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Before signing off on the settlement offered by the state, Judge Thompson toured the prison once again in 2004 and spoke directly to the warden and several of the inmates to determine what changes had been made since he had declared it unconstitutionally unsafe two years earlier. He first asked to speak with the warden, whose statements to him at his first visit had been very frank and forthright about conditions at the prison and the serious problems with assaults, crowding, and inmate idleness. For the most part, she agreed that with what the prison had at hand, as far as resources, the settlement would prove to be a workable solution. One of the most helpful aspects would be the requirement for the state to keep the prison’s population at seven hundred or less; it had reached its high of 1,017 in 2002, and was designed at that time to hold 617.
One prisoner testified to the judge that a night hadn’t passed in segregation (where she was being housed for disciplinary purposes) when she hadn’t had to kill at least ten bugs. She also told the judge that guards had harassed some of the inmates about taking part in the lawsuit, telling them it wouldn’t improve their lives.
Another woman told the judge that she had been at Tutwiler for eighteen months, and she had been denied and delayed medical care for her serious problems with high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes. Her free-world doctor, she said, had faxed a special request to the prison regarding her treatment. Because of the requirement in the settlement that prisoners be allowed to continue taking their prescription medication once they were incarcerated, she hoped that the settlement would be approved.
Following the tour, Thompson told the press that he was particularly concerned with the issue of mental-health treatment for those inmates who were in need of it. He wanted to be sure the staff understood that the inmates had a problem, and that their needs were recognized. He also spoke about the excessive heat, insect and spider infestations, crowding and understaffing, and shortages of programs that would give the inmates the opportunity for self-improvement and continuing education.
Having toured the prison and heard the testimony of staff and inmates, with a wide majority in favor of the settlement, Judge Thompson gave it his signature of approval, and it became final.
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Despite the court-ordered changes and the settlement reached between the court and Tutwiler Prison for Women, conditions had not seemed to improve a great deal by the summer of 2007. The state’s largest newspaper reported that women had been locked down in dormitories where the heat index reached temperatures greater than 130 degrees, and in the previous winter, the inmates had stuffed toilet paper into cracks in the windows to keep out the frigid drafts.
There had been much recent debate within the state government in Alabama as to whether the prison should be replaced with a larger, new facility that could hold more inmates, or whether it should be replaced with a smaller prison and use the money saved for programs to keep women out of prison. When corrections authorities asked Governor Bob Riley to support their requests for $120 million for a new prison, he declined. Instead, he created a prison overcrowding task force and began to work with reform experts to find answers to the state’s correctional and criminal justice dilemma.
The state legislature also enacted voluntary sentencing guidelines, plumped up funding of community corrections programs, and created a Commission on Girls and Women in the Criminal Justice System. The chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court also came up with a statewide drug court plan, similar to those already in place in some counties. If enacted, it would
treat
criminals with drug addictions—an alternative to a prison sentence.
The media announced that Alabama’s criminal justice system would, no doubt, become a model for progressive internal reform. But that claim would remain to be proven true; it would take a long time to improve resources within communities like mental-health treatment programs, drug treatment work programs, and other such programs designed to keep women out of prison.
Tutwiler can then be replaced by something smaller and better,
the media claimed. The question that remains is this: the newspaper writers and editors and the other journalists who believe conditions were far better in 2008 than they were in 2002, have they actually toured the prison to see for themselves?
The Southern Center for Human Rights, which brought the original 2002 suit against the state, apparently did not think the conditions had improved nearly enough, and began taking applications for a person to lead a campaign to
close the brutal Tutwiler Prison and transform Alabama’s women’s criminal justice system into one that is small, family-oriented, community-based and rehabilitative.
The Southern Center’s director said that Alabama needed a real solution, something that could not be litigated into. Two other groups, Aid to Inmate Mothers, Inc., and the Alabama Coalition Against Domestic Violence, joined in support of the campaign to close the prison.
At that time, the prison was holding 982 inmates instead of the 700 required by the settlement agreement, and inmates’ attorneys filed to have the state found in contempt of court. This caused the Alabama Department of Corrections to agree to six years of court-ordered monitoring by the Southern Center for Human Rights, instead of the four years originally called for in the settlement.
The corrections commissioner told the press that he wanted to replace Tutwiler within the next year, but that did not happen. There had been a struggle by prison officials to comply with the requirements of the settlement, and the struggle would continue while other solutions to the problems at Tutwiler were sought.
With its long-acknowledged reputation as one of the most harsh women’s prisons in the nation, Tutwiler came to be the subject of a documentary episode of ABC’s
Nightline,
with one of its reporters going so far as to live in the prison as an inmate for eleven days. The report, when aired, came as a real eye-opener for everyone who viewed it, but there was no surprising information there for the families and friends of the inmates, who already knew what life inside Tutwiler was like. The
Nightline
reporter described it best.
