Scott Sisters Freed from Mississippi Prison Now at Home in Florida

Scott Sisters Freed from Mississippi Prison Now at Home in Florida

By Earnest McBride

Special to Trice Edney News Wire from the Jackson Advocate

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Hugs and kisses from members of the Jackson State University NAACP College Chapter.  PHOTO: Earnest McBride/Jackson Advocate

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Attorney Chokwe Lumumba speaks at press conference held at the Masonic Temple in the Jackson State University community on Lynch Street in Jackson, Miss. Slso joining Gladys and Jamie scott were Benjamin todd jealous, NAACP president/CEO; attorney Jaribu Hill of Greenville, Miss, among others who worked diligently for the release of the scott sisters. PHOTO: Earnest McBride/Jackson Advocate

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Gladys and Jamie with Jackson businessman Clarence Bolls who rallied in Washington, D.C. for the Scott Sisters' release. PHOTO: Earnest McBride/Jackson Advocate

JACKSON, Miss. (TEWire) - The air is different on the other side of the wall. Just ask Jamie and Gladys Scott, two Mississippi sisters locked up for more than 16 years for a crime they emphatically deny to have been involved in. Stepping out of Central Mississippi Correctional Facility at Pearl early Jan. 7, they joyously declared their preference for the fresh air outside the prison walls because it smelled so much better.

"When I first stepped out and smelled that fresh air, I just wanted to melt," Gladys said, standing outside their attorney's office in Jackson Friday evening, 12 hours after they had been released.

"It feels so good," she added. "What's different about the air? It's like it's stale up in there. But when I come out here, it's like FREEDOM and I can go anywhere I want."

Older sister Jamie, now 38, although in need of dialysis for both kidneys and additional treatment for her diabetes, says she doesn't feel a thing. "It's like I haven't woke up yet," she said during the afternoon press conference, spearheaded by Jackson Attorney Chokwe Lumumba, NAACP President/CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous, and Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson.

Johnson said that he was almost entranced by the proceedings.

"Today, the Scott sisters were released from prison and reunited with the family," he said. "As I watched their reunion, I absorbed every detail, hoping to preserve the memory so I could share it with many others. But despite my best efforts, I doubt words can capture the incredible feeling.

The sound of the crowd will be in my head for months. The look on Jamie's and Gladys' faces will stay with me for years. But what I will never forget is the feeling of vindication."

The case began when the Scott sisters were arrested on armed-robbery charges on Christmas Eve 1993 and then given double life sentences each in October 1994. The grand theft scheme, according to the account repeated in every report of the matter, brought them a piddling $11.

The three youths who had actually robbed the two black men in question were given light sentences as a plea bargain for fingering the Scott sisters as the master plotters of the robbery.

From a few sympathetic voices calling out from the obscure corners of Jackson, Pensacola, Illinois and Maryland over the last 10 years or so, the Scott sisters' case slowly picked up steam and exploded into a cause célèbre in the last two years.

After a series of direct appeals and more than 30,000 signed petitions demanding the release of the sisters flooded into his office between September and November 2010, Gov. Haley Barbour finally yielded on December 29 and announced that Gladys and Jamie would be given suspended sentences, an act that the governor described as a sort of parole. Because Gladys, 36, had promised to give her sister one of her own kidneys, the governor included that act as a condition for the release.

Seventeen years after being picked up for a crime they didn't commit, as the sisters constantly insist, something akin to unfettered joy hovered over the presence of Jamie and Gladys Scott as the celebration of their release continued into the night. It had been a long, but beautiful day, full of demanding activity on the part of the two rather petite women who had endured what their mother had called "a living hell" after visiting the prison during one of the lowest points of their incarceration.

The people around them Friday worried whether the two sisters could handle all the pressure and the tough questions from some of the world's largest media outlets that had gathered in Jackson to get a first glance at the sisters whose story has reached to the far corners of the Earth, thanks to a devoted crew of supporters and a cause that just didn't sit right with anybody who gave it more than a passing thought.

Reuters, CNN, CBS, NBC, NNPA and newspaper reporters from myriad locales around the world shared the levity and the delight that radiated from both sisters as they sat on the stage at NAACP Headquarters in Jackson, the same hallways that retained the imprimatur of Medgar Evers from when he strode through them 50 years ago.

"It was a good day, a very, very good day" said Attorney Jaribu Hill, who served as the sisters' legal adviser early last year. Now, a municipal judge in Hollandale, MS, Hill says the ordeal faced by the Scott sisters shows how critical the need is for investigating the cases of thousands of other similarly mistreated prisoners.

Jone Maati Primm, the Jackson coordinator of the Free the Scott Sisters Committee, had visited the sisters weekly for most of the past year. But she said she was barred from entering the facility on the morning of the release.

"I met with the warden and he decided not to let me come in, even though Jamie and Gladys had requested that I escort them out," Primm recalled late into the evening. "He didn't give a reason for not letting me in. He allowed two of the security personnel to go in and get them. But he didn't let me in or explain why not. Even though I wasn't allowed to go in, I went outside the prison and waited for them across the road."

A caravan, basically to assure the safety of the Scott sisters on their six-mile trip back to Jackson and then to Florida, quietly escorted them to their hotel where they rested for a few hours and prepared for the upcoming series of press interviews that would last well into the night.

Both Gladys and Jamie say they will devote themselves to helping young people to avoid going to prison and to assist as many of the wrongfully-incarcerated inmates as they can. From their many acquaintances over the years, they said, they have seen many inmates whose cause is just as worthy as their own.

"My joy and peace came from helping someone else while I was in prison," Jamie said. "Most of the younger inmates called me Big Mama and I tried to encourage them and keep their spirits up. So many of the people coming into the prison for serious crimes now are between 17 and 20 and they just lose hope of ever getting their lives back together. I tried to help keep their hopes and spirits up, although I had a lot of times when I felt just as bad as they did. But that's what kept me going. By helping them I would regain my own spirit of hope and faith that we would be out before too much longer."

Jamie says her great hope for the near future is to gather up her kids and grandkids and to provide a loving home for them.

"I've been living with 115 women for all these years," she said. "Now I want to have a sense of independence of my own. I just want to build a relationship with my children and with my mother and to go to the park and just sit around and perhaps to watch movies and just act silly. I just want to take one day at a time."

A little before 9 p.m., the sisters, under the protective watch of their close friends and supporters, set out for Pensacola, where they expected the blessings and revelry of 16 missed Christmases and New Years to cascade down upon them and their family from the moment they arrived.