Sabrina Butler-Smith was nearly executed for what she looked like—or rather, what she didn’t look like.
In 1989, she rushed to a Mississippi hospital, after her infant son Walter stopped breathing and she couldn’t resuscitate him with CPR. Police arrest Ms Butler-Smith, who is Black, the same day Walter died, believing bruises on his chest from the CPR were the result of child abuse.
Ms Butler-Smith was a teenager at the time, in total shock, and the prosecutor said she must’ve been guilty because she wasn’t openly emoting in court during her trial the following year.
“They said I didn’t look emotional enough,” she told The Independent. “I lost my son and I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know what was going on and why. I went several years without knowing what he died from. How can you tell me how to feel about my own child?”
After she got a new trial, where new evidence came to light, Ms Butler-Smith in 1995 became one of just two women in the US to ever get off of death row. Now she’s hoping the same remarkable turn of events can occur in the case of Melissa Lucio, another mother she argues has been massively misjudged by the justice system.
Lucio was arrested in 2007, and prosecutors argued she had abused her baby daughter Mariah to death.
A mother of 14, Lucio had struggled with poverty, being a victim of sexual abuse, drug addiction and homelessness, but none of her family said she was ever violent. There were no witnesses or any physical evidence proving she killed her daughter.
What’s more, some of Lucio’s children said they had seen Mariah fall down a flight of stairs in the days before her death, and suffer abuse at the hands of her siblings.
Still, after a lengthy and at times coercive interrogation process, the pregnant Lucio was tried and sentenced to death, with her lawyer avoiding calling any of her family members for testimony.
A nationwide innocence movement with supporters like Kim Kardashian has rallied behind her story, but barring intervention from Texas officials, Lucio will be executed on 27 April.
Lucio, according to Ms Butler-Smith, who wrote a passionate op-ed in Elle about the case, is a classic example of the ways women of colour are given short shrift in the capital punishment process.
“It judges about race,” she said. “Women are judged harshly when it comes to their children. We’re not looked at, as far as, what could be going on with us. Most of the time its always about how we look and how we present ourselves.”
Texas has a long history of executing Latinos like Lucio. The state has also executed far and away the most people, 573, in modern US history.
A disproportionate number of those on death row in the state are people of colour compared with the overall population, according to Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
“What we are seeing, even as use of the death penalty and new death sentences are declining, they remain disproportionately imposed on people of colour,” she told The Independent.
Lucio, who didn’t fit the stereotypical image of a perfect mother or an innocent person in Texas, may never have gotten a fair chance.
“That’s the reason we need to fight for Melissa and give her a chance to prove her innocence,” Ms Butler-Smith said.
Lucio’s attorneys have asked state officials, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott to either grant clemency or postpone the election, arguing a bevy of outside experts and new evidence suggests her conviction rests on an abusive interrogation, bad science, and shoddy legal defence work.
One thing that encourages Ms Butler-Smith is how much more the public is talking about the death penalty, compared to the Tough on Crime 1990s.
A majority of state legislators in Texas have called on the state to stop the execution, a shocking development in a GOP stronghold, and the local district attorney prosecution Lucio has said he will withdraw the case if the state doesn’t step in.
Still, despite this support, Ms Butler-Smith knows firsthand how hard it can be to be a mother behind bars, far away from a family on the outside.
Her other young son once called and asked, “Mama, are they gonna kill you with a needle?”
“I cried like a baby when my child asked me that. That was so hurtful to me,” she said. “Here I am facing death and people are telling my son that.”
Ms Butler-Smith, who now lives in Memphis, sent an audio message to Lucio, telling her to stay strong.
“I just told her to hold her head up, stray strong going through this. I know it’s not easy,” she said, adding, “We love you. We’re all fighting for her.”
The Independent and the nonprofit Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) have launched a joint campaign calling for an end to the death penalty in the US. The RBIJ has attracted more than 150 well-known signatories to their Business Leaders Declaration Against the Death Penalty - with The Independent as the latest on the list. We join high-profile executives like Ariana Huffington, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson as part of this initiative and are making a pledge to highlight the injustices of the death penalty in our coverage.