“I was only there for eleven days,” she said, “but I will never forget what it’s like to be a prisoner—disconnected from the outside world, without control over my surroundings, or contact with the people I care about.”
If that eleven-day stretch was hard to take, it should have been easy for the
Nightline
viewers to imagine how it would feel to spend eleven months in lockup, or eleven years ... or a lifetime.
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There are several women, along with Barbara Ann Roberts, who are currently serving life without the possibility of parole at Tutwiler. Some of them are unknown to the general public, spending day after day in anonymity, serving their time for crimes that attracted little attention from the outside world.
Others, however, are from the other end of the spectrum, still attracting intense media attention, years after the crimes that put them in prison. One such inmate, Betty Wilson, was convicted of capital murder in the 1992 death of her husband, Dr. Jack Wilson, a wealthy Huntsville, Alabama, doctor. The murder and the subsequent arrests of Betty, her twin sister, Peggy Lowe, and the man prosecutors said the twins had hired to kill Wilson, a handyman named James White, made nationwide headlines. Betty was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Then, after Betty’s trial and conviction, Peggy was tried for the same crime and acquitted. The verdicts caused a sensation: one twin—rich, promiscuous, and widely disliked—was sent to prison for life, and the other twin—a beloved schoolteacher who was very active in her church—tried for the same crime and acquitted.
James White testified against both sisters but was not tried himself until after their trials. White made a deal with the prosecution; his testimony against the twins in exchange for a life sentence for himself in lieu of the death penalty. Then, after their trials and his own sentencing, he admitted he had lied about Betty Wilson.
After several true-crime books, television news magazine episodes, and an extensive Internet campaign, which netted worldwide attention for the case, support for Betty Wilson’s innocence built to a high level. Betty’s process of appeals began and eventually worked its way to the Alabama State Supreme Court, where, in 1997, an appeal for a new trial was turned down by a five-to-two vote.
The next step was an appeal to the U.S. District Court, and after several postponements, it was finally presented to Chief Justice Sam Pointer Jr. He denied Betty a new trial.
In 2000, Betty’s appeal to the Eleventh Circuit Court was denied, and the following year, in 2001, Betty’s appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court was also denied.
Betty’s legion of supporters continued to work on her behalf, preparing a petition for Alabama governor Bob Riley that asked him to change Betty’s sentence to life
with
the possibility of parole. Their hope is to present it to him toward the end of his term of office. In the meantime, Betty was married in prison on May 1, 2006, to Bill Campbell.
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One reason Betty Wilson’s supporters pinned their hopes on a commutation of her sentence by Alabama’s governor is the shocking and controversial commutation of the sentence of Judith Ann Neelley by Governor Fob James on his last day in office in 1999. Neelley was convicted of the 1982 murder of Lisa Ann Millican, a thirteen-year-old runaway whom Neelley and her husband, Alvin, kidnapped in Rome, Georgia, and later brutally tortured, raped, and murdered at Little River Canyon in DeKalb County, Alabama.
Neelley was tried and convicted, and a DeKalb County jury recommended life in prison without parole, but Circuit Judge Randall L. Cole sentenced her to the death penalty because of the extreme brutality of the crime.
James, on his final day as governor, commuted Neelley’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. When word reached DeKalb County of his action, there was immediate outrage on the part of the public and the law outrage on the part of the public and the law enforcement officers and prosecutors who had handled the case.
At the time of Lisa Ann Millican’s death, DA Mike O’Dell was an assistant district attorney, and her murder case was one of the first he helped to prosecute in the county. He was astounded to learn what had happened without his office being consulted or contacted in any way prior to the announcement of James’s decision.
“I was shocked and disturbed when I found out Governor James commuted Neelley’s sentence,” he said. “He did this without speaking to the DA’s office or asking our opinion. It is clear he did not want us to be involved in his decision.”
As soon as James issued the commutation, he left his office, left Montgomery, and headed out to a duck-hunting vacation in another state. He gave no explanation for what he had done, or why, but rumors abounded that his wife had begged him to issue the order on religious grounds.
James did not explain himself until 2002, when he made a statement to a Cherokee County, Alabama, newspaper, the
Post,
and said he had spent a long time deliberating the issue, examining documents and records, and giving the matter a lot of long, hard thought. He said the primary reason for the commutation was the fact that the jury had recommended life without parole, and then the judge overruled and sentenced Neelley to death.
“That DeKalb County jury, which heard all of the facts surrounding that heinous crime in the months right after the events took place, convicted her to life in prison,” he said.
James evidently decided that since a jury reviewed all the evidence in the case, including Neelley’s claims that she was following orders from her allegedly abusive husband, Alvin, a life sentence was appropriate punishment.
