For years, Carol Jacobsen has diligently, patiently and quietly worked to get justice for women who have spent their lives without receiving much justice, women who have been brutalized beyond belief by their families, by sadistic partners, and finally by the legal system.
If you have any doubts as to whether they’ve been given equal justice under law, or anything like it, you only need to read the case files of the women Jacobsen, and her colleagues at the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project, have chosen to defend.
What can you say about a system that sentences a young, confused woman to life in prison for merely being present when her domineering boyfriend killed someone?
They include a woman who shot her husband after she caught him raping her four-year-old daughter, and women who shot abusers who were trying to murder their children.
In many cases, testimony as to how severely these women were abused was not allowed to be presented in court. In at least two cases, the trial judges have joined in pleading that these women’s sentences be commuted. Inspired by Jacobsen’s work, former Governor William Milliken actually asked one of his successors to commute a woman’s sentence in at least one case.
Yet Michigan governors, while they have commuted a very few cases, have mostly been reluctant to use clemency to redress wrongs – even in their last weeks in office.
Politicians often find the fear of being labeled “soft on crime” more powerful than the obligation to seek justice. Those in charge of the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project have been very careful to avoid taking up doubtful cases.
Those who they have chosen to fight for have life stories and case histories that could make a stone weep. Doreen Washington got life in prison because her 12-year-old foster son killed her husband after he beat her and set her on fire.
Prosecutors charged that she had put him up to it. Her attorney never brought up her history of abuse at trial. When he learned the truth, the sentencing judge, Gershwin Drain, asked that she be given immediate parole. Ten years ago, Washington became the first prisoner whose sentence was commuted, thanks to the work of the Clemency and Justice project.
But there are many more. Jacobsen admits that some women do belong in prison for the protection of society. But in a massively researched and documented article in the Journal of Law and Social Change, she and a colleague, Lynn D’Orio, show beyond any reasonable doubt that many of their clients are the victims of a sexist system.
“Because of the refusal of courts to take violence against women seriously, many incarcerated women are convicted of crimes they committed only to survive,” they write, adding, “while clemency may be an imperfect and inadequate tool … it represents the last best hope of justice for many who are wrongfully convicted and sentenced.”
Justice is, after all, what this is all about – and not just for wrongfully incarcerated women. In the conclusion of their law journal article, Jacobsen and her co-author wrote “we look ahead to a world of compassionate and restorative justice, economic and education rights, mental and physical health care and respect for human and civil liberties.”
That may be a world which, as they write, is “a world that we can only imagine today.” But it is one that both she believes is worth fighting for.
