Woman shackled during labor awarded damages from deputies

The Associated PressUpdated
August 19, 2011

NASHVILLE — A federal jury on Thursday awarded $200,000 in damages to a Nashville woman who was shackled by Davidson County Sheriff's deputies during labor.

The jury deliberated for about an hour before deciding the amount to give to Juana Villegas, who was arrested in July 2008 on a minor traffic violation for which charges were later dropped.

Villegas testified that her wrists and ankles were bound while she was in labor during an ambulance ride from the jail to the hospital. She said she did not know that a deputy who could unlock the shackles was riding in the front of the vehicle.

"I was afraid for my son, because if he were to be born in the ambulance, I didn't know if I was going to be able to open my legs so he could come," she said.

Villegas, who was in the country illegally, was detained under a sheriff's office immigration program while she was nine months pregnant.

Her lawyers, citing more than $300,000 in future medical needs plus pain and suffering, had asked for $1.2million.
City lawyers, who represented the sheriff's office, argued that Villegas' anguish was not from the shackling but because she was under the threat of deportation. but the judge said jurors could not know that she was in the country illegally while deciding the issue of whether to compensate her.

U.S. District Judge William Haynes in April granted summary judgment for Villegas without a trial, ruling that the sheriff's office violated her constitutional rights by showing indifference to her medical needs.

Villegas, 35, was unshackled shortly before delivery, and her baby boy was born without complications, but she was shackled again shortly afterward. One leg was attached to the bed when she was lying down. Her legs were shackled together when she got up to use the bathroom. And deputies refused to allow her to use a breast pump after giving birth, causing her pain and illness.

This week's jury trial was solely to decide what damages Villegas was due. Sheriff Daron Hall said after the verdict that the government will appeal. "We clearly want to have our case heard. We haven't been able to do that," he said.

Contributing: Brian Hass of The Tennessean in Nashville
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press

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Marisa González ’05 Helps Free Karen

 Narita from Prison

Marisa González ’05 and Karen Narita

By Andrew Cohen

Marisa González ’05 will be hard-pressed to take a more memorable car ride than the one she enjoyed June 15 with Karen Narita. After spending more than 26 years in the Central California Women’s Facility for her role in a murder committed by her abusive husband, Narita was released on parole and driven home to Southern California by González, who had been working to free her since 2005.

González directs the California Habeas Project (CHP), which seeks to enhance justice for domestic violence survivors incarcerated for crimes related to their past experience of abuse. Most of her work involves supporting and training pro bono attorneys, and Narita was her only client.

“It was surreal,” González said. “I had only seen Karen in prison, so taking her away from there was an incredible feeling. We went to a restaurant in Fresno, got some things at Target, and the whole time we just kept looking at each other in amazement.”

Narita’s husband and two of his associates beat and killed a man who owed him money. At her husband’s insistence, Narita participated in a limited way in the beating and accompanied the men as they drove the victim out to the desert, where her husband shot and killed him. Too afraid of her husband’s abuse to stop him or tell the police afterward, Narita was later arrested and convicted of second degree murder as an accomplice.

When González started at CHP after graduating from Berkeley Law, then-director Olivia Wang ’01 was representing Narita. González took over the case, and advocated for Narita at her May 2006 parole hearing. Narita had been granted parole in December 2004, but then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the decision.

“She was denied parole in 2006,” González said. “In 2004, her commitment offense was found not to be a factor in deciding her potential dangerousness. But two years later, all of a sudden it was. It’s a very political decision, which is so frustrating as an attorney. Your client can be a model prisoner and you can prepare diligently, but often the result isn’t about your client or your work. If it’s an election year for the governor, that’s what rules the day.”

Narita was again denied parole in 2007. At her May 2008 hearing, a psychological evaluation for the first time said she posed a “low to moderate risk” to society—an increase from “low to below average.”

The prison’s senior psychologist based finding that “on not believing she’d been abused or that abuse was a contributing factor in her commitment offense,” said González. “I challenged that finding and asked the psychologist to review the parole board’s own determination that she had been abused and that her culpability was close to zero. But the senior psychologist said no, and her parole was again denied in November 2008.”

Hope emerged, however, when the California Supreme Court heard In re Lawrence, and ruled that parole boards may not base their decisions solely on a crime’s severity unless it has some predictive value for current dangerousness. Another case held that lack of insight as to why the crime was committed, or lack of remorse, could be combined with the crime’s severity as a viable reason to find dangerousness.

“All of a sudden, the parole board found that Karen had a lack of insight into the crime, which had never been mentioned before,” González said. “We challenged that with a habeas petition in Riverside Superior Court, and thankfully got a judge who asked the Attorney General’s Office to respond.”

The judge held an oral argument—González’s first time appearing in court—and found in Narita’s favor by ruling that there was no evidence to deny her parole. A new hearing was ordered, and in January 2011 Narita was found suitable for parole. She then had to wait four months for the parole board to review the decision, then another month for Governor Jerry Brown to affirm it. González notes that Brown has upheld about 80 percent of parole grants compared to roughly 25 percent by Schwarzenegger.