James’s opinion notwithstanding, DeKalb County and most of northeast Alabama and northwest Georgia remain outraged to this day that Judith Ann Neelley’s death sentence was commuted ... on the very day that the district attorney’s office asked the state to set an execution date. By the good graces of a former governor, or perhaps by the religious fervor of his wife, Judith Ann Neelley will be staying at Tutwiler Prison for the remainder of her natural life.
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There are, no doubt, other equally dramatic stories among the inmates at Tutwiler who are serving life without parole. Appeals are a continuing concern, court-appointed attorneys fail to stay in touch with updates, and frustration reigns on a daily basis. The inmates grow impatient because they are unable to take action for themselves and do for themselves the things they must rely on others, on the outside, to take care of for them.
When Barbara Ann Roberts was first sent to Tutwiler, she had an especially hard time adjusting to the conditions there, primarily the constant, incessant noise. It was all but impossible to sleep, she wrote, with the commotion in the dorm. Prison food apparently did not agree with her at all, either. When she returned to Cherokee County for her first appeal hearing after several months at Tutwiler, she had lost a shocking amount of weight and appeared tired and haggard. She had no money in her prison account for soda, coffee, snacks, or anything else, and she had to borrow pens and paper in order to write letters. By the time she was convicted and sent to the prison, she was destitute and had no resources whatsoever, and her appeal attorney had been appointed by the court.
Attorney Angela Cochran Morgan appeared to be very prepared at the appeal hearing, and had familiarized herself with the case quite well by that time. Barbara’s impatience for quick action would have to be reined in by the facts of the matter: things just don’t move quickly in the legal system, no matter what the circumstances.
As time passed, Barbara began to write about the remorse she felt over Darlene’s death. On one occasion just before the trial, she said, Rodney Stallings had brought the crime scene photos taken of Darlene for Barbara to see.
“You really do not know how much I wish that would have been pictures of me, instead of Darlene,” she said. “Then no one would be hurting now, no family would be missing anyone, nobody would care at all. Everything would have long since been forgotten, never to be remembered.
“It’s not that way, though,” she said. She pointed out there were two people without a mother, Vernon without a wife, a family lost a sister, and so much more. If it had been her instead of Darlene, she said, there would be no one in pain.
“Why could that have not been God’s choice, why?” she asked. “Why? If you could only imagine how it would have been.”
A woman had died a terrible death, Barbara said, and her mother, Irene Comeaux, had died, and so many people were hurt and suffering, and their lives would never be the same again.
Barbara said on one occasion that she had trusted in the system and believed she would not have been found guilty of Darlene’s murder.
“I had only seen [how the system works] on TV,” she said, “you know, where it was the innocent are always shown as such. I have come to find out that in the real world, things do not always work that way.”
People would rather hear lies and twisted truths, she said, not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
“Truths do not seem to make headlines at any court.”
Barbara wrote very often about how much she loved and missed her family, and at one time two of her sisters had planned to come to visit her at the prison. She had been out of contact with them for such a long time, and she looked forward to the visit so much that she shared the news of their expected visit with the other inmates in the chapel services.
“I told everyone how God did answer prayers, just to continue praying and never let go,” she said. “I had so much hope.”
Barbara’s hopes were dashed when arrangements for the trip from Texas fell through due to scheduling and other concerns. It had meant so much to her. But she held out hope that someday, someway, they might plan another trip to visit her.
“I really need them,” she said. “I miss them all so very much. Please let them know how much I love them.”
If Barbara’s family had, indeed, been able to come to visit her, they would have undoubtedly seen a very different person than they had dealt with the last time they were together, back in Texas for their mother’s funeral, days before Barbara and Schiess were arrested when their plane touched down at the Atlanta airport.
In addition to the startling weight loss, Barbara’s mental clarity seemed to have become a great deal more focused. Now that she was in prison, where a court order had ruled that inmates’ prescription medication would be administered correctly and properly, her mind was much sharper, her thoughts were far better organized, and she seemed to be functioning at a much better level than prior to the trial, while she was in the care of the DeKalb and Cherokee County Jails.
The county jails no doubt were much quieter than Tutwiler, and the food was probably better, but being medically regulated for the period of time at Tutwiler had made a great difference in Barbara. Thin, haggard, and as tired as she might be due to lack of proper rest, Barbara seemed to have gained strength while in the prison. If she could be patient and work through the appeals with her attorney, perhaps things might move faster for her than for Betty Wilson and other inmates. And Judith Ann Neelley could tell her that sometimes an unexpected stroke of fate might accidentally come her way.
Hopefully, Barbara will heed her own advice to the other inmates:
“Just ... continue praying and never let go.”