While doing research about the power of words, I ran across this quotation by Benjamin Franklin:
Here comes the orator with his flood of words and his drop of reason. If I were to listen to good, old Ben, I would stop now and take my seat.
But, I’ve never been one to let an old white guy tell me what to do.
As a writer, I am always aware that words are my life—I count them, I play with them, I beat them into submission. But even if you are not a writer or a public speaker, words are your life, too.
We are surrounded by words—we use them to work together and to play together. We use them to warn, to instruct, to entertain. We use them to say: I Love You. Words can be very beautiful, very enlightening, very healing things.
But, as Ralph Ellison wrote: If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
Many of you here today, know this all too well. You have been attacked by words, ostracized by words, distorted into someone you are not by words. They have literally imprisoned you.
As women, we are more verbal, more in tune with the nuance of words, the injury of words, than our male counterparts. We feel their slings and arrows in ways most men can never know.
Linguistics expert Deborah Tannen said of women: Our responses are emotional. When you think you're being snubbed, what does that mean? It means your 'humanness' is not being acknowledged.
It becomes even more traumatic when we are not just snubbed, but stigmatized by words that degrade and humiliate. “Killer” “Monster” “Bitch” “Unnatural” “Unfit” and worse. Those words are meant to steal away your humanity and make you a target for the hate, frustrations and fears of others.
A crime committed by a man gets a far different reaction than if a woman were to execute the exact same actions. As a society, we may not like but we expect violence from men. We are appalled by the violence of women and react more viscerally to it. Behind that reaction is the strongest emotion of all: fear.
Every single one of us owes our existence to a woman—the one who carried you in her womb. We want to believe that that very act makes each biological mother a caring, nurturing, loving person. Some of us learned from personal experience that is not true. Society logically knows that is not true. But deep inside our emotional core, we cling to that myth—it provides a sense of security and comfort.
That is why the reaction to a woman charged with a serious or violent crime quickly becomes overheated. The characterization by law enforcement, the disparagement by prosecutors, the outcry in the media is all calling on the primal fear in each one of us.
And the accusing words start flying fast and furious long before guilt can be determined. For a case in point, look what happened to Laura Johnson. She was sliced and diced in the press after being charged with the murder of her husband—all before the autopsy report was completed. When it was, the cause of death was NOT homicide. Laura was released but the damage was done. Her children removed from her custody, her name stained and her sense of self shattered. As Joseph Conrad wrote: Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
WORDS.
We all remember the childhood rhyme: Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you. Please. What was the writer of that old adage thinking? It had to be written by a man. Women know the agony of a word.
They can do so much damage, so quickly. Particularly to women. Tannen points out that men see words as a source of information. Women view words as the way to verbalize feelings, to enhance intimacy, to create relationships.
When being verbally assaulted in the courtroom, in the media, or to her face, a woman feels every relationship being ripped from her grasp as her self-image is distorted and destroyed. When a woman is wrongfully convicted, she is condemned by society, plagued by self-doubt and left wondering if anyone believes her or believes in her any longer—because now, she no longer believes in herself.
But why do these gender differences matter? Why are we here? After all, a wrongful conviction is a wrongful conviction—no matter who is put behind bars. I found a lot of food for thought in the article Julie Rea Harper wrote for the Obvious Answers newsletter. The number of women in prison has increased at nearly double the rate of men since 1985 and yet, this percentage is not reflected in the number of exonerees.
In all likelihood, a lot of the differences are caused by the fact that a great many of exonerations occur because of DNA testing of bodily fluids. While over 250 people have been exonerated through DNA, only four of them have been women because the majority of those crimes involved sexual assault. When a rape is committed at a crime scene, testing the DNA is a no-brainer. Yeah, a lot of prosecutors haven’t gotten that message yet but hopefully, they are a dying breed.
With advancements in technology like touch DNA testing, it is far more likely that more women will be exonerated as previously untestable samples come up for review.
But, I believe, another big factor is that deeply embedded fear—a woman even suspected of murder frightens people on a more primitive level. Even though they may doubt a conviction, they are apt to remain silent for fear that they are seen sympathizing with a woman the media and authorities have demonized as unnatural and abhorrent.
Not only does society condemn a woman who it believes committed a crime, but they often hold her responsible when her partner commits a crime. Let’s compare and contrast parents who did not protect their children from harm at the hands of their partner. Two are woman, Tabitha Pollack and Raye Dawn Smith. The other is a man, Rusty Yates.
