Siwatu
Ra, who gave birth to her son while she was incarcerated, was reunited
with her family after being released from prison on bond.
Photograph Courtesy FreeSiwatu.org
A story
can defy belief and appear ordinary at the same time. This is such a
story. Siwatu Ra, a twenty-five-year-old woman with no prior criminal
record, was sentenced by a Detroit court, in March, to two years in
prison on felonious assault and felony firearm charges, after
brandishing a gun at another woman during an argument. Ra maintained
that she pointed the gun in defense of herself, her mother, and her
two-year-old daughter; her gun was unloaded and licensed, and she has a
concealed-carry permit in Michigan, which is an open-carry, Stand Your
Ground state. Ra was incarcerated as soon as she was sentenced, even
though she appealed her conviction, and even though she was nearing her
third trimester of pregnancy. Three months later, she gave birth in St.
Joseph Mercy Hospital, in Ann Arbor, in the presence of four armed
guards. Her son was taken from her two days later.
Ra is a
prominent environmental activist, and her case became a cause for much
of the activist community in Detroit. Last Wednesday, eight and a half
months after Ra was imprisoned, a judge finally ordered her to be
released on bond, pending the outcome of her appeal. Her release, and
the campaign to free Ra, were the unusual aspects of the case.
Otherwise, every step along the way, the system functioned exactly as it
usually does—and as it is designed to work.
The story begins on
July 16, 2017, at the house of Ra’s mother, Rhonda Anderson, who was a
Sierra Club organizer for eighteen years and is a den mother to many
Detroit activists. Ra was visiting that day with her two-year-old
daughter, Zala. Also present was Ra’s teen-age niece N’Deye, who lives
in the house. A schoolmate of N’Deye’s came over, intending to spend the
night; the adults of the house did not want her there, because the
girls had recently had an altercation at school. The girl’s mother,
Chanell Harvey, came to pick her up, and that is when a conflict
occurred between her and Ra.
Some facts are not in dispute.
Whatever happened took place in front of the house, where Zala was
playing inside Ra’s parked car. It involved Harvey bumping Ra’s car with
her own, although there is disagreement about when and why this
occurred. (Harvey claims that she hit the car by accident while
attempting to drive away.) Ra pulled her licensed handgun out of her
vehicle and pointed it at Harvey to force her to leave—the sides agree
on this fact, and it’s uncontested that the gun was not loaded. Anderson
told me that, before Ra brandished the gun, Harvey revved her engine
and brought her car within inches of her. After Ra took out the gun,
Harvey snapped a couple of photos with her phone and left.
Both
women went to the police. Harvey went immediately after the incident;
Ra went a couple of hours later, after she had dropped off Zala at home.
Ra was charged with assault and released on a fifteen-thousand-dollar
bond. Ra faced a jury trial; the jury was not told that a conviction for
a felony firearm charge would carry a mandatory two-year sentence. Nor
did the jury know that Harvey had thrice been convicted of felonies,
including assault with a shotgun.
The sentencing was scheduled for
March 1st. As several people have recounted to me, all of activist
Detroit seemed to come to the courthouse that day, filling the courtroom
and spilling out into the hallway. Ra has been an environmental
activist since she was fifteen years old; she worked as a youth
organizer in Detroit neighborhoods and schools, and has taken part in
protests as far away as Paris, during the 2015 global climate talks,
with her baby Zala strapped to her. Some activists wonder if the show of
support in the courtroom might have made the judge, Thomas Hathaway,
less sympathetic to Ra. The judge had no discretion over the length of
the mandatory sentence. But Ra was six months pregnant, and the defense
asked that either the sentencing or the sentence itself be deferred
until after she gave birth. Hathaway denied these requests.
Ra
told me that, after she was sentenced, she spent the night in the Wayne
County Jail. The next day, she was driven to the Huron Valley
Correctional Facility, a women’s prison about half an hour outside of
Detroit. Like all inmates, she was at first placed in quarantine. For
the first three days, she was confined to a dimly lit, cold cell, with a
single bunk with dangerous rusty edges. She was allowed no phone calls
or mail. She was given a Bible; Ra is Muslim, and asked for a Koran, but
she received no response, she said. “Most of the time I didn’t even
know what time of the day it was until it was nighttime,” Ra told me. “I
just lay on the bunk looking up at the little window, praying at the
moon.”
After
a week, she was allowed to go to the chow hall for meals with other
inmates. She graduated to a two-person cell in a hallway of forty such
cells. For an hour each day, inmates were allowed to leave their cells,
and this was when all of them tried to use one of four payphones or the
single computer available for sending e-mails to family members. This
was when Ra first saw a fight break out
between inmates, when both wanted to get to the computer. A few of the
women on the floor were pregnant.
After
three weeks, Ra told me, she was transferred to the unit for pregnant
and postpartum women. She had developed an infection while in quarantine
and went to the health unit to ask for help. “I saw a woman who I’d
seen in quarantine,” she told me. “She was nine months pregnant when I
saw her, and now she was no longer pregnant. I asked her, and she said
the baby was still at the hospital: she couldn’t take it home, and now
it was a ward of the state. I became so upset that I started to have an
asthma attack, because I knew I was next.” She went into labor; she was
twenty-nine weeks pregnant. When the ambulance came, she said, prison
officials insisted on performing a strip search before she was taken off
the premises. “Even the E.M.T.s were upset with the prison,” she said.
