If you haven’t already listened to Part 1 of this story, we suggest you do that first.
In 2013, the Texas Jail Project gets a call from Bonnie Wyndham -- a mother whose daughter, Cat, is pregnant behind bars and not getting the medical care TJP has been fighting to guarantee. In this episode, we hear Cat’s story. Plus, nearly 15 years after their chance meeting in the Victoria County Jail helped launch the TJP, our reporter Rowan Moore Gerety brings Shandra Williams and founder Diane Wilson together.
Mitzi Miller: 70 million adults in the United States have a criminal record. This is Season Two of 70 Million, an open source podcast about how people, neighborhoods, counties, and cities are breaking cycles of incarceration—starting with the local jail.
I’m your host, Mitzi Miller.
Clips: “So I got to experience the uncomfortability of just being stuffed in a cage and all that. It was real scary.”
“They’re keeping people down there with rats, roaches, they got black mold, and we spend $16 million on it every year.”
“We eliminated cash bail bonds in the city of Atlanta.”
“There’s no one who’s been incarcerated, including myself, who has been helped by incarceration.”
Miller: This is Part Two of our series on conditions for pregnant women in Texas Jails. In the previous episode, you heard the story of Shandra Williams, who spent the last days of her pregnancy in a medical isolation cell in a south Texas county jail, and endured labor alone. If you haven’t listened, press pause, go back and start there.
While in custody, Shandra barely received attention from a doctor and was only given Benadryl for the pain. By the time she was brought to a hospital, her son Anthony had died.
While she was in jail, Shandra told her story to a woman named Diane Wilson. Diane’s an environmental activist who started to raise the alarm about jail conditions while serving time for trespassing. That work eventually helped form an organization called the Texas Jail Project. Our story picks back up in 2013, nine years after Shandra’s pregnancy.
At this point, the Texas Jail Project had been able to pass state laws banning the shackling of pregnant women during labor and delivery, and requiring jails to track the number of pregnant women in custody. But they were still pressing for laws requiring better prenatal care, and pushing judges to release pregnant women while they awaited trial. A lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t.
This is the story of another pregnancy, and a woman who got help in jail thanks in part to what happened to Shandra. Here’s reporter Rowan Moore Gerety.
Rowan Moore Gerety: Hi there, how are you?
Moore Gerety: Cat Wyndham meets me on the dirt road near her parents’ cabin in Texas Hill Country west of Austin.
Clips: “This road isn’t so bad.”
“Ok. You never know, some people….”
Cat Wyndham: This is my mom, Bonnie.
Moore Gerety: This is where her parents always wanted to retire.
David Wyndham: These are the cabins. We’ve had this land last for what, 15 years, Mom?
Bonnie Wyndham: Probably about that, yeah.
Moore Gerety: But Cat was raised in a small town west of Dallas called Strawn.
Cat: I'm Cat Wyndham. Catherine Wyndham. I'm 40 years old.
Moore Gerety: Growing up, she says, her father was a foreman on a state highway crew and her mother was a teacher.
Cat: It was a small town, but I did all the sports and got all the straight A’s and I was homecoming queen.
Moore Gerety: You were homecoming queen?
Cat: Yeah. Well it's a small town, but yes, yes, yes. I just didn't, I lacked coping skills. Really basically, to cope with emotions of any sort. And so, um, I just started, you know, I found alcohol and drugs in high school.
Moore Gerety: She was accepted into the University of Texas at Austin and managed to finish college. But her substance abuse kept getting worse. In her 20s, she was hired and fired because of her drinking. Then hired and fired again.
Finally, she moved out to the desert in West Texas to try and recharge. Once she was there, though, she started mixing alcohol with pills and other drugs. She said if she didn’t have a drink as soon as she woke up, she’d have trouble getting out of bed. Cat’s mom, Bonnie, was really worried about her.
Bonnie: It was no different than it had been through all those years when she was in trouble. It’s like, if this is going to end any way but her dying young, you have to stay with her.
Moore Gerety: Bonnie had already paid for Cat to go to treatment for alcoholism, twice.
Cat: I know that it came to a head in Terlingua because I think I was basically dying. Like my body was shutting down.
Moore Gerety: By 2013, Cat’s parents had moved to a town near the Louisiana border called Nacogdoches, where her mother’s family went back generations. When she called home to ask for help, her parents drove all the way across the state to pick her up and drive her back to east Texas. Cat moved in with them and found part-time work at Lowe’s. But, she also reconnected with an old boyfriend who was struggling with addiction too .
Cat: We couldn't be with each other without using heavily, heavily drugs. This is not, we never had a sober day. That's all we knew. So I'm like, Oh yeah, l et's run in to, you know, that's the state of mind. It was just insanity. I'm like, ‘Oh, let's rekindle this and I'm going to stay sober.’
