as rights or justice. It might be argued that since this transference results from an abandonment of the old idea of punishment, and, therefore, of all vindictive motives, it will be safe to leave our criminals in such hands. I will not pause to comment on the simple-minded view of fallen human nature which such a belief implies. Let us rather remember that the ‘cure’ of criminals is to be compulsory; and let us then watch how the theory actually works in the mind or the Humanitarian. The immediate starting point of this article was a letter I read in one of our Leftist weeklies. The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our laws as a crime, should henceforward be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse. What he complained of was not the shutting up but the letting out. On his remedial view of punishment the offender should, of course, be detained until he was cured. And or course the official straighteners are the only people who can say when that is. The first result of the Humanitarian theory is, therefore, to substitute for a definite sentence (reflecting to some extent the community’s moral judgment on the degree of ill-desert involved) an indefinite sentence terminable only by the word of those experts—and they are not experts in moral theology nor even in the Law of Nature—who inflict it. Which of us, if he stood in the dock, would not prefer to be tried by the old system?
It may be said that by the continued use of the word punishment and the use of the verb ‘inflict’ I am misrepresenting Humanitarians. They are not punishing, not inflicting, only healing. But do not let us be deceived by a name. To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of ‘normality’ hatched in a Vienese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors hav succeeded or I grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared—shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust—is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.
No one “deserves” punishment. As humans we have a strong emotional impulse toward retribution and revenge, but it is irrational if the notion of free will is, at best, debatable.
If the goal is to stop crime, prevention — before the fact and rehabilitation after — is the rational goal. And the humanitarian one.
That’s a fascinating essay, tz, thanks. (I immediately thought of how it might apply to the Aniah Ferguson case, and I went back an saw that you posted it there, but the fact that she’s a minor is a crucial consideration.) Some more from the essay:
(*) That is definitely true.
Every advanced/civilized country in the Western World effectively abolished the death penalty over half a century ago. If Americans want to think of themselves as “civilized” they ought to give some serious thought to this.
There are civilized Americans but most want to think of themselves as macho world champions, which is why they play sports no other country plays and kill people in small countries which cannot fight back.
In 2013, only 21 countries in the world are believed to have carried out executions (from Wikipedia): Afghanistan (2), Bangladesh (2), Botswana (1), China (1000+), India (1), Indonesia (5), Iran (369+), Iraq (169+), Japan (8), Kuwait (5), Malaysia (2+), Nigeria (4), North Korea (+), Palestine (3+), Saudi Arabia (79+), Somalia (34+), South Sudan (4+), Sudan (21+), USA (39), Vietnam (7+), Yemen (13+).
there is a way to cut down on this. Instead of a permanent district attorney a county would create a pool of criminal lawyers who would either be from in the district attorney’s office and the public defenders office. Then you create 2 lists, the states attorney and the public defender. All the lawyers are split between the lists and as their name gets to the top they are chosen to try a case. once they are finished they are taken off the list they are on and moved to the bottom of the other list. This way lawyers will have to work both the state and the defense.
A person could still hire a private lawyer instead of using the public defender.
There also has to be an agreement that neither side can spend more than 20% than the other.
I have an alternative. Pass a law that states “should a person, who was found guilty based on criminal prosecution misconduct, is later proved innocent, said person shall be legally allowed to beat the shit out of his prosecutor within an inch of his life, whereby at the conclusion, said prosecutor shall serve out the rest of said persons sentence in solitary confinement .
I’m positive overzealous prosecutors will think twice.
My experience of many years with California’s criminal justice system has demonstrated that public defenders tend to be inexperienced attorneys wishing to earn their way into the more prestigious ranks of criminal prosecutors, and that District Attorneys are in a club with judges and police. It is all a game, and the point is to win one for the team and rack up impressive scores to tout for statistical outcomes. The term “justice” is routine deception that assures the taxpayers that the enormous costs of salaries and the business of incarceration is above reproach.
Thanks for this article Liliana. If only we had the wisdom of age on our youth, how different might this world be?
Since that can’t happen, the next best thing is to widely share the wisdom of those who have the courage to share their own regrets with us. Thank you for enabling that process.
What if, in that final moment, before the switch is thrown, or the syringe is injected, or the trap door catch is released, or before the click of a trigger, the executioner refused?
We all have within ourselves the power to choose what to do and what not to do.
State ordered murder is morally wrong same as any other murder.