FREE THE SCOTT SISTERS: Prominent Black writer draws attention to injustice
By Monica Moorehead
Oct 20, 2010
The 16-year struggle to free Jamie and Gladys Scott from a Mississippi
prison has caught the significant attention of a progressive African-American
journalist. Bob Herbert, who writes for the New York Times on a regular basis,
penned two op-ed pieces within three days of each other exposing the injustice
that the African-American sisters have suffered and calling for their immediate
release.
In his Oct. 12 column, entitled “So Utterly Inhumane,” Herbert
gives a brief history of this tragic incident of racist injustice in the South.
The Scott sisters were just 19 and 21 when they were arrested in December 1993
for a store robbery of $11 near Forest, Miss. No one was hurt and it was the
sisters’ first charge.
The three teenagers who admitted to taking the money testified that they
were pressured by the authorities to implicate the Scott sisters in order to
gain an early parole date. The teenagers eventually served two years of an
eight-year sentence. The sisters were sent to prison in 1994 with two life
sentences each.
Despite the three teenagers’ admissions of guilt in court, appeal
after appeal demanding that the two sisters be set free based on their
innocence has been turned down by the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the meantime, Jamie Scott has developed stage-four kidney failure due to
inhumane prison conditions, including a poor diet. She has faced numerous
life-threatening medical crises because prison authorities have not provided
timely dialysis treatments.
Herbert writes, “This is a case that should be repugnant to anyone
with the slightest interest in justice. The right thing to do at this point is
to get the sisters out of prison as quickly as possible and ensure that Jamie
gets proper medical treatment.” (www.nytimes.com, Oct. 12)
In his Oct. 15 “The Mississippi Pardons” column, Herbert focuses
on the power that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has to carry out pardons,
including for prisoners convicted of first-degree murder. Herbert contacted the
Mississippi Department of Corrections, which confirmed that on June 16, 2008,
Barbour pardoned five people serving life sentences. Herbert went on to say
that these five people were assigned to a special prison program where they
worked in the governor’s mansion.
“The idea that those men could be freed from prison and allowed to
pursue whatever kind of lives they might wish while the Scott sisters are kept
locked up, presumably for the rest of their lives, is beyond disturbing,”
states Herbert.
The sisters’ attorney, Chokwe Lumumba, along with the national
president of the NAACP, Ben Jealous, have called on Gov. Barbour to use his
executive powers, which overrule any decisions made by the state parole board,
to free the sisters.
Go to www.freethescottsisters.blogspot.com for more information and to get
involved in the campaign to free the Scott sisters.
