Life after Death Row: Exonerees' Search for Community and Identity

Chapter 9. Coping With Life after Death Row

Chapter 9 Coping with Life after Death Row It’s easy for people to say what I should and what I shouldn’t do. . . . And I don’t want nobody . . . experiencing what we experienced. It’s easy to say what we should do, but it’s not easy to do. We’ve been taken care of all of our lives [during twenty-six years of incarceration]. We’ve had no responsibilities. No pay, no bills. We [did not have] to worry about living out here in society. And then we out here trying to adjust. Well, [people] trying to say, “Get over it, get over it!” I still go through a lot of stuff here. Right? I’m shocked; it’s hard to get over. You just can’t get over it. —Tim Howard How do you get over being taken from your home, convicted of something you did not do, told you were going to die for it, isolated on death row, incarcerated for many years, and then released back into society just as suddenly as you were first taken, with little assistance , no explanation, and no apology? Or do you get over it? How do you make sense of that experience for yourself and your family? How do you find your place back in your home and community? How do you overcome the many barriers set in your way? These are all questions that confront exonerees when they return home. In negotiating their dislocation and the economic and emotional terrain of life after death row, they begin a process of recovery that, for many, will be a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, successes and failures. Some will find this process more problematic and fraught with setbacks than others, but all will find it difficult. 129 Exonerees as Trauma Survivors This process of recovery is not unlike that negotiated by survivors of other types of catastrophic, life-threatening events that uproot people from their lives and communities and jeopardize core beliefs about the self. Exonerees walk a road similar to survivors of disasters and atrocities—floods, earthquakes, war, the Holocaust—and life-threatening disease and illness—AIDS and cancer. Interestingly, disaster survivors and exonerees alike recognize their similarities of experience, perhaps more so than us experts and definitely more than criminal justice professionals responsible for the exonerees’ situation. One survivor of the Buffalo Creek mining accident and flood that wiped out entire communities in the Appalachians of West Virginia wrote, “I feel as I’m sure a prisoner must feel who has been sentenced to prison for a crime he didn’t commit ” (Erikson 1976, 13)—dislocated, uprooted from place and community , isolated, detached. Likewise, exoneree Alfred Rivera recognizes his situation in that of returning war veterans: “When one comes home from war, he is afforded the opportunity to be dealt with by those who can help diagnose the symptoms [of the] aftereffects of the trauma one has recently returned from. We know of posttraumatic stress disorder. Could it be that one who is caged up and told that he will be injected with a formula which will in turn end his or her life, then [is] released from such conditions, [may] suffer PTSD also?” Trauma is the common element that exonerees share with other types of survivors. Judith Herman (1997, 33) defines traumatic events as different from “commonplace misfortunes” in that they “involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death” and “overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.” Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor (1972, 42) distinguish the “mundane” disturbances of life from traumatic ones in that “the problem is so extreme, so dreadful that one’s physical existence, one’s sense of self or one’s whole view of the world is at risk.” Most certainly, being wrongly convicted of heinous crimes and condemned to death constitutes a trauma of this magnitude (Grounds 2004; Simon 1993; Weigand 2009). All of our exonerees know the experience of being fully and completely rejected by society, to the extent of being told they are no longer worthy of life. While awaiting their own execution, they are surrounded C o p i n g w i t h I n n o c e n c e 130 by the despair of others, some of whom take their own lives or are taken for execution: Life on death row is...