Prominent Black writer draws attention to injustice

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.