Stan Moody

POB 240
Manchester, ME 04351
207/626-0594
www.stanmoody.com

Stan Moody of Manchester, ME, former Maine State Representative and most
recently a Chaplain at Maine State Prison in Warren, is advocating for transparency
and accountability in Maine’s prison system…A prolific and published writer, Dr.
Moody is pastor of the Meeting House Church in Manchester and has been a
speaker on human rights issues at conferences around the nation…

Exonerated Prisoners: Why Aren’t They Just P.O.’d?

January 5, 2011

They gave him 2 chances to get out on parole, the latest in

2004, if only he would admit to being a sex offender. He refused,
and on Tuesday, January 4, Cornelius Dupree, Jr. was declared
innocent of a 1979 rape after 30 years in prison. He became the
21st DNA exoneration in Dallas County, TX, a distinction
unmatched nationally but happily the result of a quirk in the
county crime lab procedure that preserves biological evidence for
decades after a conviction.
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, the first black
DA in Texas history, has cooperated with the Innocence Project in
hundreds of cases because of what he calls a “convict-at-all-
costs” mentality in the Texas Criminal Justice system. As a former
chaplain at the maximum security Maine State Prison, I often
reminded prisoners that the time for justice was during trial – not
after being sentenced: “On the streets, you are presumed
innocent until proven guilty; in here, you are presumed to be
guilty until proven innocent.”
That is largely true except in the case of blacks, Hispanics,
the indigent, the homeless and the socially disconnected.
Throughout the nation, the system of a fair trial is tilted heavily in
favor of suburban whites living in mortal fear of a disruption of
their ordered lifestyles, including the steady encroachment of
age.

Exonerated-Prisoners: Why-Are-They-Not-P.O.’d?
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 Time after time, we have watched these exonerated
prisoners come out into the sunlight with nary an angry word,
while the rest of us are quick to say, “I would be some P.O.’d!”
The 51 year-old Dupree, after hearing the words, “You are free to
go”, said, “It’s a joy to be free again.”
My good friend, Mwalimu Johnson, of New Orleans, was shot
and paralyzed by FBI agents erroneously assuming his
participation in an armed bank robbery (charges later dropped).
He was tried, convicted and sentenced for 7 years for assault on
the agents who shot him and 50 years for unrelated charges that
were later deemed to be false. He was released after 22 years in
prison. Mwalimu, one of the most peaceful persons I have ever
met, tells about his attitude transformation with these words:
Initially I was unable to entertain any thought of
forgiveness, but slowly I came to realize that bitterness
only creates bitterness. Negative experiences are a
kind of cancer, and my choice as a human being is
either to encourage the spread of that cancer or to
arrest it and apply a solution. I opt to be part of the
solution; part of the healing. Forgiveness is not a
matter of doing anything heroic or exceptional; it’s just
about being natural.
As for all of us, peace for the wrongly accused is about self-
preservation. Anger and bitterness, though effectively exploited
within the penal system, is a suicide mission. Those who have
been unfairly treated or accused have only one path to survival –
forgiveness and compassion for others. Once you cross that
divide, there is no going back to a world of reaction and revenge.
Johnson is by background a professing Christian. While there
is much about his drug-dependent youth of which he is not proud,
he has put his finger on the problem of anger both inside and
outside prison. To be anything but part of the healing process is
to be part of the problem. It is called “growing up,” a
phenomenon missed by all too many blogging suburbanites these
days.
Closer to home, I recently received a letter from a parolee
from Maine Correctional Center. Having spent a number of years
in prison, his awakening came from witnessing what he calls the
“thousand mile stare,” the heart-wrenching look of despair on
Exonerated-Prisoners: Why-Are-They-Not-P.O.’d?
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every face staring out the cell door window after every lock down.
Also a professing Christian, he shared this with me:
Something is extremely different in my life today;
the anger just isn’t there like before. I’ve been angry
and hurt for as long as I can remember. This notion that
all people suck has been removed from my vocabulary!
It has been replaced with compassion and
understanding for just how much pain there is in this
old world and how much it impacts us all.
Can it be said that the penal system in America, therefore,
has scored some victories, albeit unintended victories? I think not.
While many of those who have come to peace in the system may
well have lived their lives, inside or outside, under the dictates of
rage had they not come to a place of spiritual renewal, it can
hardly be said that they have the detached US criminal justice
system to thank.
They simply have learned that one can never be free on the
outside until one has learned to be free on the inside. We white
suburbanites might take a lesson or two from those we so readily
throw away.

Exonerated-Prisoners: Why-Are-They-Not-P.O.’d?
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