Lara Bazelon is an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and a contributing writer to Politico Magazine. This essay was adapted from her book, Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction, which was published on October 16.





Debbie Sue Carter, 21, pretty and vivacious, had just moved into her first apartment in the tiny town of Ada, Oklahoma, where she was born and raised. It was October 8, 1982, and she was coming into her own as an adult. But Debbie still came home regularly to see her mother, Peggy, her two younger sisters and her Aunt Glenna, who lived one block away with Debbie’s little cousin, Christy, who was 8 years old.

In early December, Debbie came to Peggy’s house to do her laundry. That night, as she snuggled next to her mother in bed, Peggy recalled, “she wrapped them long legs around me,” and Peggy teased her, “Debbie Sue, get off of me or I’m gonna tell all of your friends you sleep with your mama.” Debbie said, “I don’t care who you tell,” and she slept in her mother’s bed that night.


A few days later, on December 8, Debbie was found naked on her bedroom floor, gagged with a bloody towel, with the word DIE painted on her stomach. She had been raped and strangled to death.

The darkness that engulfed the family after Debbie’s murder marked the end of her cousin Christy’s childhood. There were no more boisterous family Christmases, no more casual get-togethers, no more walking to school. Debbie’s grandmother—Peggy and Glenna’s mother—got a pit bull; Peggy spent time in a mental institution. The world was dangerous in a way that was undeniable and unspeakable at the same time. Christy never felt safe again.

This is not a true crime whodunit. This is the story of what happens to the family of a murder victim when they find out years later that everything the criminal justice system had led them to believe was a lie. This is a story of wrongful conviction told from the perspective of Debbie’s family, how they survived one earthquake and then another, and came to the other side. It is also about Debbie’s little cousin Christy: her reckoning, her rage, her forgiveness, and her transformation into a crusader for a different vision of justice—a vision that put her at odds with her tight-knit, rock-ribbed red-state community.



***

Debbie’s murder remained unsolved for five years, until a woman arrested on fraud charges implicated Ron Williamson, a man who happened to be in jail at the same time as she was. Williamson’s supposed involvement in Debbie’s rape and murder only added to the sensationalism surrounding the case: He had been a baseball star with real prospects for the major leagues before drug use and mental illness had derailed his life. Also charged was Williamson’s friend, Dennis Fritz, implicated by another jailhouse informant. With the charges of both men came an onslaught of media attention, which was yet another source of stress for Debbie’s family, all of whom felt increasingly sidelined and powerless as the case moved from investigation to prosecution. Christy explained, “from the victim’s standpoint, it’s no longer your case. It’s the state’s case. For a rape victim, her body isn’t even her body anymore, it’s a piece of evidence. Even the name of the case belongs to the perpetrator. Debbie was literally erased.”

But Debbie’s family took some solace in knowing that they were getting justice when the jury returned guilty verdicts in 1988. Williamson was given the death penalty, Fritz life in prison without the possibility of parole. What Christy felt for them, she said, was “true hatred.” She went to bed at night praying that they would suffer as much as possible.

Christy remained in Ada as an adult. She married her high school boyfriend, Dustin, and became a licensed professional counselor who specialized in helping broken families. She stuck close to her own family, particularly her Aunt Peggy. At 25, 11 years after the verdicts, she was pregnant with her first child. Blonde and cheerleader pretty, she exuded warmth and a can-do attitude. Though she stood only 4 feet, 10 inches tall, she was tough and implacably determined to steamroll over any obstacle in her path. But at the time, Christy saw no obstacles: Life was good.

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Then Christy’s world exploded: Her mother, Glenna, called to tell her that the newspapers were planning to print a story that Williamson and Fritz were about to be exonerated for Debbie’s murder. Days later, Christy learned the details for the first time sitting in the courtroom as the judge explained that there had been a terrible mistake. DNA evidence recovered from Debbie’s body matched that of one of the state’s key witnesses in the murder case, a man named Glen Gore. Fritz and Williamson—who at one point had been five days away from being executed—were innocent.

On April 15, 1999, Peggy and her surviving daughters sat beside Christy and Glenna, staring in disbelief as Williamson and Fritz walked out of the courthouse as free men, flanked by Barry Scheck and the other Innocence Project lawyers who had freed them, trailed by a horde of flashing cameras and breathless reporters. Head District Attorney Bill Peterson added to the family’s confusion, continuing to insist that Williamson and Fritz were somehow involved and promising, “we’ll figure this out.”

