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

Chapter 10. Reclaiming Innocence

168 Chapter 10 Reclaiming Innocence It’s just different. I don’t know. My thinking is different. I feel different. I really can’t say. I’m just a different person. I felt I might have been killed that night too [when my parents were killed], and I’ve started a new life. It’s just, it’s different. It’s completely different. I can’t even describe it. It’s like stepping into another universe. —Gary Gauger Their wrongful capital conviction and incarceration not only disrupt exonerees’ relationships with others and connections to community but also their sense of self, their identity, and very personal understandings of who they now are as free people. In addition to being abruptly released, they return to communities that may or may not accept their return. Upon release, they discover that others continue to believe in their guilt, that their exoneration and release are inadequate to proclaim their status as innocent people. Some must fight to assert their innocence and reconstruct their reputations as people worthy of trust. Stuck between the falsely applied “murderer” master status and the person they are and want others to see them as, they struggle to reconstruct their identity and reclaim their innocence. Trauma, Stigma, and Assaults on the Self Trauma disrupts the sense of self. For some, traumatic experiences attack the very core of survivors’ beliefs about self and the world around them. Trauma shatters preconceived understandings of their worth and value; it discounts the control and agency that survivors felt they had over their lives prior to the traumatic experience. As Judith Herman (1997, 51) explains, “Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships. They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community. They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experience” (see also Brison 2002). In part, this attack on the self emerges from the realization that their “voice” was discredited or silenced during the traumatic event, rendering their perspective, desires, and needs mute. Herman (1997, 53) writes, “At the moment of trauma, almost by definition, the individual’s point of view counts for nothing.” Many survivors feel a sense of disorientation or displacement, lost in the new posttrauma reality they confront. Herman (1997, 196) likens this to being an immigrant in one’s own life in which survivors speak of “losing and regaining the world” in a moment. They are displaced from their former selves and their place in the world but have not yet established their new selves and where they belong in relation to others, community, and the world at large. Kai Erikson (1976, 212) describes disorientation among survivors of the Buffalo Creek flood. They repeatedly report feeling “strange” and “out of place.” He concludes, “People all over the hollow live with a lasting sense of being out of place, uprooted, torn loose from their moorings, and this feeling has long outlasted the initial trauma of the disaster itself.” The traumatic event is a marker delineating the point where the old self lost relevance and cast the survivor into a new reality in which he or she wrestles to define who the new self will be. Many argue that incarceration is traumatic and attacks the self, producing similar disorienting effects for prisoners. Gresham Sykes’s (1958) classic study of the “pains of imprisonment” reveals that total control undermines inmates’ understandings of self, autonomy, masculinity, and self-worth (see also Cohen and Taylor 1972). True, a spate of prison studies in the latter decades of the twentieth century argued that prison time was akin to a period of “deep freeze” of earlier behavioral patterns that are not seriously impacted, for better or worse, by the conditions of imprisonment (Zamble and Porporino 1988). However, more recent studies have found severe and long-lasting psychological effects resulting from incarceration (Haney 2003a, 2003b; Jamieson and Grounds 2005; Kupers 2008). Ideas first introduced by Sykes regarding the impact of incarceration on understanding self and self-worth are now being Reclaiming Innocence 169 revisited. As John Irwin and Barbara Owen (2005, 98) explain, “Long imprisonment assaults and disorganizes the personality in . . . insidious and subtle ways, including loss of agency, assaults on the self and damage to sexual orientation.” Though studies of ex-prisoners’ adjustment postrelease are few and far between, evidence suggests that, like other trauma survivors...