The mother of two and a recent grandmother, Narita is now in a transition program for former female inmates in Claremont, California. At 49, she has spent more than half her life behind bars. Her husband committed suicide in jail.

“I became very close to Karen and felt responsible for her freedom in many ways,” González said. “My dad is a former public defender and dependency attorney who has a caseload of 60–100 clients at any given time, and I recognize that I wouldn’t be able to feel so strongly about her if I had that many clients. This experience is something I’ll never forget.”

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 Mother's Day like no other - in prison

St. Joseph sisters' program brings children to incarcerated mothers
                                                              May. 07, 2011
By Tom Roberts

With just under an hour to go in the two hour bus ride southeast from the San Francisco area to Chowchilla, Calif., site of two large women’s prisons, 15-year-old Tajanae is finishing a long note on a mother’s day card.

She was one of hundreds of children who participated in the 12th annual Get-on-the-Bus program May 7 that brings children, who silently share the sentence when a parent is incarcerated, to mother’s day weekend reunions at prisons throughout the state.

Tajanae and her three siblings, 11-year-old twin sisters, Unique and Janique, and their 12-year-old brother, Jaquan, have made the annual trip to Valley State Prison for several years of their mother’s sentence. Sabrina Fletcher has been in for six years and expects to be released at the end of 2015.

Jaquan said he was looking forward to “hanging out and talking with her, giving her a hug and a kiss. We take pictures, and she keeps some of them.”

The Get-on-the-Bus program was born in 1999 when Sister of St. Joseph Suzanne Jabro,now executive director of the Center for Restorative Justice Works, along with Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala and other religious leaders of the area noticed a 500 percent spike in the number of women going to prison in California during the previous decade. They took a trip to the Central California Women’s Facility, across the road from Valley State, met with some of the inmates and asked what they could do help them while they were in prison.

It was an easy decision. “They were crying, weeping and begging us: Let us see our children,” said Jabro, watching from the sidelines this year at a gymnasium full of mothers and children at Valley State Prison. “I said we ought to be able to get a bus here.”

And they did, in 2000, a bus with 17 children and chaperones to visit 9 women chosen by the prison.

This year, the program sent 24 buses loaded with kids to unite with hundreds of moms. It is a day part family reunion, part picnic, and mostly a rush to cram as much normalcy as mothers and children can in to a four-to-five hour span. There’s face painting and games – Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, Monopoly, and face painting and coloring, and endless snacks and lunch with mom and hugs that never end.

The unspoken question seems to be: How much of a year’s deficit of affirmation and questions can anyone cram into this time? And there are family photos to be taken, and mothers sit for minutes just drinking in the prints that arrive, just gazing at them. And it all eventually bumps up against the inevitable awful goodbye. One more separation, rivers of tears, heartbreak and elation all mixed together.

Beginning at top and clockwise: Sabrina Fletcher, Jaquan (son, 12), twins, 11 years old, Janique and Unique, and 15-year-old Tajanae

They came young, perhaps the youngest a two-month-old girl born in the prison hospital and returned to her mother for the first time since birth by a family member. Three-year-old Jacob slept in the arms of his mother, Jeanette Broughton, for most of the morning. He was part of a double mother’s day reunion. Jeanette’s mother, Zeida Calvo, who’s caring for Jacob while her daughter is in prison, has been a constant support and brought the youngster to visit.

The visitors included 21-year-old Marcel Nelson, whose mother and father have been in California’s prison system most of his life. His father was never in his life much at the start and has been in and out of prison for most of it.

His mother got 15-years to life. He doesn’t want to talk about the offense, says she never told him what it was, but he knows that it was at some point when “she got angry and let her temper get the best of her.” What he knows is that people make mistakes and sometimes they have to pay for them. He did, too, during his teenage years. The second drug arrest woke him up. He didn’t want to follow his mother to prison.

Sr. Suzanne Jabro with Gilbert and Isaias Navarro.

That, he said, was the turning point. He put away the anger that once welled up when he couldn’t figure out “why she wasn’t around,” the anger when he saw other kids’ mothers picking them up at school or coming along on field trips. There was a realization earlier that while some kids cried to get parents to come to them, “in this case every time I cried it didn’t happen.” His mother couldn’t hear him. His grandmother, Pat Dockery, on his father’s side, was his support and encouragement. And he eventually found a program made up of other kids whose parents were in prison. Finally he wasn’t alone with what he recalls as the hardest thing growing up – telling his peers that his mom and dad were in prison.

He graduated from high school, has taken some courses in junior college and is trying to put the money together to continue classes in criminal justice. He’s been working for the past three years for the same diversion program, McCullum Youth Court that provided an alternative to prison as a juvenile.
His mother’s proud of him, he says. He turned out to be the kind of man she wanted him to be.

On the long ride home from the day’s visit, he gets an unexpected call, from his father, who’s in Folsom Prison near Sacramento. He’s proud of him, too, and glad he’s been to visit his mother.

Roberts is NCR Editor-at-Large. A longer version of this story and more reporting on prisons and prison ministry will appear in future issues of NCR.

http://ncronline.org/news/women-religious/mothers-day-no-other-prison