Moore Gerety: Together, they started driving around the back roads around Nacogdoches looking for houses where no one was home.
Cat: Like, the thrill of going in there and finding, you know, a drug in the medicine cabinet.
Moore Gerety: What does that feel like?
Cat: To go into a house?
Moore Gerety: Well, you just said it as a thrill on some level. Like, you know, you open that cabinet actually find something.
Cat: Yeah. That's great. I mean, yeah, it's great...You're like, “Jackpot.” They have hydrocodone, they have Percocet, they have Xanax. You know, most people have these things. And you're like, “Bingo.” Nine times out of 10, you're going to find something.
Moore Gerety: A few months after she moved back home, Cat found out she was pregnant. And then, she got arrested. That day, sheriff’s deputies drove her around town and asked her to help them identify the homes she’d broken into. Cat says the officers even watched her swallow a handful of pills in the back of the cruiser. She says she was still hallucinating when she was booked into jail.
Cat: Just complete detachment from reality.
Moore Gerety: She says it took five or six officers to restrain her, and strap her into a chair where she couldn’t move.
Cat: As I sat in the county jail over the weeks that followed, it's not an uncommon thing. It's this, you pretty regularly, you know, once every couple of days somebody is coming in high, loaded, screaming, yelling, and they've got them in the chair. I was in a cell where you can just hear the mayhem that ensued. So it's, it's not uncommon.
Moore Gerety: The Nacogdoches County Sheriff wouldn’t comment on Cat’s case. The arresting officer didn’t respond by email or phone, but we learned that he served probation after a court found that he lied on the witness stand in another case. Cat’s version of events is backed up by a letter she wrote to her mother from jail a few weeks after the arrest, by medical and police records from her case, and by her family’s correspondence with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.
At the time, Bonnie knew about Cat’s alcoholism, and about some of her struggles with drug abuse. But she was shocked to hear about the break-ins.
Bonnie: I was upset with her. I mean to think that a daughter of mine could be robbing people. I mean, whoever heard of such a thing? I taught her better than that. What is she doing? So... and then I had people telling me she was better off in jail where she couldn't get drugs.
Moore Gerety: Bonnie was inclined to agree.
Bonnie: I wouldn't bail her out at first. She asked me to when I wouldn't, not that I could, they set her bond at $100,000. I didn't have $10,000 to give a bail bondsman. How was I going to bail her out?
Moore Gerety: Then, after about a week, she went to see Cat, and learned that she didn’t even have a toothbrush.
Bonnie: They wouldn't give her underwear. They wouldn't give her something to keep her warm. She was cold. I had to buy an undershirt from the jail at an extended price.
Moore Gerety: It sounds like all of this was a little bit of a revelation to you.
Bonnie: Oh yes. Goodness. Policemen are there to help us. The law is good. We need it. And the policemen uphold the law and so they're our friends. They're helping us, not like purposely torturing her. So yes.
Moore Gerety: One day, she stopped by the jail to drop off a prescription for the anti-anxiety medication Cat’s OB-GYN had given her.
Bonnie: I had gone with her to her doctor's visit and he had sat down and he had told her, I have seen more babies harmed by a mother's anxiety than I've ever seen harmed by a drug, So I want you to take it. So I dutifully take the drugs up there and they say, no, we don't give, we don't give them drugs like that. So I'm starting to think, and then it just kind of all comes together: They're not taking care of her and they need to.
Cat: I didn't sleep for like, I swear to you, I didn't sleep for probably seven days at all.
Moore Gerety: Like first week.
Cat: Yeah. Because they, I didn't have, my medication that I had been prescribed. I suddenly just went cold turkey on that.
Moore Gerety: Then, Bonnie got a letter from Cat describing meals at the jail.
Cat: I was really at a hungry part of my pregnancy. It was like two hot dog weenies and some potato chips and uh—I remember this—and like a piece of bread, stale bread, you know, that was often the meal. Like um, no vegetables, really nothing with any sort of vitamins in it.
Moore Gerety: Under Texas state law, pregnant women are supposed to receive double-thick mattresses and double rations. That’s something that Shandra Williams had gotten during her pregnancy in Victoria County nine years earlier. But that’s not what Cat’s lawyer told her mother.
Bonnie: I went to him and I said, “I don't care whether you get her out of jail or not. I want them to take care of her. I want them to take care of her as a pregnant woman, so the child will be okay.” My lawyer was telling me they didn't have to do anything. They were not required by law to give any concessions to pregnant women.
Moore Gerety: Bonnie wasn’t satisfied with that answer. So she called the sheriff too.
