“Well, don’t try to smuggle notes. They can write us.”
“Well, some say they have written.”
“We’re swamped, Diane. I’m sorry, but we’ll try to reply.”
“I’m mostly worried about the lifers. They’re the ones who will die in here.”
“We’re trying—there is only so much we can do.”
“I tell them that, I know. They’re just desperate, like I was desperate before y’all helped me.
Marsha, Ashley, Monica, Patricia are sweatin’ me to have you send someone to help.”
We met Marsha Colbey shortly after that and began working on her appeal. We decided to
challenge the State’s case and the way the jury had been selected. Charlotte Morrison, a
Rhodes Scholar and former student of mine, was now a senior attorney at EJI. She and staff
attorney Kristen Nelson, a Harvard Law grad who had worked at the Public Defender Service
for the District of Columbia, the nation’s premier public defender office, met with Marsha
repeatedly. She would talk about her case, the challenge of keeping her family together while
she was in prison, and a range of other problems. But it was the sexual violence at Tutwiler
that most frequently came up during these visits.
Charlotte and I took on the case of another woman who had filed a federal civil suit after
she was raped at Tutwiler. She had had no legal help; because of defects in her pleadings and
the allegations she made in her complaint, we could secure only a small settlement judgment
for her. But the details of her experience were so painful that we could no longer look past
the violence. We started an investigation for which we interviewed over fifty women; we
were truly shocked to see how widespread the problem of sexual violence had become.
Several women had been raped and become pregnant. Even when DNA testing confirmed that
male officers were the fathers of these children, very little was done about it. Some officers
who had received multiple sexual assault complaints were temporarily reassigned to other
duties or other prisons, only to wind up back at Tutwiler, where they continued to prey on
women. We eventually filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice and released
several public reports about the problem, which received widespread media coverage.
Tutwiler made a list of the ten worst prisons in America compiled by Mother Jones; it was the
only women’s facility to be so dishonored. Legislative hearings and policy changes at the
prison followed. Male guards are now banned from the shower areas and toilets, and a new
warden has taken over the facility.
Marsha held on despite these challenges and started advocating for some of the younger
women. We were devastated when the Court of Criminal Appeals issued a ruling affirming
her conviction and sentence. We sought review in the Alabama Supreme Court and won a
new trial based on the trial judge’s refusal to exclude people from jury service who were
biased and could not be impartial. Marsha and our team were thrilled, local officials in
Baldwin County less so. They were threatening re-prosecution. We involved expert
pathologists and persuaded local authorities that there was no basis on which to convict
Marsha of murder. It took two years to settle the legal case and then another year of
wrangling with the Department of Corrections to give Marsha full credit for the time she’d
served before she was finally freed in December 2012 after ten years of wrongful
imprisonment.
We had started holding annual benefit dinners each March in New York City to raise money