NEWS

Posted Wednesday, December 3, 2014 5:00 am

By the time the deal was struck last week, Marissa Alexander, now 34, had already spent 1,030 days behind bars. If State Attorney Angela Corey had gotten her way, she might have spent another 20,800 days in that same cell.



But after a ruling earlier this month that devastated the prosecution's case — and revealed that there was a lot more to it than they wanted a jury to know — the state attorney's office caved.



"I think from our client's standpoint, she wanted to get this behind her and move on with her life and her family," says Alexander's chief defense attorney, Bruce Zimet.



Under the terms of the plea agreement her lawyers hashed out with prosecutors, Alexander will be a free woman after her probable release on Jan. 27 — free with the exception of an additional two years of community control, which means she'll have to wear an electronic device to track her movements, though she'll have few restrictions on where she can go.



Alexander lost two birthdays and missed watching her baby daughter grow up because Corey decided that she needed to be locked up — for 20 years, originally — for firing a warning shot in July 2010 into a wall near her husband, Rico Gray, who she said had just tried to strangle her and then threatened to kill her (an allegation backed up by one of his two sons, who were not hers), and who was, according to more recent testimony, a generally abusive son of a bitch, not just to Alexander but to previous partners and an ex-wife, as well. (Gray has denied abusing Alexander, and in fact said it was Alexander who was the aggressor.)



Alexander sat in that cell even as people like U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and numerous anti-domestic violence groups across the country raised hell with Corey over what they perceived as another miscarriage of justice, another case in which she let common sense fly out the window in her relentless pursuit of a scalp.



All along, Corey's office has insisted Alexander's mistake was going to the garage to get her gun — which means she could have fled. When she decided to fight back instead of fleeing, that made it a case of aggravated assault instead of self-defense.



Alexander's other mistake, it seems, was turning down a three-year plea deal before her first trial. She refused because, she said, she was innocent. In May 2012, a jury took only 12 minutes to convict her on all counts. Judge James Daniel seemed conflicted when he realized that Florida law compelled him to sentence her to 20 years for firing a warning shot. The decision, he lamented, "has been entirely taken out of my hands."



Those mandatory minimums — the laws that throw out judicial sentencing discretion and impose lengthy prison terms no matter the circumstances of the crime — are often used by prosecutors as a cudgel to force defendants to accept plea deals, even when the defendants insist on their innocence. In this case, Corey tried to force Alexander into taking the three years with the threat of the 20.



Alexander took the bet, and lost.



She became something of a cause célèbre, especially after Corey failed to win a conviction in the shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin last year. Fairly or not, the juxtaposition of those two cases — a white man shoots and kills an unarmed black boy and goes free; a black woman fires a warning shot at her abusive husband and gets 20 years — became a rallying cry for Corey's critics.



But it wasn't public pressure that got Alexander's conviction tossed in September 2013. Instead, an appellate judges ruled that the court's jury instructions had improperly told jurors that Alexander had to prove her innocence, rather than the prosecution having to prove her guilt.



Though Alexander had already served about two years at that point, Corey promised to retry the case anyway — and this time, she warned, Alexander could face 60 years in prison because under Florida's 10-20-Life rules, each conviction (there were three counts, each carrying 20 years) has to be served consecutively.



But then, in mid-November, Judge Daniel ruled that statements from two of Gray's previous girlfriends and an ex-wife would be admissible in the new trial. They had testified in an earlier hearing that Gray had abused them, too. Their testimonies would have been devastating to the prosecution's case — which makes it all the more disturbing that prosecutors knew about these and tried to keep them out of court in their zeal to keep Alexander behind bars.



Soon after that ruling came down, the plea deal was announced. The state attorney's office would have you believe this is a coincidence.



As Corey spokeswoman Jackie Bernard wrote to Folio Weekly in an email: "No one ruling has prompted any decision in this case. This case was handled like any other case in this office. The State Attorney's Office has been actively negotiating with Ms. Alexander's defense counsel for more than a year."



Zimet declined to offer details on those negotiations. "I can't speak for [Corey's] decision-making or her motivation. I have learned not to talk about negotiations between parties." The deal wasn't perfect, he says, but he and his team told Alexander her options, and she accepted it, though it will make her a convicted felon.



"No one's doing cartwheels going back to jail, but this was her means of getting the case behind her," Zimet says.