“They were yelling, ‘We have to get her out, she is in active labor, her
blood pressure is too high and the baby’s heart rate is falling.’ ” She
was taken to the hospital in handcuffs and leg irons.
Ra was
hospitalized for three days—the doctors succeeded in stopping her
labor—and returned to prison. She eventually delivered a full-term baby
boy, with four armed guards in bullet-proof vests looking on. No family
members were allowed to be present, but Ra told me that a dozen medical
personnel piled into the room, some of them for the sole purpose of
showing sympathy and support. She returned to prison after forty-eight
hours. Her husband, Kamal Muhammad, picked up the baby from the hospital
after Ra was discharged. For the next five and a half months, he
brought both of the children to see Ra in prison twice a week. “You
should see that visiting room,” Anderson, Ra’s mother, told me. “It’s
the happiest place and the saddest place. It’s moms and their children,
and moms and moms, and husbands.”
Being separated from her
children was by far the most punishing aspect of incarceration. “In one
of our conversations, she said, ‘Mommy, my body yearns for my children,
my brain searches for my children,’ ” Anderson told me last week. “I’d
never heard anyone put it that way, and the first thing I thought about
were the immigrants. I just read that a hundred and forty-one children
may never be reunited. We’ve already sentenced them to a lifetime of
hell. We’ve got this history of doing this to indigenous people, to
African-Americans. This isn’t a fluke. This is what we do to inflict
pain.”
On the outside, a team of activists and lawyers were
working on Ra’s behalf. “Free Siwatu” buttons and posters could be
spotted all over Detroit. The bureaucracy churned with excruciating
slowness. It wasn’t until October that a judge heard Ra’s plea for a
release on bond pending the outcome of her appeal—and denied it. An
appeals court vacated the decision earlier this month, suggesting, in a
strongly worded order, that the lower-court judge had used circular
logic. “Conviction of the crime alone is not a sufficient basis” for
denying bond, the order stated. On November 14th, Judge Donald Knapp
finally ordered Ra released on a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond. This
decision was as logical as it was unusual: usually, once a person has
landed behind bars, she will stay there until the end of her sentence.
In fact, no one seemed to know quite how the process should work in Ra’s
case, and her lawyer and his clerk ran around trying to arrange the
payment, the documentation, and the electronic tether bracelet ordered
by the judge.
Rhonda Anderson embraces her daughter Siwatu Ra outside of the Huron Valley Correctional Facility.
Photograph Courtesy FreeSiwatu.org
On
Wednesday afternoon, a half-dozen different cars pulled into the lot at
Huron Valley: Ra’s lawyer, friends, and family came to see her get
released. She came out wearing a sky-blue prison-issue sweatsuit and
carrying a giant box of letters that she had received while in prison.
She hugged her lawyer, Wade Fink, first, handed him the heavy box, and
then embraced her mother. Ra’s husband, with the two children in the
backseat, was the last to arrive. Ra opened a back door and stood
looking at the baby in his car seat as she held Zala, who stayed very
still, as though shell-shocked, and the group debated where they should
go to celebrate: Olive Garden, Taco Bell, or Red Lobster.
Fink had
taken over Ra’s case from the lawyer who represented her at trial. He
recounts the story of the case to me as a litany of denials; to him, the
unifying thread of this narrative was the “cavalier administration of
justice.” No one, it seemed, was interested in determining whether Ra’s
behavior in the front yard of her mother’s house had constituted
self-defense, whether she was a danger to her community, or whether the
harm done by having her give birth while incarcerated and then
separating her from her child was in any way justified. The overarching
logic of the process was the logic of mass incarceration: once the
machine started churning, it was nearly impossible to stop. The logic of
mandatory sentencing turns the judge into a representative of the
bureaucracy; discretion shifts to the police and prosecutors who have
the power to frame cases in terms
that trigger mandatory sentences. Because lawyers and defendants
understand that power rests with the prosecutors, more than ninety per
cent of cases in the country never go to trial—they end in plea deals,
which further cements the power of the prosecution.
Ra’s sentence
remains in effect. If her appeal is denied, she will have to serve the
remaining year and three months. If the appellate court overturns her
conviction, she will have spent eight and a half months behind bars, and
given birth to a child who was taken away from her within forty-eight
hours, simply because such was the logic of the incarceration machine.
For
her part, though, Ra has followed her principle of trying to leave any
place better than she found it. During her time in the Huron Valley
facility, she mounted successful campaigns for securing Muslim inmates
rights to receive copies of the Koran, to purchase hijabs, and to be
given fresh, warm food after sundown during Ramadan, among other things.
(That Ra had to fight for these things is all the more remarkable given
that the Detroit area is home to one of the largest Muslim populations
in the United States.) She also fought to protect the rights of women
giving birth while incarcerated. Among the difficulties she faced was
the cost of procuring a copy of pregnancy-related prison rules, as the
facility charged a fee for it. Once the women had a copy, they passed it
around and tried to memorize their rights and develop strategies for
securing them. Ra, for example, discovered that, according to the rules,
postpartum women were not supposed to be shackled and handcuffed until
after they had showered, even though, she said, guards generally
attempted to put restraints on women as soon as the birthing process was
over. “So I told women not to shower,” Ra told me. “Better to sit there
smelly holding your baby than to sit there shackled holding your baby.”
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