ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Carol Jacobsen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, a professor of art and design at the University of Michigan whose work has been exhibited in galleries and screened everywhere from the Lincoln Center to Barcelona.
Machelle Pearson was a homeless teenager when she was convicted of first-degree murder after a robbery attempt gone wrong in 1984, and has spent most of her life behind bars at Michigan’s Huron Valley Correctional facility for women.
They would appear to have little or nothing in common. But they are colleagues and friends, united in pursuit of a goal:
“Winning clemency for women unjustly imprisoned. Freeing women who have been convicted of murder, but who really were acting in self-defense, or in some cases weren’t even there,” when the murders were committed, said Ms. Jacobsen, who for years has run the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project.
“We only take the cases of women who have been sentenced to life in prison under circumstances we believe are unjust,” Ms. Jacobsen said. She agrees that a few women do indeed deserve to be behind bars, and like others who are familiar with the world of Michigan prisons, she knows many more belong not behind bars, but in secure mental institutions.
But she also thinks that Michigan’s penal system “is very sexist. Women and what happens to women aren’t taken seriously,” she said, as Machelle Pearson, now 52, vigorously nodded.
When I noted that in recent years, judges and courts have been encouraged to consider more seriously how the effects of repeated battering can affect people, she said “Yeah, but nothing’s changed.” It’s an old boy’s network. They still don’t take women seriously.”
Ms. Pearson’s own story is an example. After her mother died when she was 12, she fell under the influence of an abusive, drug-using boyfriend. One night in 1983 he forced her to help him in a robbery by threatening to kill her brother.
She said she was holding a gun when it accidentally went off and killed the woman being robbed. Later, she went to the police and eventually confessed. She was just 17 when a jury sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Her life got even worse in prison; she was raped by a guard, got pregnant, and had a baby she was forced to give up for adoption. “Was he punished?” she laughed. “He got two years probation.”
Resigned to a life in prison, she took classes, got an education, tried to help other prisoners. She would still be behind bars, but in a landmark 2012 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life without parole.
Then, four years later, they made that decision retroactive. Ms. Pearson had found out about the Michigan Women’s Clemency Project years before, when Carol Jacobsen was making a documentary in her prison. They began corresponding.
After the Supreme Court decision, Ms. Jacobsen went to a parole hearing and testified on Ms. Pearson’s behalf. So did other people, including an alternate juror in her trial.
Finally, in August 2018 she was freed.
Now, she lives in Detroit, doing what jobs she can find, and trying to help others find justice “If I could give my own life to bring back the woman I killed I would,” she said.
“But I can’t do that, so I can just try to live a good life.”
Carol Jacobsen wants others to have the same chance. Several times a year she and a few supporters attend parole board hearings of other women in whom they believe, testifying on their behalf.
“I’d say I’ve also gone to more than twenty public hearings, for women sentenced to first degree murder,” she added.
But many other women she considers unjustly sentenced are never going to get paroled. It is still legal to deny the possibility of parole to someone who commits murder as an adult.
So a large part of what she does is lobby Michigan’s governors to pick up a pen and pardon, or more likely commute, the sentences, of women who should no longer be in jail.
Governors are the only ones who can do that. She has patiently lobbied Govs. John Engler, Jennifer Granholm, Rick Snyder, and now Gretchen Whitmer, and their legal staffs.
“We’ve been successful 13 times,” she said, but sadly, unsuccessful many more. Currently, she has a list of 11 women she is trying to win clemency for.
They include: Sharleen Wabindato, who has been in prison for 42 years because she was present when her violent boyfriend shot and killed an elderly man during a robbery; Nancy Seaman, a teacher who was convicted of first-degree murder in 2004 during a violent fight with her husband, who allegedly came at her with a knife.
There is Dolores Kapuscinski, who shot an abusive husband to death in 1987, and Susan Brown, who stabbed her husband to death after he sexually assaulted her daughter and tried to kill her.
Carol Jacobsen thinks the governor should grant clemency to all these women, but isn’t very hopeful any will get out this year, since the governor has to run for reelection in 2022, and freeing convicted criminals is seen as a politically risky thing to do.
“Usually, when they do grant clemency, it is in the final weeks of their last term.” But she’s not giving up. Her life’s work, she now realizes, is “fighting for human rights, and feminist justice.”
Now in her late 70s, Ms. Jacobsen has just published a book: For Dear Life: Women’s Decriminalization and Human Rights in Focus.) And she intends to keep up the good fight, as long as she can.
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
