- There are countless people doing hard time
in American prisons for crimes they didn't commit.
I've interviewed dozens of them for my podcast.
Now, we're bringing these powerful stories
to your screens each week.
I'm Jason Flom, and this is Wrongful Conviction.
Sabrina Butler-Smith was
convicted of murder after performing CPR on her 9-month-old
son, Walter Dean Butler.
Prosecutors convinced the jury she'd killed him.
Sabrina was later cleared by medical evidence
that showed her baby had a deadly illness.
She became the first woman exonerated from death row
in the United States. This is her story.
Growing up in Mississippi as a teenage mother was kind
of hard. I was trying to be a mom
and doing teenage things at the same time.
And when you're a teenager,
you make a lot of mistakes, and I did.
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My son and I were in an apartment.
He was playing on the couch,
and it was like nothing was wrong.
You know, I didn't see any signs
that anything was wrong with him or anything like that.
I wasn't gone 10 minutes, and I got a bottle, went
to his room, and I noticed that he wasn't breathing
and right then I panicked, so I grabbed him and ran outside.
The girl came out and she grabbed him
and she put them on the floor and started CPR.
The girl that did CPR told me to blow in his mouth,
hold his nose and press in his stomach.
Well, she didn't tell me the right way.
So I applied adult CPR to little Walter all the way to
the hospital thinking that I was doing the right thing,
but I wasn't. I was scared, I didn't know what to do.
I never thought that
these people would charge me with murder.
I just thought that I would go to jail for not you know,
being at the house with my son.
And so I said to myself that I couldn't be honest.
You gotta lie, you know, that's the first thing I thought.
It took them forever to come out and get me to say
that they couldn't save him. I couldn't believe what
they were telling me, he's gone, we can't save him.
And I remember telling them no, you lying,
you know, all you people are lying.
And that's when the questions began.
And it was like 1,000 people standing around me.
I did not have proper time to mourn my son,
I was only looked at as a person
that could have killed my son.
And at first I didn't realize that they were leaning
toward murder until I got into the interrogation room.
When I did finally start telling them what happened,
they didn't want to hear that.
And the lead detective he wrote a statement out,
he shoved it in my face and told me,
you hit your baby, you stomped him, you beat him,
this is what you did. You know, and asked me to sign it.
And after so long of being no sleep interrogation,
I just signed.
(soft music)
I sit in a county jail for a little over a year.
They sent me to Whitfield.
And Whitfield is a place where they send you if you're
they think you're crazy to see if you're able
to stand trial, and that was a horrible experience.
Once eight weeks were over,
I was sent back to the county jail.
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I knew here I am,
this poor Black kid. Didn't have, you know, decent attorneys
to present my case. As I pleaded to take the stand in my own
defense because the district attorney was making me out
to be a horrible person, a horrible mother,
they wouldn't let me take the stand.
So I knew that you know, I was done for, I knew it.
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I just wanted to die right there,
I was like, what's the use?
Nobody's listening to me.
I'm trying to tell you what happened.
What else is there left?
Leg shackles, irons from your wrist
all the way down to your feet.
They stripped me of everything I thought that I had.
They put me in this bullpen that looked like a cage
that you put a dog in.
I was hyperventilating because I was scared out of my mind.
I was considered the monster mother
who killed a child, who beat my child to death.
That's what I was considered as.
No one cared about my feelings or how I felt about
my son passing and didn't know what he died from.
When you go to prison, they don't care about your feelings,
I paced the floors, I listened for every sound, every chain.
Because I actually thought that that was the day
that they was gonna kill me. To be tortured that kind of way
is one thing that
Nobody from the lawyer's office or anything
told me anything about that.
Somebody next door to me on death row, who had already went
through the same thing, told me what to expect
and not to worry. That's how I get through it.
(suspenseful music)
I'm thinking that it was gonna be quick. Well, it wasn't.
I want to ask you about the trial itself.
What was that moment like for you, Clive, and Sabrina?
One of the key points in the trial,
Clive was cross examining one of the police officers
and Clive handed him a doll and said,
how would you perform CPR on an infant?
And the police officer did it with his two hands,
pressed down, instead of the way it should be done
with a child, which is two fingers gently.
And through that one demonstration,
Clive was able to point out to the jury that even
a police officer could make the same mistake
that Sabrina Butler made.
And that may have been the cause or part of the cause
of her child's death, but it wasn't intentional.
She wasn't trying to abuse the child.
She wasn't trying to kill the child.
Unlike the first trial, the jury got a real picture
of Walter Dean's existing medical problems
and how those might have contributed to his death,
which demonstrated our theme that this was a tragic death,
I found out that my son had heart problems,
kidney problems, and chronic bowel syndrome.
It was nothing that I had done to cause his death,
I just didn't know how to apply CPR. He had already passed.
I was doing CPR on him trying to bring him back
but he was already gone.
(intense music)
But when the verdict came back and he said,
you are not guilty, I just fell because,
you know, I've been through so much.
And I finally, finally, finally somebody heard what I said.
And they freed me for what should have been in
the first place.
It was so much to, you know,
to contain at that moment.
Two years, two years, I visited my son's grave.
When I found him, he was down a rock road, in the woods,
under a tree on a hill,
and it looked like it used to be a cemetery long time ago,
but there was no way to get in it.
Two years after I got out,
I found out that his death certificate still stated
that he was murdered.
So I'm in the process still of fighting Mississippi today
trying to get them to change his death certificate.
If you are exonerated, that don't mean shit
and I'm just here to tell you.
It don't mean shit because
I got out in '95 I've been doing advocacy work since '96.
And I'm gonna continue to do until, until I can't.
And when I see something wrong,
it bothers me until it's fixed.
And I think that's why I advocate so hard
because I know that it's wrong, I know this is wrong.
They're steady killing people on death row, it is wrong.
How can you
We're not God, you can't do that.
You don't have the right to say who lives
and who dies no matter what.
I feel like we as human beings have gotten so far away
from what is right.
It's all about
It's not about what's right.
I wrote my book to try to use it as a teaching tool
to help as many young people as I can, because there's a lot
of us out there, Black, brown, white, whatever,
maybe going through the same situation that I did.
To the viewers watching me,
I would like you to know that you can get involved.
We have to do something as a people to make a change.
If we don't, then we gonna keep on getting the status quo.
What we got right now,
that's what we're gonna continue to get.
(intense music)