Tabitha’s boyfriend, Scott English, admitted that in the middle of the night he struck three-and-a-half year old Jami Pollock in the head. Tabitha was not in the room and had no knowledge of the injury. When Scott told Tabitha that something was wrong with Jami, Tabitha immediately began CPR on her daughter until the ambulance arrived. She then rode with her daughter to the hospital assisting with CPR. Tabitha was convicted of murder and given a 36-year sentence for not protecting her child.
Raye Dawn Smith’s case was similar. Not only was she not in the room, she was not even in the home when Michael Porter sexually assaulted and murdered her daughter. He admitted to the crime and accepted a 30-year sentence in a plea bargain. But Raye Dawn, a grieving mother, was given a 27-year sentence for not protecting her child.
Rusty Yates, on the other hand, knew that his wife Andrea was not mentally stable. He knew she had gone off her medications. He knew that she was suicidal. And yet, he went off to work and left his wife Andrea home alone with their five children. Andrea drowned them one by one.
It sounds like a clear case of child neglect on Rusty’s part. Did Rusty get charged with murder for not protecting his children? No. Did he get charged with anything? No. And yet, his culpability in the death of his children seemed more obvious to me than Tabitha’s or Raye Dawn’s culpability in the death of their daughters. Did both women have to be dead to be forgiven to someone else’s crime?
When the gender bias is this stark and undeniable, how can it be called justice?
The persecution of the wrongfully convicted woman does not end with the dark day in court when the jury says, “guilty.” It has only just begun.
Any medications she’s been taking on the outside are removed from her and thrown away. It can take as much as three weeks for the bureaucracy to get around to providing them for her again. With this deprivation, she may now become physically or emotionally ill. This adds to her de-personalization. She becomes a number, a part of the inventory, the property of the state.
Prison is a soul-eating, demoralizing, devastating experience even for a woman who is rightfully imprisoned. But that woman can be angry at herself for the role she played in her own fate. She can work on those issues and move past the verbal abuse with much greater ease than the wrongfully convicted woman.
In jail for something she has not done, that woman carries a heavy weight around her neck—a millstone engraved with every cruel lie, mischaracterization and verbal assault. She enters a world where she does not belong where psychological games are played by the guards and fellow inmates alike. Games that are created to control, debase and dehumanize.
I have never been incarcerated. But I have been a visitor to jails and prisons and I have been appalled by the experience. From the moment you come inside, you ceased to be an individual. You are made to follow arbitrary rules, yelled at for being confused about directions, ignored as if it is your fault you are there. I have gone home and ached for the mothers and wives who dutifully follow directions, shuffling through lines, keeping their eyes down on the floor, fearing to speak. It is depressing just being in that building. I can only imagine how much more depressing it is on the inside.
And that was where Julie Rea Harper when I stumbled across a television show that brought her case to my attention. Julie was living in an abusive, bewildering place. As Julie described it: You don’t believe what you hear. You don’t believe what you see. Yes means no. No means yes. Except when it doesn’t. They convince you that you are in hell, that you are not alive.
At the start of the program, I saw Julie, her family and other supporters protesting her innocence. I was skeptical—many guilty people in prison make the same claim raising the cynicism of us all. There was a time when most of us would have found the idea that a woman could murder her own child almost impossible to believe. But that was before Susan Smith—that was before she pushed the car containing her children into the water and claimed a black man abducted them. We listened to her sobs, we hurt for her. When the truth came out it hurt us all—but it hurt the wrongfully charged women of the future most of all.
Later in the show, I heard the prosecutor Ed Parkinson talk about Julie’s case. Not only was his language inflammatory but he made general statements that I knew were not true. I knew that because I’d been interviewing serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells and I knew that killers sometimes came into homes and used knives they found in a kitchen. I knew that their motives could be obscure and illogical—seemingly motiveless to a normal thinking mind. That’s when I realized that Julie might be innocent. That this horrible crime could have been committed by someone like Sells.
I wrote to Sells, telling him about what the prosecutor said but I didn’t mention any names, or any time frame or any location. He wrote back with the date of Joel’s murder. Ultimately, he confessed to the crime—but it was just words. What could I do with them?
I knew from listening to the prosecutor on television that it would be senseless for me to contact him or law enforcement involved in Julie’s case. I checked with Texas Ranger Johnny Allen but Sells had not mentioned the crime to him.
I only had one remaining option: take the words given to me and put them in the book I was writing and pray that someone who would know what to do with those words—would read them and take action.
And they did. That eventually placed me before the prison review board where I testified about Sells’ confession and the circumstances surrounding it. It also placed me in the same room with Parkinson. He’d been so vicious with the words he used against Julie and now he was calling me names too: serial killer groupie, fiction writer, co-conspirator and many more. I sat in that room writing them down, stunned at the shredding of my identity.
