Sabrina Butler, Death Row Exoneree, Tells Her Story

Sabrina Butler (pic­tured), the only woman among the 144 peo­ple exon­er­at­ed from death row since 1973, recent­ly told her sto­ry in TIME Magainze. 

Butler was just 17 years old when she went to check on her infant son and found he had stopped breath­ing. She attempt­ed to resus­ci­tate him and rushed him to the hos­pi­tal, where he was pro­nounced dead. The next day, a detec­tive accused Butler of mur­der­ing her son. 

“I was alone with no lawyer or par­ent with me. I told him I tried to save my baby. He wrote down what I said and threw it in the garbage. He yelled at me for three hours. No mat­ter what I said, he screamed over and over that I had killed my baby. I was ter­ri­fied. I was put in jail and not allowed to attend Walter’s funeral.” 

Butler describes how she was coerced into sign­ing a false con­fes­sion: ​“I was a teenag­er who, less than 24 hours before, had lost my pre­cious baby boy. Ambitious men ques­tioned, demor­al­ized and intim­i­dat­ed me. In that state of mind, I signed the lies they wrote on a piece of paper. I signed my name in tiny let­ters in the mar­gin to show some form of resis­tance to the pow­er they had over me.” 

She was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death, spend­ing six years in prison before she was acquit­ted in a retri­al where she pre­sent­ed evi­dence that her son had died of a hered­i­tary kidney condition. 

Butler explains that her wrong­ful con­vic­tion is part of a larg­er prob­lem, cit­ing a recent study that esti­mates a rate of erro­neous con­vic­tions on death row of over 4%. Butler said, ​“As long as human beings are in charge, they will make mis­takes. If we can’t get the death penal­ty right every time, we shouldn’t do it at all.”