5B. Does the trial record reveal gender bias?
Patty Prewitt
GENDER-BASED NARRATIVE AND ANALYSIS
GENDER-BASED NARRATIVE AND ANALYSIS
WHY
did the young dark-haired mother
in the soft blue cotton skirt
and starched white summer blouse
sitting at the dark oak defense
table near the juror's box
reject the generous
plea bargain offer,
because white nodding blossoms
watching from branches outside
the courthouse window
winked at her,
because proclaiming guilt
for a horrendous crime that
she didn't commit was
incomprehensible to her,
because she still believed
blind Lady Justice was not
also deaf and dumb,
because white men in suits exuded
confidence that the
jurors would judge
liars for what they were,
but mostly because those
winking white blossoms
lied to her?
did the young dark-haired mother
in the soft blue cotton skirt
and starched white summer blouse
sitting at the dark oak defense
table near the juror's box
reject the generous
plea bargain offer,
because white nodding blossoms
watching from branches outside
the courthouse window
winked at her,
because proclaiming guilt
for a horrendous crime that
she didn't commit was
incomprehensible to her,
because she still believed
blind Lady Justice was not
also deaf and dumb,
because white men in suits exuded
confidence that the
jurors would judge
liars for what they were,
but mostly because those
winking white blossoms
lied to her?
– Patty Prewitt, 2008
* * *
On December 14, 1986, 37-year-old inmate Patricia Ann Prewitt was called to the visiting room of the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, Missouri, where her parents and five children were waiting to see her. A large, beefy prison guard stopped Patty at the door to the visiting room. “Over here,” he said, and gestured for Patty to step toward him for a pat-down.
Patty knew that ever since Missouri had lifted its ban on cross-gender pat searches in August of that year, this particular guard had developed a penchant for conducting invasive, humiliating pat-downs. She had seen the man fondle women’s breasts and buttocks and run his hands between their legs, supposedly searching for contraband – which he never found. The guard’s behavior was so unbearable that inmates had taken to skipping meals when they knew he was on duty in the cafeteria, preferring to go hungry rather than be subjected to his groping hands.
Facing the prospect of such a violation, and with her parents and young children watching expectantly from inside the visiting room, Patty could not bring herself to approach the guard. She requested that a nearby female guard conduct the search instead. Unused to having his authority questioned by a female inmate, the beefy guard became angry and ordered Patty to come to him.
Describing the incident in a letter to her friend Nancy the next day, Patty wrote, “The veins were sticking out on his meaty thick red neck. My legs would not move. The rational part of me knew that I was in big trouble. The hurt little girl in me couldn’t allow him to touch her.”
Embarrassed and vulnerable, Patty whispered to the guard, “Please, sir, I’m a rape victim. I beg you to allow the female guard to search me.”
Unmoved, the guard simply became more enraged. Patty looked through the door of the visiting room, from which her family could see but not hear the exchange. The look on her father’s face gave her courage, and she addressed the guard again.
“If you’re not going to allow me to visit, give my family the big box of Christmas gifts that I made for them. The box is in the Property room in the basement. Do you understand?” Patty said, loudly enough for all the occupants of the visiting room to hear.
Patty’s audacity led to palpable hostility toward the male guard as the husbands in the visiting room realized he had probably sexually assaulted their wives, and it won Patty the small victory of being searched by the female guard and preserving her Christmas visit with her family. But after visiting hours were over, Patty received her punishment. She spent her first Christmas Day as an inmate locked in solitary confinement for disobeying a direct order.
* * *
Patty Prewitt made a second trip to solitary confinement in March of 1987, after another defiant encounter with the beefy guard. Although the other inmates were too afraid of retaliation to challenge the guard, Patty stood her ground. She helped initiate a lawsuit to address the problem of male guards molesting female inmates, and a hearing was conducted in federal court on September 30, 1987. Patty and six other women testified before Judge Joseph Stephens – in handcuffs and leg shackles – about the sexual abuse they endured at the hands of male prison guards. Many of them told the judge about their pre-prison histories of physical and sexual violence, which made the guards’ unwanted fondling even more psychologically painful.
