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

Preface

xi Preface The idea for this project was born in November 2000 at the American Society of Criminology conference in San Francisco, California. I (Saundra) had organized a panel on wrongful conviction issues and asked Michael Radelet to serve as a discussant. Kim, a former student of Mike’s and good friend, attended to see Mike and hear some of the papers presented . Kim and I had never met. During his few minutes of discussion, Mike reeled off a list of topics related to wrongful conviction issues that had not been undertaken and that desperately needed attention. One of those topics was about life after exoneration: what is life like for exonerees once they leave prison? I immediately gravitated toward that particular topic among those Mike offered up. Having just finished work on my first project related to wrongful convictions, I was casting about for something new to work on, and this particular topic seemed intriguing . It combined my interests in wrongful convictions with my methodological preference for qualitative research. Unbeknownst to me, Kim was thinking exactly the same thing. Having completed work on some projects related to capital punishment, she found compelling the idea of combining her interests on the death penalty with a new area she did not know much about, wrongful conviction—a project on life after release for death row exonerees might be just the ticket. But, again, we did not know each other, so we had no way to know we were contemplating the same project. That all changed later that afternoon when I was staffing the outreach table for the Division on Women and Crime, and Kim arrived to take the next shift. Kim recognized me from the earlier panel and told me how much she had gotten out of the papers, but in particular, how interesting she had found Mike’s discussant portion. We swapped funny stories about how we each had come to know Mike Radelet. I picked up on Kim’s earlier comment about his discussion and offered that my interest also had been piqued by a particular topic he had mentioned. We soon discovered that we had landed on the same idea. We eagerly began thinking out loud about how we could pursue this project. Kim even had a title already in mind—“Life after Death.” Within thirty minutes, we had crafted the outline of this research and forged the beginnings of a productive and deeply meaningful friendship. It would take, however, almost two years before we could begin serious work on the project. The following semester and summer, Kim headed off to Australia on a Fulbright fellowship to pursue her interests in restorative justice. In July, I headed off on a new adventure of my own when my son, Drew, was born. So it was not until sometime in 2002 when both of our lives settled back down to a place where we could begin work on this project. Since then, our interviews with exonerees have taken us around the United States, remembering that when we first began, conferences regularly attended by exonerees were not frequent occurrences. If you wanted to talk to an exoneree, and a death row exoneree at that, you had to go to him or her. So we did. In the process, we have shared many meaningful moments with each other and with them. For a project spanning nearly a decade, the number of people we must thank is voluminous. No doubt, we will inadvertently forget to thank someone. We hope that you know who you are and that you have felt our appreciation in other ways. We, of course, first must thank Mike Radelet. Without his compelling idea and subsequent unwavering support, we would have never met, become friends, and embarked on this fascinating work that has enriched our lives. The gratitude we have for the eighteen exonerated death row survivors who participated in our research is truly too deep to fully express. We thank each of them and their families—Gary B., Kirk, Shabaka, Sabrina, Perry, Charles, Gary G., Alan, Tim, Gary J., Dave, Ray, Walter, Juan, Alfred, Scott, Delbert, and Greg—for their openness, their trust, and their patience. We had no idea it would take us this long to complete this project, and we know they have been waiting. We hope we have done justice to their experiences and have rendered their journeys more visible to others. We want to assure them that our original commitment to them still stands. We...