Williamson won a large settlement after his release in 1999. But he remained plagued by inner demons, suffered from alcoholism, and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 2004, two years before John Grisham published An Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, the bestselling book about his case that has been adapted for a soon-to-be-released Netflix series.

Christy Sheppard with her aunt, Peggy Carter, circa 1976. | Photo courtesy of the author

Meanwhile, in 2003, Glen Gore was convicted of Debbie’s rape and murder and given a death sentence. But the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals threw out the verdict, finding that Gore had been denied a fair trial. Gore was convicted again in 2006, and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Christy, who sat beside her Aunt Peggy for both trials, felt none of the vitriol toward Gore that she previously directed at Williamson and Fritz. “If there is one thing I’ve learned,” she said, “it’s that I would never be stupid enough to say that I was 100 percent sure about anything.” Christy was “fairly confident” that Gore was guilty, “but to me, it’s just more sadness.” She regularly runs into Gore’s mother, whose grandchildren attend the same school as Christy’s. Looking at the now-elderly woman, Christy sees a fellow victim: “I just feel sad for her.”

Once Upon A Time. Happily Ever After. The fairy tale myth is deeply embedded in American culture. We cheer for the underdog, turn out in droves to watch our superheroes do battle at the multiplex, root for the star-crossed lovers, and privately cherish the idea that our own lives will follow a similar, if less dramatic trajectory. This aspiration is rooted firmly in our collective belief in the power of second chances and the cauterizing effect of retribution.

The arc of an exoneration story seems to fit neatly within the fairy tale framework. We see the bang of the gavel, the embrace between client and attorney, the press conference where the exoneree gives thanks—to his tireless advocates, to his family, to God. There are joyful tears. The horror is over.

But an exoneration is not the happy ending it appears to be. An exoneration is an earthquake. Loud and terrifyingly disruptive, it leaves upheaval and ruin in its wake. After the euphoria comes the rude realization that getting out of prison was a small step in a much longer journey with no clear path forward. Many exonerees suffer horribly—both physically and mentally—in prison. Full of anger, sadness and fear, they learn to stifle their emotions in order to survive. Decades later, they leave prison with no ready access to services or a support system that can help them re-acclimate to society. The road to obtaining money from the state, if that is even possible, can be long and arduous. The physical shackles of prison are gone, but there are invisible ones that remain firmly in place.

But the damage is not limited to the exonerees. Often forgotten are the crime victim’s family members, like Christy and Peggy, forced to relive the worst experience of their lives with the knowledge that the actual perpetrator was never caught, or caught far too late, after victimizing more people. Sidelined by a system that failed them, they are left to watch as stricken bystanders as the men they had learned to hate are set free. These families feel cast aside, because the exoneration process is not concerned with their suffering. Like the exonerees, they are without the resources to cope with overwhelming and wildly conflicting emotions.

The anguish of Debbie Sue Carter’s family is shared by thousands of victims who are struggling to recover from the spectacular trauma of a wrongful conviction. While the crimes that shattered their lives happened thousands of miles apart and in different decades, the repercussions have a familiar rhythm. There is the life-upending violation—the violent taking of a loved one’s life. There is the result—conviction, removal from civilized society of the perpetrator, and the leaden certainty of an ending. When the truth erupts with all of its outsize consequences, exposing a system that is rife with venality, bias, and cruelty, the revelations are not freeing. A wrongful conviction is a psychological prison for everyone it impacts directly. The question is how to get out. Some crime victims, like Christy, do it by making a justice of their own.



***

In 2013, Katie Monroe, then director of national partnerships at the Innocence Project, reached out to Christy to ask if she would speak on a panel with Jennifer Thompson at the organization’s annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Thompson, who had been raped and nearly killed in 1985, misidentified her attacker as Ronald Cotton following the faulty identification procedures that were standard practice at the time. Cotton was convicted and sent to prison. When DNA revealed that the real rapist was a man named Bobby Poole, Thompson was overcome with shame and remorse. But after Cotton’s release, he and Thompson had an emotional reunion and formed a lifelong bond. Picking Cotton, the book they co-authored about their improbable story, had been published in 2009 and became a bestseller.

Christy agreed to speak at the conference. Having met Monroe in the past, she trusted her, and it was an honor to be speaking on a stage with Thompson. Still, she did not know what to expect.

