Willie Mae Harris, 72, from Bradley, was given a life sentence for first-degree murder in 1985 but said that the shooting of her husband Clyde was simply an accident related to self defence, according to the criminal justice website The Appeal which has championed her case.
Court documents started that she had been a domestic abuse victim for a long time.
She had refused a plea deal of 20 years in prison in which she would be out in 13 years for good behavior and she testified that her husband “was threatening to kill me,” adding, “I don’t really know what happened… I did not shoot my husband,” according The Appeal.
She had been lauded for her work at Wrightsville Women’s Facility, southeast of Little Rock, teaching other inmates how to read. During her incarceration, she lost her eyesight after a stroke and is now legally blind.
The state parole board recommended five times that she receive clemency but no governor, who makes the final call, agreed until Wednesday, when Asa Hutchinson announced that he would commute her sentence.
“She had been a victim of domestic violence for a long period of time [and] there was evidence of that. She proclaimed her innocence but for a lot of reasons I granted clemency to Willie Mae Harris,” Hutchinson said, according to the Arkansas Times.
Her daughter, Silvia Jackson Harris, who was only 13 when her mother went to jail, told Fox 16, that she would finally be able to meet the whole of her extended family, which included nine grandchildren, and 18 great-grandchildren.
“This lady has always had the best spirit throughout this whole process of 34 years being incarcerated,” she said, adding that when she found out that she would be released, “all I could do was just run outside, run out of my office and just scream.”
“This was a woman that loved her husband and she was not trying to take his life, it was just a freak accident and accidents happen,” she added.
Her lawyer, Lee Eaton, said that in her recent clemency appeal, she did not get a fair hearing because no evidence of the domestic abuse she suffered was presented. She told the AP: “She’s missed generations of her family.” Newsweek has contacted Eaton and the Arkansas governor’s office for comment.
Senior research analyst for advocacy group The Sentencing Project, Nazgol Ghandnoosh told Newsweek that the fact the parole board had recommended her parole five times and no governor until now agreed to it, showed “how much politics skews public safety decisions.”
“People who are experts who are reviewing the case closely thought that it was not a community safety risk for her to be released. Meanwhile, governors have been reluctant to put their careers on the line and release somebody who they were afraid about getting backlash about.
“It is very commendable that the governor has recognized in this case this is not a person who poses a public safety risk and should not continue to be incarcerated.
“But on the other hand it underscores the need for the governor and for the legislature in Arkansas to evaluate the 2400 other people that are serving life sentences there.
“Are they in prison in order to protect communities or are they in prison still to protect political careers?” That is the important question that the public and the elected officials need to consider for themselves when deciding to imprison people for such lengthy periods of time,” Ghandnoosh told Newsweek.