The lawsuit resulted in a consent decree, stipulating that male prison guards had to search the breast area of female prisoners with the backs of their hands and that female prisoners could choose to be frisked by female guards when they were available. In the years after the consent decree was in place, the female prisoners no longer had to suffer in silence. If there was a violation of the consent decree, they called the attorney who had been appointed to them by Judge Stephens, and the problem was addressed.
Patty’s audacity is not the only thing that makes her different from her fellow prisoners. Statistically, a majority of female inmates in the United States have histories of domestic violence or child sexual abuse. Patty does not. Most of them have drug addictions or mental illnesses – often the former is a coping mechanism for the latter. Patty has neither. Many female prisoners had absent parents growing up and lack a high school diploma. Patty had two loving parents and some college education. Most of the women in prison with Patty are there because of their relationship with a man – often they took the fall for drug dealer boyfriends, or they killed abusive husbands.
Most of them are guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. Patty is innocent.
* * *
On April 19, 1985, at 4:40 p.m., the twelve-member jury returned to the Pettis County courtroom after six hours of deliberation to announce its verdict. In the matter of State of Missouri v. Patricia Ann Prewitt, the jury found the defendant guilty of capital murder and sentenced her to fifty years in prison without parole.
Stoic throughout most of the four-day proceedings, Patty broke down into sobs when the foreman read the verdict. Her five children, aged seven to fifteen, went into hysterics, screaming and running out of the courthouse and into the street. Even the jurors, who had just sealed Patty’s fate, could not hold back tears.
The nightmare had begun fourteen months earlier. In the early morning hours of February 18, 1984, Patty and her husband Bill returned to their Holden, Missouri home through the rain from a Friday night outing with friends. The couple checked on their sleeping children before going to bed themselves. Patty woke up to the sound of a gunshot among claps of thunder and the feeling of being dragged out of bed by her hair. In the darkness, a man forced her to the floor, held what felt like a knife to her throat, and raped her.
Patty knew something must have been horribly wrong with Bill because he did not come to her aid. As soon as her attacker left, she crawled over to Bill to check on him. He would not wake up, and his breathing had taken on a rattling sound. The lights and the phone did not work. Scared and confused, Patty checked on her children, who were still sleeping soundly. Patty raced down the stairs, almost falling down them, and retrieved a flashlight from the truck outside. She ran back up to Bill, and the light from her flashlight revealed blood all over his pillow.
Needing to get help for Bill but afraid to leave the children behind, Patty woke up her daughters and then her sons. She told them there was a fire so that they would follow the fire drills the family had practiced. Patty helped the kids get dressed and took them outside to the truck.
Panicked, Patty locked the children in the car and ran back through the rain and inside one more time, thinking there must be something she could do for Bill. Once upstairs, she realized the futility of this attempt, as she could not carry her unconscious, bleeding husband out to the car alone. She raced back to her children, still with no idea what to do. Patty started the ignition and drove down the road in search of help. She stopped at the home of Cliff and Patricia Gustin, pounded on the door, and begged for assistance, somehow communicating to them what had happened. Cliff quickly drove off to find the Holden police chief.
Sometime later, an ambulance stopped at the Gustin home. Patty stepped outside to receive the news that her husband was dead. Patty does not remember how she broke the news to the kids. All she remembers is huddling on the couch with her children, all six of them clinging to each other for dear life and crying together, no one speaking a word. Bill was gone. There was nothing to say, only shock and grief.
* * *
Within a matter of hours, news spread around the small town that Patty Prewitt had killed her husband. The morning of the murder, Deputy Sheriff Kevin Hughes went straight for the life insurance papers and collected the Alfred Hitchcock novels from the Prewitts’ home, expecting to find similarities between the stories and the circumstances of Bill’s death.
Patty was not informed that she was a suspect until two days after the murder – when she was interrogated for seventeen hours straight – but Hughes and the other law enforcement officers had made up their minds from the very first moment. Satisfied that they had apprehended the murderer, they ceased their half-hearted efforts to find the intruder who had shot Bill and raped Patty, believing him to be a myth.
