The Criminal Injustice System: A True Story

By Carol Spencer and Terry Lowery

This book is the story of a psychotherapist who fell in love with a Death Row inmate who she had met through a newspaper article and the strong urging of God to write to him. It tells about their relationship, some of the problems they had while he was in prison, and how the system helped and failed him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532081002

Book preview

PREFACE

L et me introduce myself. I do not consider myself as an author, unless you would count the thousands of progress notes I have written over my 40+ years of experience in the field of social work and mental health psychotherapy. I am a simple person, perhaps in more ways than one. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, went to Ohio University, married my high school sweetheart, and had the then typical 2 children. I made sure that they were two or more years apart so that each one would have time to be the baby. I tried to do everything right. I always went to church, and cannot remember a time when I was not an authentic believer in God, and Jesus Christ. However, life, fate, God, time or whatever you want to call it, has a way of changing us, whether we want it to or not. I had a good life, and I still do, but I did not expect or plan for it to change like it did from just reading a simple newspaper article.

I have always had a lot of empathy for the plight of other people, as you might expect or hope to find in someone who is a social worker/ counselor. I guess that is why that newspaper article got to me. Also, at that time my children were grown, my marriage was stagnant, and I still had not yet fulfilled my own career dreams of getting my master’s degree in social work. That is when God really spoke to me, and sent me on the path of this story, and my life has never been the same since. It was Terry who encouraged me to go back to college and get my master’s degree, so I owe as much to him as he does to me.

CHAPTER 1

The Criminal Injustice System

T here I was 23 years old, and standing in front of a judge, and a courtroom full of people. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I knew I wouldn’t live to see 30. I had always known that. My mind was racing. My heart was beating faster than it ever had before. I had to be strong. I couldn’t let them see me sweat, or even worse, cry. I wouldn’t let the bastards see that they had gotten to me. The verdict came down hard, DEATH IN THE ELECTRIC CHAIR! My heart sank, and my knees started to buckle. NO, I told myself. Don’t react like they expect you to. Be a man. Be strong. Reporters started to swarm around me. I told them, trying to be as bad as they were, ‘That chair is not going to get me. I am going to get right up out of that chair’.

Almost 10 years later, I did just that. By the grace of God, I was given a good lawyer, Atty. Judith Menadue. She and some others got me off of Death Row, or X-Row, as they called it in there. The Fort Wayne Herald quoted me when that happened saying I was right. That was the only time they said that I was right. From the time when I first got arrested to the present day the press and the public have done nothing but convict, defame, and mistreat me just like my grandparents did when I was a child. They made me out to be some kind of a demonic person way before the judge read the verdict.

The media helped to convince the public that I was guilty, when there was no real evidence that I committed the crime, except for a forced confession which the police got after a grueling interrogation in which they kept me in a room and made me go without food, water, sleep, and warmth for a couple of days. Also, they injected me with a drug, and when I resisted, they injected me anyway. I couldn’t call anyone, because I had no one to call, and even if had someone to call, they would not let me call. They kept shouting at me, Tell us what we want to hear. Tell us what we want to hear. Finally, to get them off my back I told them what they wanted to hear, which was the biggest lie I ever told, and the worst one. Years later, I told my wife the name of the drug they injected in me, and when she looked it up in the PDR she found that if a person was not psychotic when they took the drug, it made them, psychotic.

In my 26 years in prison I learned more about the criminal injustice system than I ever really wanted to know. It is amazing how well it all works together to keep the poor, and disenfranchised people down and prevent them from getting the same kind of justice that the knowledgeable and/or wealthy people are able to get. A person does not have to be black to be mistreated by the justice system. All they have to be is poor, lower middle class, and have no money or support system. The criminal injustice system is all about money and power, just like the prisons are. If one can hire a good lawyer, or pay off a guard in prison, they can get almost anything that a person can get outside of prison. If one hires the wrong lawyer, they just waste their money.

A major problem