Those words bothered me for a long time. I found myself re-reading them, questioning myself, questioning my motivation. Then one day, I took that list of words and put them through my shredder. He tried to obliterate me—I would obliterate his words.
Psychologists say that for every negative thing said about you—by others or by yourself—it requires seven positive statements to overcome the power of that one negative. A word can plunge deeper into your soul than any weapon can.
Often, a wrongfully convicted woman locked away from society will turn that weapon on herself, blaming herself as many victims of domestic violence do. Wondering what she did to deserve this, what she should have down differently, how she could’ve prevented the crime, her prosecution, the pain. The should-haves and could-haves beat her down with every breath she takes.
Then comes time for visitation. It should be a moment of unbridled joy. But the guards call the prisoners “ladies” in front of the visitors and the women know what the guards really want to say—the same epithets they use every single day. As a result, being called a lady becomes even more insulting than anything else.
As author Phillip K. Dick wrote: The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
The only way a wrongfully convicted woman can survive this negative onslaught is through the healing words of family and friends. The words that bring hope, love and understanding. But it takes a lot of those words and a constant repetition of them to buoy her up. Because every day, she functions in a world cut off from normal interaction and relationships. Some create an artificial persona and hide inside of her, sublimating their real personality until they return to the real world. Many cannot bring themselves to abandon their true selves no matter how battered they may be.
The wrongfully convicted woman needs to know that real people on the outside are thinking of her, praying for her, working to find justice and set the world right again.
But it is not over when the exonerated woman is legally vindicated. A new battle begins. She can’t just step out of the prison and pick up the pieces of her old life as if she had never been gone.
She can’t just pretend the harsh words were not spoken. She can’t just shrug off the emotional toll of the abusive institution we call prison. And the system usually isn’t helping. The prosecutors and law enforcement officers who put in her prison in the first place seldom admit they did anything wrong and if they do, they rarely apologize to the newly released victim. They are no help in her return to society.
She, essentially, needs to start from scratch to rebuild herself and discover who she is now. Every experience in life—good or bad—changes who we are. Now that she’s spent time in hell, she is not the same person she was before it all began.
While she makes her voyage of self-discovery, she needs all the patience, support and loving words the world can express. Mother Teresa reminds us: Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. Never refrain from using them.
If you have been wrongfully convicted, words can help you in another way when they are the words you express. You need a safe place to speak the words of your pain and suffering. Someone or somewhere that you will find understanding and a lack of judgment. This place, this conference, this time is one of those opportunities. Reach out for healing because if you seek it, you will find it here. You will also discover ways to help others—and giving back to others is the most healing thing you can do. Absorb the words of love and understanding and give them out to others.
As I thought about talking to all of you this evening, a song kept running in my mind. The anthem to surviving bad relationships: I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor. I looked up the lyrics and rewrote them a little to fit the situation of the wrongfully convicted woman. I won’t try to sing them but I will read them to you now.
First I was afraid
I was petrified
Kept thinking I could never live
with what I felt inside
But I spent so many nights
thinking how they did me wrong
I grew strong
I learned how to carry on
and now I’m back
from my barred space
I just walked out to find them still in place
with condemning looks on every face
I need to change the words they used
I need to find my own to say
I throw out their words of hate
I know it’s not too late
They can just go, walk out the door,
just turn around now,
'cause they're not welcome anymore
weren't they the ones who tried to hurt me with their lies?
They thought I'd crumble
they thought I'd lay down and die
Oh no, not I
I will survive
as long as i know how to love
I know I will stay alive
I've got all my life to live
I've got all my love to give
and I'll survive
I will survive
It took all the strength I had
not to fall apart
kept trying hard to mend
the pieces of my broken heart
and I spent oh so many nights
just feeling sorry for myself
I used to cry
Now I hold my head up high
and they see me
somebody new
I'm not that chained up little person
imprisoned, broke in two
and so they felt like saying more
never wanting me free
now I'm saving all my life
Now I am who I define me to be
They can just go, walk out the door,
just turn around now,
'cause they're not welcome anymore
weren't they the ones who tried to hurt me with their lies?
They thought I'd crumble
they thought I'd lay down and die
Oh no, not I
I will survive
as long as I know how to love
I know I will stay alive
I've got all my life to live
I've got all my love to give
and I'll survive
I will survive
I will survive. Take those words. Embed them in your heart. Make them your own and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You shall survive.
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