Sabrina Butler-Smith's Fight for Freedom | Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:33- There are countless people doing hard time
2. 0:35in American prisons for crimes they didn't commit.
3. 0:38I've interviewed dozens of them for my podcast.
4. 0:40Now, we're bringing these powerful stories
5. 0:43to your screens each week.
6. 0:45I'm Jason Flom, and this is Wrongful Conviction.
7. 0:52Sabrina Butler-Smith was
8. 0:53convicted of murder after performing CPR on her 9-month-old
9. 0:56son, Walter Dean Butler.
10. 0:59Prosecutors convinced the jury she'd killed him.
11. 1:02Sabrina was later cleared by medical evidence
12. 1:04that showed her baby had a deadly illness.
13. 1:06She became the first woman exonerated from death row
14. 1:09in the United States. This is her story.
15. 1:17Growing up in Mississippi as a teenage mother was kind
16. 1:19of hard. I was trying to be a mom
17. 1:21and doing teenage things at the same time.
18. 1:23And when you're a teenager,
19. 1:24you make a lot of mistakes, and I did.
20. 1:28(intense music)
21. 1:38My son and I were in an apartment.
22. 1:41He was playing on the couch,
23. 1:42and it was like nothing was wrong.
24. 1:44You know, I didn't see any signs
25. 1:46that anything was wrong with him or anything like that.
26. 1:55I wasn't gone 10 minutes, and I got a bottle, went
27. 1:58to his room, and I noticed that he wasn't breathing
28. 2:00and right then I panicked, so I grabbed him and ran outside.
29. 2:10The girl came out and she grabbed him
30. 2:12and she put them on the floor and started CPR.
31. 2:14The girl that did CPR told me to blow in his mouth,
32. 2:17hold his nose and press in his stomach.
33. 2:19Well, she didn't tell me the right way.
34. 2:22So I applied adult CPR to little Walter all the way to
35. 2:25the hospital thinking that I was doing the right thing,
36. 2:28but I wasn't. I was scared, I didn't know what to do.
37. 2:34I never thought that
38. 2:35these people would charge me with murder.
39. 2:37I just thought that I would go to jail for not you know,
40. 2:41being at the house with my son.
41. 2:43And so I said to myself that I couldn't be honest.
42. 2:45You gotta lie, you know, that's the first thing I thought.
43. 2:54It took them forever to come out and get me to say
44. 2:56that they couldn't save him. I couldn't believe what
45. 2:59they were telling me, he's gone, we can't save him.
46. 3:01And I remember telling them no, you lying,
47. 3:03you know, all you people are lying.
48. 3:05And that's when the questions began.
49. 3:06And it was like 1,000 people standing around me.
50. 3:15I did not have proper time to mourn my son,
51. 3:18I was only looked at as a person
52. 3:19that could have killed my son.
53. 3:21And at first I didn't realize that they were leaning
54. 3:25toward murder until I got into the interrogation room.
55. 3:40When I did finally start telling them what happened,
56. 3:44they didn't want to hear that.
57. 3:45And the lead detective he wrote a statement out,
58. 3:47he shoved it in my face and told me,
59. 3:49you hit your baby, you stomped him, you beat him,
60. 3:51this is what you did. You know, and asked me to sign it.
61. 3:55And after so long of being no sleep interrogation,
62. 3:59I just signed.
63. 4:00(soft music)
64. 4:09I sit in a county jail for a little over a year.
65. 4:12They sent me to Whitfield.
66. 4:14And Whitfield is a place where they send you if you're
67. 4:16they think you're crazy to see if you're able
68. 4:18to stand trial, and that was a horrible experience.
69. 4:22Once eight weeks were over,
70. 4:23I was sent back to the county jail.
71. 4:25(intense music)
72. 4:37I knew here I am,
73. 4:38this poor Black kid. Didn't have, you know, decent attorneys
74. 4:43to present my case. As I pleaded to take the stand in my own
75. 4:47defense because the district attorney was making me out
76. 4:49to be a horrible person, a horrible mother,
77. 4:52they wouldn't let me take the stand.
78. 4:53So I knew that you know, I was done for, I knew it.
79. 4:57(intense music)
80. 5:04I just wanted to die right there,
81. 5:05I was like, what's the use?
82. 5:07Nobody's listening to me.
83. 5:08I'm trying to tell you what happened.
84. 5:11What else is there left?
85. 5:21Leg shackles, irons from your wrist
86. 5:25all the way down to your feet.
87. 5:27They stripped me of everything I thought that I had.
88. 5:29They put me in this bullpen that looked like a cage
89. 5:33that you put a dog in.
