Sabrina Butler-Smith, 50, from Mississippi, was branded a 'child killer' and had to fight other inmates in prison before she was finally exonerated of killing her son Walter
A mother spent almost 3 years on death row before she was finally exonerated of killing her baby son.
Sabrina Butler-Smith was just 17-years-old when she came back from a run to find her boy Walter dead in their apartment in Columbus, Mississippi.
Despite insisting her innocence, prosecutors claimed she beat her child to death and a jury found her guilty of murder.
It took Sabrina 5 years to prove her son’s injuries were likely caused by her CPR efforts and that he probably died from an pre-existing health issue.
She was exonerated in 1995 but is still haunted by her time in prison, where she was branded a ‘child killer’ and had to fight other inmates.
Sabrina, 50, told The Mirror: “When I arrived at death row, a guard said to me ‘you are going to die here’.
“They put me in a little room smaller than my bathroom, slammed the door and left. I didn’t stop crying for 2 weeks.
“When my death date came in I was horrified. I was listening for every chain coming down the hallway.
“I thought that was the day they were going to kill me. You are waiting to die and you have no-one there to help you. You can’t run or do anything.
“It will always haunt me. They took my life from me for nothing.”
Sabrina’s nightmare started when she came home to find her son, whose dad was in prison when she went to trial, dead in their apartment in 1989.
She told The Mirror: “My son and I were in the apartment by ourselves. I put him to sleep and went for a jog up the street.
“When I got back I went to the kitchen to get a bottle of milk and then went into the room and realised he wasn’t breathing.
“I grabbed him and panicked. I started knocking on doors and screaming, trying to get someone to help me.
“One lady grabbed my son, put him on the floor and started CPR. I found a couple to take him to hospital and then ran back in and grabbed my child.
“This woman who was resuscitating him then instructed me how to do CPR.”
It later emerged that Sabrina was not told the right way to perform CPR and during her retrial a medical expert said this could explain her child’s injuries.
After handing her son over to the doctors at the hospital, she paced the corridors while waiting for an update on his condition.
She told The Mirror: “I said to myself ‘you are in so much trouble as you left him in the house’.
“The police started asking me questions and then told me to go home.
“I thought I couldn’t be honest with them as I was scared. I was only 17. I never thought I would be charged with murder.”
After Sabrina’s son died she was taken in for questioning by detectives.
“Before I even sat down in the interrogation department they started screaming like they were going to fight me,” she said.
“They told me ‘you beat your baby, you stomped on him, you killed him’. I kept telling them I didn’t.
“The detective wrote a statement and shouted ‘sign this’. The only thing I thought I could do was sign at the bottom of the page - and not on the dotted line.
“They charged me with murder and child abuse.”
During her trial in 1990, prosecutors rejected Sabrina’s account and told a jury that the mum beat her child to death.
She said: “I had an all-white jury and a white judge.
“I was 18 by then and I knew these people were going to throw me away. I knew they were going to sentence me to death.”
Her attorney failed to call any witnesses, including the neighbour who gave her CPR instructions, Sabrina said.
She did not testify at her trial and was found guilty by the jury before being sentenced to death.
Sabrina had already spent around a year in prison and after sentencing she was moved to Central Mississippi Correctional Facility.
She was placed in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and could not stop crying on the floor of her cell.
However, her case took a turn after she started speaking to another death row inmate, called Susan Balfour, in the cell next door.
They chatted through a vent underneath their toilets and Susan managed to put Sabrina in touch with British lawyer and death campaigner Clive Stafford Smith. Mr Smith, who was already representing Susan, told The Mirror: "Nobody had bothered to tell Sabrina that she would have an appeal before being executed, so she was sitting shivering with fear in her cell until Susie let her know.
"Susie then had me take on her case and so I did her appeal. Getting the case reversed wasn't difficult. There had been all sorts of mistakes.
"They hadn't put forward any defence at the 1st trial. One of the two lawyers representing Sabrina was very young and the other was hopeless.
"They were up against the District Attorney Forrest Allgood, who is a true believer and still thinks Sabrina is evil incarnate. He's a fundamentalist Christian who believes in an eye for an eye."
Mr Smith said he secured a change of venue for the retrial, which took place in a county with an estimated 90% African American population.
The retrial had 11 black jurors and an African American judge, something Mr Smith welcomed as he thought it gave them a better understanding of the issues Sabrina faced.
Revealing how he secured Sabrina's exoneration, Mr Smith said: "I had to explain why this child had broken ribs.
"To me it was obvious. Sabrina had obviously done CPR with her hands like you see on TV. But with a child you do CPR with the tips of your 2 fingers.
"At the retrial I brought in a baby doll and got the lead detective on the witness stand. When I asked him to do CPR on the doll he crushed the thing with his hand.
"The next thing we had to prove was what Walter actually died of. I spent a week at a medical library and pored over books looking for something that matched what doctors saw with Walter."
Mr Smith eventually stumbled upon a kidney condition called chronic nephrotic syndrome, which would explain Walter's death.
He said: "I asked them (doctors in the case) if they knew what it was at the retrial and they didn't. I then went through it with them and got them to say it was consistent with what they saw.
"I had no idea at the time but later on Sabrina's 2nd child developed the same condition."
Before Sabrina was exonerated, Mr Smith approached the District Attorney Mr Allgood to ask him for a reasonable plea deal.
The 62-year-old, who studied law at Columbia University, New York, rejected the offer and later secured Sabrina's exoneration.
Mr Allgood lashed out after a jury exonerated Sabrina, insisting 'nobody wanted to pay attention to the facts', according to the Clarion-Ledger newspaper.
He said: "I have very, very strong feelings about this. By golly I lost this thing. But I am going to tell you every son of a gun that kills a baby in (my district), I am going to ask for the death penalty in every one of them."
The former District Attorney claimed the case had been influenced by 'myths and fables since it was tried'.
He added: "It has gotten all garbed all the way down the line. It has been one of those situations where nobody wants to pay attention to the facts."
Mr Smith rejected Allgood's response at the time and said the case showed 'the tragedy of people making up their mind someone is guilty before looking at the evidence'.
He told The Mirror that his interest in death row cases started after he developed an 'obsession' with capital punishment as a youngster.
It all started when he was just 12-years-old and read about the execution of French heroine Joan of Arc in a history book.
He said: "I saw a picture of her in the book and she looked just like my sister. I then wrote an essay in school about it and realised the death penalty still existed in America."
Sabrina has credited the Brit, who now lives in Dorset, with saving her life.
Thanks to his work she was taken off death row and sent back to county jail in late 1992.
It took 3 years before Sabrina was finally exonerated in her retrial - and she had to fend for herself in county jail during this time.
She said: “I was called a child killer and a monster. I had to fight other prisoners.
“Who wants to hear that when I was already dealing with why my son died? I was already thinking what if I hadn’t left the house, what more could I have done.”
A retrial heard how Walter likely died as a result of chronic nephrotic syndrome and that his injuries could have been caused by CPR attempts. Sabrina was exonerated in 1995 after spending 6 1/2 years in prison and 2 years and 9 months on death row.
The State of Mississippi introduced compensation exonerated former inmates in 2009, with Sabrina being awarded $329,000 (£237,408).
She now works alongside the group Witness to Innocence in campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty.
Kirk Bloodsworth, executive director of Witness to Innocence, told The Mirror: "The death penalty has had its chance. Its promise to save Americans has failed. The only thing it has done is endanger society."
Source: The Mirror, Matthew Dresch, August 14, 2021
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