The room was packed with exonerees. “It was standing room only,” Christy said. Thompson was not particularly nervous. She had participated in hundreds of forums like this one. She expected the usual questions about the specifics of her story: what she believed was her rock-solid memory of the event and her shame and horror at learning years later of her misidentification.

Instead, Monroe posed a different question. “What harm was done to you as a victim in the way that the exoneration process unfolded?”

Debbie Sue Carter’s grave. | Photo courtesy of the author

Listening to Thompson speak in a choked voice about how she often felt blamed, shamed, used and left out, even by the Innocence Project, Christy said, “I was doing the ugly cry.” The fact that Thompson “was speaking to the re-victimization and not being included. I felt that, too.”

As in Thompson’s case, the crime that upended Christy’s life left a wound that would not heal. And there was no moving on from it. Year after year, there were new developments: the investigation, the trials, the death penalty sentence for Williamson, the shocking news that the wrong men had been convicted, the arrest, prosecution, overturned conviction, and re-prosecution of Glen Gore. Her family and its trauma was dissected over and over again in the public square: The town was small, the case was notorious and the glare of the media was unrelenting. No one, it seemed, could ever stop talking about the case, and yet no one had any interest in hearing about the suffering of the victims who were still alive.

Now Monroe was giving Christy a public platform to speak from her heart—not about the facts of the case, or the awfulness of the injustice experienced by the men who had been wrongfully convicted—but about what it had done to her family.

Christy left the conference feeling as though she had come to a turning point. What she realized, she said, was that the experiences of exonerees and crime victims was “completely different but also the same.” She explained, “We have all been lied to, mistreated, and not counted.” Was there a way to communicate that shared trauma and make it mean something larger?



***

In 2015, two years later, the opportunity presented itself. Steve Saloom, the former policy director at the Innocence Project, reached out to Christy and asked if she would be willing to write an op-ed about a controversial Oklahoma execution scheduled to take place just days later.

Christy grew up believing in the death penalty as an instrument to deliver justice and retribution. But the condemned man, Richard Glossip, was believed by many prominent people to be innocent. Still, the idea of taking a public stand seemed crazy. “I am going to get my house burned down,” Christy told Saloom. In Oklahoma, embracing the death penalty was a part of being a patriotic American.

In Ada, people still spoke with pride about a vigilante execution more than a century earlier. It happened in 1909, after a wealthy cattle rancher was killed. Four men were arrested, but before they could be put on trial, a mob broke into the jail, dragged them out, and hung them in a nearby barn. A gruesome photograph of the four dead bodies—dangling from the rafters as chickens pecked at the ground below—was still emblazoned on T-shirts, coffee mugs and postcards. Christy saw the memorabilia around town when she was growing up, always with the same tagline: Ada: A Great Place to Hang Out.

But Christy no longer felt that way herself. Williamson and Fritz’s exonerations were incontrovertible proof that the state could and did get it wrong. Had Williamson died according to the jury’s determination, strapped to a gurney with state officials pushing lethal drugs into his veins, it would have been murder. Nor was Williamson an outlier; nine other people had been freed from Oklahoma’s death row after it was discovered that they were innocent.

Christy felt that she had been complicit by lending her support to the prosecution’s efforts to kill the men convicted of her cousin’s rape and murder. It was true that state officials declared complete confidence in Glossip’s guilt. But so had the prosecutors in Debbie Carter’s case—even after a judge had ordered the release of Williamson and Fritz, backed up by DNA evidence. The state’s assurances rang hollow. “I know these cases are not about the truth,” she told me. “It is politics; it is a game where people are moved around and played. It is not fair and it is not balanced.” She decided it would be moral cowardice not to speak out. It was not the cause she would have chosen, but she felt it choosing her.

On September 12, 2015, four days before Glossip’s execution date, Christy’s op-ed was published in the Oklahoman, the state’s most widely read paper. She started by acknowledging the suffering of the victim and his loved ones. She went on to describe the suffering she and her family members experienced as the evidence unraveled against the condemned men in her cousin’s case. “[The victim] and his family deserve justice,” she wrote, “but justice won’t be served if Glossip is put to death and we find out too late that he is innocent of this crime.”