As Hughes and others put together a case against Patty over the next fourteen months, the prosecution began to offer Patty plea bargains. Because she was innocent, Patty rejected every plea presented to her. Even when she was offered a deal that would have released her from prison on parole after five years, Patty refused. She refused to consent to being imprisoned for a crime she did not commit, much less a crime of which she and her children were victims.
“I’m not leaving my kids for five years,” Patty said. But on April 29, 1986, after learning that her appeal had been denied, Patty was forced to leave them for fifty years.
* * *
Patty Prewitt was – and still is – a devoted mother. Before going to prison, she had never been separated from her children for more than a weekend. She was affectionate and supportive. At Halloween, Patty made costumes for her children, and at Easter, she hid eggs for them. She volunteered with the PTA; she coached softball; she helped start a task force to keep drugs out of the high school. Her family was her life.
But Patty’s status as a mother was used against her at trial.
During jury selection, the prosecutor asked potential jurors, “Would anyone, regardless of the evidence, would anyone solely because the defendant is the mother of five children be unable to vote for conviction of capital murder and send her to the Department of Corrections for life without parole for fifty years?”
Seven members of the jury panel raised their hands. Over Patty’s attorney’s objections, Judge Donald Barnes granted the state’s motion to strike all seven potential jurors for cause – leaving only the jurors who, without hearing any of the evidence, had no qualms about locking a mother with young children away for the rest of her life. It is hard to imagine this personalized jury screening tool being used for a male defendant with children. Sometimes juries are screened for their ability to administer a particular punishment more generally; for example, in death penalty cases, jurors who absolutely refuse to sentence any defendant to death are excused. But rarely, if ever, has a court allowed a jury to be so carefully selected for its lack of sympathy toward a particular characteristic of a defendant – in this case, Patty’s motherhood.
Through letters, phone calls, frequent visits, and sheer determination, Patty has continued to be a good mother to her children during her twenty-three years in prison. When they were still young, she did everything she could to protect her children from knowing about the horrors of prison life she experienced every day. She gave them handmade Christmas gifts, wrote to them about her funny prison stories, kept up a positive attitude during visits, listened to their problems, and alleviated their fears.
Patty’s children have always known that their mother would never have killed their father. Now adults, they have created petitions, websites, Facebook and MySpace pages, and tried everything they can think of to get their beloved mother out of prison. It is hard not to wonder how their lives might have been different if those seven jurors had been allowed to remain.
* * *
Patty Prewitt may not have much in common with her prison mates, but she did not exactly fit the norms of the women in her pre-prison community, either. Patty was raised on a ranch in rural Missouri, where she rode horses, played sports, and developed into quite the tomboy. Manual labor was familiar to her from an early age. Patty was always outgoing, even boisterous.
After Bill and Patty got married in 1968, Patty spent several years tending the house and raising the children while Bill worked. But in 1976, the couple borrowed some money and bought their own lumber yard. After that, the two worked side by side, partners in their endeavor. Patty’s role in the business was unusual for a woman of her time and place. She had one friend who operated a hot asphalt roller for a living, but all the other women she knew were housewives. Patty was the only female driver when she made trips to pick up lumber for the business. As the more assertive spouse, Patty was the one who worked to collect from customers with outstanding balances.
Patty Prewitt did not conform to her community’s expectations of femininity – and her lack of conformity ultimately condemned her.
* * *
Bill Prewitt was murdered with his own gun, a 22-caliber repeating rifle. At Patty’s trial, the prosecution placed significant emphasis on the fact that Patty knew how to operate the gun. Deputy Hughes testified that Patty told him she had used the rifle to shoot the rats that got into the chicken house at the Prewitts’ old home.
“She said she used to sit out there and plug those suckers,” Hughes testified during his direct examination.
During her cross-examination, Patty and the prosecutor had the following exchange:
Prosecutor: “You told the officers, I believe, you wanted the gun the week or so before your husband was murdered in order to shoot a stray dog; is that right?”The prosecutor went on to ask Patty about the 22-caliber rounds found in her jewelry box by Bill’s and her bed. Patty explained that the ammunition was there from fifteen years of putting away the contents of Bill’s pockets at the end of each day – the change and the shells were all mixed in together.