90. 5:34I was hyperventilating because I was scared out of my mind.
91. 5:38I was considered the monster mother
92. 5:40who killed a child, who beat my child to death.
93. 5:43That's what I was considered as.
94. 5:45No one cared about my feelings or how I felt about
95. 5:49my son passing and didn't know what he died from.
96. 5:52When you go to prison, they don't care about your feelings,
97. 6:03I paced the floors, I listened for every sound, every chain.
98. 6:08Because I actually thought that that was the day
99. 6:10that they was gonna kill me. To be tortured that kind of way
100. 6:15is one thing that
101. 6:28Nobody from the lawyer's office or anything
102. 6:31told me anything about that.
103. 6:33Somebody next door to me on death row, who had already went
104. 6:37through the same thing, told me what to expect
105. 6:40and not to worry. That's how I get through it.
106. 6:47(suspenseful music)
107. 7:03I'm thinking that it was gonna be quick. Well, it wasn't.
108. 7:11I want to ask you about the trial itself.
109. 7:13What was that moment like for you, Clive, and Sabrina?
110. 7:17One of the key points in the trial,
111. 7:19Clive was cross examining one of the police officers
112. 7:23and Clive handed him a doll and said,
113. 7:26how would you perform CPR on an infant?
114. 7:30And the police officer did it with his two hands,
115. 7:33pressed down, instead of the way it should be done
116. 7:36with a child, which is two fingers gently.
117. 7:39And through that one demonstration,
118. 7:43Clive was able to point out to the jury that even
119. 7:47a police officer could make the same mistake
120. 7:50that Sabrina Butler made.
121. 7:53And that may have been the cause or part of the cause
122. 7:56of her child's death, but it wasn't intentional.
123. 7:59She wasn't trying to abuse the child.
124. 8:01She wasn't trying to kill the child.
125. 8:15Unlike the first trial, the jury got a real picture
126. 8:19of Walter Dean's existing medical problems
127. 8:23and how those might have contributed to his death,
128. 8:27which demonstrated our theme that this was a tragic death,
129. 8:38I found out that my son had heart problems,
130. 8:41kidney problems, and chronic bowel syndrome.
131. 8:44It was nothing that I had done to cause his death,
132. 8:47I just didn't know how to apply CPR. He had already passed.
133. 8:51I was doing CPR on him trying to bring him back
134. 8:53but he was already gone.
135. 8:57(intense music)
136. 9:08But when the verdict came back and he said,
137. 9:09you are not guilty, I just fell because,
138. 9:12you know, I've been through so much.
139. 9:14And I finally, finally, finally somebody heard what I said.
140. 9:18And they freed me for what should have been in
141. 9:20the first place.
142. 9:24It was so much to, you know,
143. 9:27to contain at that moment.
144. 9:43Two years, two years, I visited my son's grave.
145. 9:46When I found him, he was down a rock road, in the woods,
146. 9:52under a tree on a hill,
147. 9:55and it looked like it used to be a cemetery long time ago,
148. 9:59but there was no way to get in it.
149. 10:08Two years after I got out,
150. 10:10I found out that his death certificate still stated
151. 10:13that he was murdered.
152. 10:15So I'm in the process still of fighting Mississippi today
153. 10:19trying to get them to change his death certificate.
154. 10:23If you are exonerated, that don't mean shit
155. 10:26and I'm just here to tell you.
156. 10:28It don't mean shit because
157. 10:38I got out in '95 I've been doing advocacy work since '96.
158. 10:43And I'm gonna continue to do until, until I can't.
159. 10:47And when I see something wrong,
160. 10:49it bothers me until it's fixed.
161. 10:52And I think that's why I advocate so hard
162. 10:56because I know that it's wrong, I know this is wrong.
163. 11:05They're steady killing people on death row, it is wrong.
164. 11:10How can you
165. 11:14We're not God, you can't do that.
166. 11:17You don't have the right to say who lives
167. 11:20and who dies no matter what.
168. 11:22I feel like we as human beings have gotten so far away
169. 11:28from what is right.
170. 11:31It's all about
171. 11:34It's not about what's right.
172. 11:40I wrote my book to try to use it as a teaching tool
173. 11:43to help as many young people as I can, because there's a lot
174. 11:46of us out there, Black, brown, white, whatever,
175. 11:48maybe going through the same situation that I did.
176. 11:59To the viewers watching me,
177. 12:01I would like you to know that you can get involved.
178. 12:05We have to do something as a people to make a change.
179. 12:07If we don't, then we gonna keep on getting the status quo.
180. 12:11What we got right now,
181. 12:12that's what we're gonna continue to get.
182. 12:14(intense music)