From the left: Christy Sheppard, her mother Glenna, Debbie’s mother, Peggy Carter, and Christy’s daughter Addie. | Photo courtesy of the author

Christy did not say that she was morally opposed to the death penalty; she made it clear she was not: “I still struggle with my desire for justice and what I know about wrongful convictions.” But the question mark hanging over Glossip’s involvement could not be reconciled with the finality of his punishment. As long as there was doubt, she wrote, “it actually threatens justice—and peace of mind—to make the leap to execute him.”

Two days later, Glossip’s advocates held a standing-room only televised press conference at the Oklahoma State Capital. Don Knight, Glossip’s lead attorney, started off by quoting Christy and imploring his audience to take her message into consideration. An hour later, Knight ended this way: “I began by talking a little bit about that letter that Christy Sheppard gave, and I think I would like to end there as well, because it is a powerful letter. A very powerful letter.” He proceeded to read most of it aloud. Christy, watching at home, was amazed.

On September 16, hours before Glossip was scheduled to die, his lawyers persuaded the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to issue a stay; but when it was lifted two weeks later, the governor announced that the state was going forward with the execution on September 30. After Glossip had eaten his last meal, he got another reprieve—it was his fourth in a year. The state, as it turned out, did not have any more potassium chloride, one of the drugs required under its protocol.

The following month, the attorney general announced a moratorium on the death penalty after it was revealed the state had swapped out other drugs in the past—leading in some cases to botched executions. A grand jury was empaneled and spent the next eight months taking testimony and poring over documents to get to the bottom of what one local judge called the “monkey business” at the corrections department over these improper substitutions. The head of the Department of Corrections and the warden were forced to resign.

Meanwhile, Christy found herself in demand, traveling to Ohio to testify before the state Senate in support of a bill banning the execution of the mentally ill, and to Nebraska to give the keynote address at the annual awards dinner for Nebraskans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

In 2016, Christy was named to the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, an 11-member bipartisan blue-ribbon panel. When Christy got the call, she said, “I was like, ‘Me?’” Co-chaired by former Democratic Governor Brad Henry and two former judges, it also included the president of Oklahoma State University, the dean of Oklahoma City University School of Law and the former Republican speaker of the state assembly. Sheppard was the only commission member who was not a lawyer or a politician.

As the commission began its work, the death penalty remained in the headlines. On May 19, 2016, the Oklahoma grand jury delivered a scathing 106-page indictment of one of the botched executions, calling it an “inexcusable failure” and faulting Oklahoma officials for their recklessness, incompetence, arrogance and neglect.

The commission met for full-day sessions throughout 2016 and in early 2017, conducting interviews and listening to presentations by experts. Christy decided to do her own presentation. Too often, she felt, politicians and prosecutors invoked the death penalty in the victim’s name. Over and over, Christy had been told that the death penalty was the only true justice for Debbie Carter and her family. Christy wanted to challenge that idea; more fundamentally, she wanted to challenge the idea of what it meant to be the victim of a crime.

On a large screen in a conference room, Christy presented a short slide show of photographs: Debbie as a pretty and carefree teenager, Christy as a 4-year-old child standing beside with her beloved Aunt Peggy. Mug shots of Williamson and Fritz followed, then pictures taken on the day they were released. Christy ended with a picture of Williamson taken shortly before he died. He was 50 years old, bald, emaciated and toothless. “This is what death row does to people who aren’t supposed to be there,” she said, and left the image on the screen.

In March 2017, the commission released its report recommending that the moratorium remain in place. The members were unanimous in concluding that the state’s death penalty was unenforceable under present conditions—or perhaps at all: “Many of the findings of the Commission’s year-long investigation were disturbing and led the Commission to question whether the death penalty can be administered in a way that ensures no innocent person is put to death,” the co-chairs wrote in the executive summary.

The political climate, too, seemed to have shifted. The report was positively received in the media—including by the conservative editorial board of the Oklahoman.

A flurry of press followed the release of the commission’s report, and Christy gave interviews on television and to local and national media outlets. Initially, she worried about pushback from her family and community about her membership on the commission and her contribution to its ultimate conclusion. But she found little. Mostly what she heard was “You did great” and “You looked so pretty in your blue dress.” Several weeks later, Christy went to pick up her youngest son at his school dance and ran into the father of one of his classmates. “I saw you on TV the other day,” he told her, sounding surprised. “I didn’t know you were an activist.”

“Oh, well,” Christy paused. “I guess I’ve done a little bit of that.”