Patty: “Not shoot a stray dog, to scare a stray dog off.”
Prosecutor: “Scare it off. You had used the semi-automatic a lot of times, hadn’t you?”
Patty: “I used it before.”
Prosecutor: “Did you tell the officers at the old house you had rats in the chicken house and you used to sit on the deck and plug those suckers?”
Patty: “The way it sounds is not exactly the way it was, but I have shot rats with that gun.”
Had Patty been a man, no prosecutor, juror, or judge would have thought twice about her experience with guns or at the presence of ammunition at her bedside. A man’s knowledge of guns would not have incriminated him; in fact, it would have been expected of him.
Yet the prosecutor, in his closing argument, cited as supporting evidence for the government’s theory of the case, “Mrs. Prewitt’s knowledge of that gun. She used to set and plug those suckers. She knew how to use it. Had one, she knew how to use it, kept her shells for fifteen years handy.”
The prosecutor knew that every juror would find it unusual for a woman to be familiar with guns and experienced in using them. He was also counting on the jurors to be appalled at the image of a woman shooting and killing rats or stray dogs. The juxtaposition of the femininity of Patty’s jewelry box with the masculinity of the deadly ammunition sent the message to the jury that this was not their kind of woman. The assumption the prosecutor hoped to transmit was that if Patty knew how to use the gun that killed Bill, she must have been the one to do it. It probably helped that nine of the twelve jurors were themselves women – women tend to be harsher on their own sex.
Ironically, although Patty’s failure to conform to gender norms contributed to her demise, the traditional feminine attributes she did possess may have been just as damaging. By her own admission, Patty approached the investigation of her husband’s murder with complete naiveté. Wanting to help find Bill’s murderer, Patty spoke freely to the officers of the Holden Police Department and the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. Two days after the murder, she was interrogated for seventeen hours without asking for an attorney – it did not occur to Patty that an innocent person would need one. Patty rejected plea bargain after plea bargain, convinced that the truth would prevail. But in the end, being peaceful, cooperative, and trusting – all characteristics considered appropriate for a woman – may have harmed Patty just as much as her outgoing, self-sufficient, tomboyish nature did.
* * *
In May of 1974, Bill and Patty Prewitt drove to Sedalia, Missouri, to run some errands. They split up and arranged to meet back up at a park at a certain time. Patty took care of her shopping and then meandered back toward the park, enjoying the beautiful weather.
Patty heard footsteps behind her and slowed down to let them pass. The footsteps slowed down as well. Patty started to get nervous. She told herself she was being paranoid, so she kept walking but began to speed up. The footsteps sped up too.
Three men grabbed Patty from behind, dragged her behind some nearby bushes, and raped her.
Patty and Bill decided not to tell anyone what had happened. Patty felt embarrassed and ashamed, and they thought it would be best to just move on and forget about it. At first Bill was sympathetic and understanding about the rape, but after a while, it became clear that Bill was having an even harder time coping with it than Patty was. Their relationship became strained and distant. They ceased to be intimate.
While they were buying the lumber yard and transitioning to Holden in 1976 and 1977, Bill and Patty lived apart – Patty at the old house with the kids and Bill at the new place in Holden. They were essentially separated. They worked together during the day, but they slept apart at night. Patty felt lonely and lost.
In 1976, confused and with nowhere to turn, Patty began an affair with a man named Ricky Mitts. Over the course of the next couple of years, she and Bill were both unfaithful to each other with several different people. None of the affairs lasted longer than a few months at a time, and none of them involved love. Ashamed of her reasons for cheating on Bill and unable to talk about the rape, Patty told her lovers that Bill was abusive or that she wanted a divorce. She thought the lies would be easier for the men to accept than the truth.
Finally, in the fall of 1978, the carefully buried problems in Bill and Patty’s marriage exploded to the surface. During an argument in their kitchen, Patty started throwing the china at Bill. They yelled at each other until they were both crying. After that, they worked hard to mend their relationship, and by 1980, their marriage was solid again.
At her trial, Patty testified, “We kind of lost each other for a while, but we had so much. We had so much. We worked hard. We went back like it was, only sometimes I thought it was even better. We were stronger. We were happy. We were really happy.”
* * *
When Deputy Hughes first questioned Patty about her husband’s murder, he asked her if she or Bill had ever had affairs. Patty said no. She was ashamed, and she considered the intimate details of her relationship with Bill to be private – and completely unrelated to finding the man who murdered Bill.
Deputy Hughes’s investigation uncovered Patty’s affairs, though, and three of her former lovers were brought in to testify against her at the trial. Patty’s attorneys objected to the testimony, but the prosecution insisted it was relevant to Patty’s motive, and the judge allowed the men to take the stand.
All three of them said on direct examination that Patty had told them she wished her husband were dead or even that she wanted them to help her kill Bill. On cross-examination, though, two of them admitted that they had been intimidated or coerced by the sheriff’s office.
Jonathan Hancock testified that the police told him he was a “prime suspect” and that if he did not cooperate, they would lock him up. He was also under investigation for arson, a charge that disappeared.
Richard Hays testified that after he gave his original statement to the police, they presented him with a pre-typed statement to sign. The second document included assertions Hays had never made – including that Patty had told Hays that if he killed her husband, the life insurance would make Patty a wealthy woman. Hays said the sheriff told him that if he signed the new document, he would not have to testify in court. Hays also had a pending charge for assault. His troubles with the law disappeared after he testified against Patty.
Ricky Mitts voluntarily went to the sheriff and confessed about the affair. He also told the police that Patty had asked him to kill her husband. On cross-examination, though, Mitts admitted that after he gave his statement, he went straight to Patty’s house. He told Patty that he had given incriminating information to the police but that if she married him, he would not have to testify against her, and she would be free.
* * *
This parade of paramours formed the core of the government’s case against Patty. Over and over, the prosecutor told the jury that Patty had killed Bill for “lust and greed.” Deputy Hughes, who developed a personal vendetta against Patty because she was the one suspect he could not get to confess, claimed in court that Patty told him she had affairs because her “fire burns hotter than others” and because she had “a different set of values.” Patty insisted that she never said anything remotely like that.
Deputy Hughes and the three former lovers all were allowed to testify about the gory details of the affairs, many of which were exaggerated, according to Patty. The judge allowed testimony about the duration of the affairs, how many times Patty had sex with each man, and where they had sex each time – with no objection from Patty’s attorneys.
The prosecutor repeatedly used Patty’s affairs not only to suggest a motive for killing her husband but also to infer that she was a bad mother, which would presumably make her more willing to kill her children’s father.
During Patty’s cross-examination, the prosecutor questioned her as follows:
Prosecutor: “As I understand your explanation of that, the extramarital affairs were just for the sexual gratification they offered?”The prosecutor even used Patty’s explanation for her affairs against her, twisting it to sound as though Patty were trying to blame Bill for her unfaithfulness.
Patty: “No.”
Prosecutor: “Well, what did they afford, ma’am?”
Patty: “I don’t know, some comforts. I don’t know.”
Prosecutor: “Did they have an effect on your relationship with your children?”
Patty: “No, sir.”
Prosecutor: “Well, wasn’t it necessary for you to abandon the children’s interests when you were with these men?”
Patty: “No, sir.”
Prosecutor: “Is it your testimony that you could continue being a good and proper mother and be at a motel with Jon Hancock?”
Patty: “I was always a good mother.”
In closing, the prosecutor said, “Her rape over here in Sedalia occurred before the first known illicit affair, and it was Bill Prewitt’s fault, he withdrew from her, he couldn’t take it, forced her, forced her to be an adulteress, had to have others for sexual delight or for comfort, not clear which.”
This statement not only encouraged the jury not to believe Patty’s story about her 1974 rape but also completely minimized the complexity and emotional trauma of recovering from such an experience, for both Patty and for Bill. It made Patty’s explanation of her affairs sound weak, implausible, and selfish.
The prosecutor’s skepticism of the 1974 rape, combined with the testimony about Patty’s affairs, cast doubt on Patty’s assertion that she was also raped by Bill’s murderer. The prosecutor played upon society’s tendency to be suspicious when a woman cries rape, especially if she does it more than once – and upon the idea that “promiscuous” women cannot be victims of rape.
In his closing argument, the prosecutor characterized Patty’s defense as insisting that “a rapist intent on murdering Mrs. Prewitt” came into the Prewitt home, disabled the lights and the phone, killed Bill, and “advanced with his murderous manner to enjoy Mrs. Prewitt’s oft-enjoyed sexual favors.”
The undertones of the government’s closing argument are, first, that no one would go through all of that trouble just to rape Patty Prewitt – ignoring the fact that Patty’s defense claimed that the intruder’s primary goal was to kill Bill, not to rape Patty – and second, that no one would need to rape Patty because Patty would have given in willingly.
The prosecutor also used Patty’s dishonesty toward her former lovers about her relationship with Bill and her dishonesty toward Deputy Hughes when first asked about affairs to suggest that Patty was lying about what happened on the night of Bill’s murder. The prosecutor’s message to the jury was, if you believe Patty committed adultery, then she has no credibility, and you must also believe she committed murder.
“The defendant was motivated by sheer greed and sexual lust and had been for years. She had planned for years to kill her husband. She disregarded her marital vows and the noticeable obligations of motherhood. She pursued one sleazy affair after another, once, two at a time,” the prosecutor said, conflating the sin of adultery with the crime of murder.
The prosecutor continued in his rebuttal, “The Defense acknowledges Bill Prewitt is a fine, decent, man, devoted. The evidence is that she defiled his home with those lovers when the children were there, she defamed him as a wife beater, she abandoned her duties as mother of her children. She deprived him of a future with his family, and she deprived the children of their father by murdering him, and ladies and gentlemen, there is in evidence conclusive proof that Patricia Prewitt murdered Bill Prewitt.”
The “evidence” listed by the prosecutor is simply that Patty cheated on Bill, and he explicitly urges the jury to make a leap of faith from that fact to the conclusion that Patty was guilty.
As a result, Patty Prewitt was essentially convicted of adultery and sentenced to fifty years in prison without parole.
* * *
Five months after Patty went to prison, her parents and children came to visit her, as they did almost every Sunday. Each of her five children took turns sharing a private one-on-one moment with their mother.
When it was nine-year-old Morgan’s turn, he climbed into Patty’s lap, took her face between his small hands, and asked, “Mommy, do you have fifty years?”
Wanting to protect her youngest child from the harsh truth but understanding that he already knew the answer to his question, Patty hugged her son and replied, “Yes, Morgan, but we’re working on it. We’re working hard to change that so I’ll be able to come back home to you.”
* * *
Twenty-three years later, Patty remains in prison. She turns sixty this year. She has not yet served half of her fifty-year sentence. Morgan is now thirty-one years old, and he and Patty’s three daughters all have children of their own.
Through it all, Patty has refused to give in. She enjoys regular visits with her children and grandchildren, provides advice and emotional support to her fellow prisoners, and is a AFAA-certified group exercise instructor and is studying to take the Personal Trainer certification test very soon. She writes poetry and piles of letters, takes advantage of every educational opportunity available to her in prison, drafts letters to government and prison officials and local newspapers when she encounters mistreatment of inmates, and acts in plays through the Prison Performing Arts program. She won an award for an essay about prison life. She has worked as the shop lead in the prison’s Information Systems Unit for fourteen years, writing software and teaching programming skills, and she has become an aerobics and yoga instructor.
Patty has exhausted every legal remedy available to her – she has submitted a motion for a new trial, appealed her conviction, and petitioned for habeas corpus – but all of her efforts have been denied. She has begged for clemency from five governors and is working on her sixth.
Patty Prewitt learned the hard way that sometimes innocent people do go to prison. But Patty will never stop believing that they can find their way back home again.
Jessica Heaven,
Georgetown University Law Center
[+/-] show/hide this post
Georgetown University Law Center
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home