Bonnie: Well, I, I talked to him and uh, he said, uh, he immediately launched into this big spiel about how she was a dangerous criminal and all the bad things that she had done and, and all that. And I said, well, you know, I realize that sheriff, that she broke the law and all that, and that she’s just going to have to pay. But there was an unborn child here and that’s who I'm concerned about and that unborn child is innocent. And he said, well, we'll take care of it. Goodbye.
Moore Gerety: Bonnie said Cat’s midwife had told her she was at risk for gestational diabetes, and she wanted to make sure the jail would bring Cat to an appointment she had with a high-risk pregnancy specialist. So she called again. After that, Cat says the sheriff brought her into his office.
Cat: They told me that if I didn't stop raising a stink, calling my mom, having my mom call people, demanding pregnancy treatment…that they would ensure that I went to jail for the rest of my life, like threatening me. They would make this the hardest thing of my life…They will make sure the judge gives me the harshest sentence, you know…I can't believe I'm saying this like they really did this, I'm not making this up.
Moore Gerety: Do you remember your reaction in the moment?
Cat: I was terrified. I was already scared as I could be of everything, of all of it. And, um, for them to threaten me on top of that, I believed them.
Moore Gerety: The Texas Jail Project has fielded allegations of mistreatment and retaliation from other inmates in Nacogdoches. Jail Commission records show that the jail has repeatedly run afoul of minimum standards in areas like providing adequate exercise, conducting suicide screenings, inmate welfare checks, and using restraints. The year before Cat’s arrest, under the same sheriff, two deputies were indicted on charges of criminal negligent homicide after a woman in their custody died of dehydration.
Bonnie: So I just started researching on the internet and that's when it kind of in a roundabout way where I got in touch with Diana.
Moore Gerety: Diana Claitor is a co-founder of the Texas Jail Project. You heard from her in the last episode. Bonnie Wyndham emailed her about Cat in 2013.
Claitor: Let’s see what we have here.
“Dear Diana, thank you so much for answering my email. Just to know somebody cares about our plight is very helpful. I did tell the Texas Commission on jail standards three things.
I guess that would be three complaints. I don't know. I told them about the sheriff refusing to give her prenatal treatment of any kind. I told them about the sheriff’s threat.”
Moore Gerety: Diana was used to hearing from families in the same position as the Wyndhams—being misled about legal protections for mental health or chronic illness while in custody, or told their sons or daughters were lying about retaliation.
Claitor: Cat’s case, uh, was illuminating in a couple of ways.
Moore Gerety: Not just the fact that she was pregnant.
Claitor: She was white, middle class… And the moment they started complaining and her mother reached out to us, the jail’s reaction was so hostile. I mean, it wasn't like, “Oh gosh, here we have another pregnant woman in that the family's going crazy because she's pregnant in here.” But it wasn't like that. It was real hostile and I couldn't quite figure it out.
Moore Gerety: She told Bonnie to write a letter to the Commission on Jail Standards describing everything that had happened. Then, Bonnie got to talk to someone at the commission.
Bonnie: I actually spoke to a jail commissioner who told me the truth, told me that they did have to give her double portions and a mattress. And, they weren't allowed to shackle her because she was, you know, being pregnant, she was not as coordinated as she should be. And, uh, that they were responsible for giving her prenatal care and all that.
Moore Gerety: So, she tried calling the sheriff again.
Bonnie: He wouldn't talk to me. Of course, I just told the secretary, I said, you better tell him to call me because I'm writing to the jail commission if you don't, if I don't talk to him. So he called me the second time, and said exactly the same thing.
Music break
Moore Gerety: When an inspector from the jail commission did visit the jail, Bonnie received a letter saying Cat’s care was appropriate. They said she was seeing a doctor, but most of her medical paperwork was signed by nurses, or in a couple of cases, nurse practitioners.
Claitor: You have a real range of medical care. And that's the biggest problem we run into.
Moore Gerety: That’s Diana Claitor again. At some jails, especially the smaller, more rural ones, the nearest medical provider could be hours away.
Claitor: They may only come in twice a week. So if you're in real trouble and they say they're not going to come until Wednesday. You may die in there for lack of being getting an ambulance trip to a hospital.
Moore Gerety: In the middle of all the back and forth on Cat’s medical treatment, the judge in her case dropped her bail, and she was released on her own recognizance. She could spend the rest of her pregnancy at her parents’ house, as long as she wore an ankle monitor, submitted to drug tests, and notified the authorities whenever she left the house.
Bonnie: In other words, I was now her jailer.
Moore Gerety: Cat was terrified she’d blow her chance, and she did. It only took about three weeks before she snuck into her next door neighbor’s house looking for pills.
Cat: I just had this obsession and, um, the neighbor came home and found me and called the cops.
Moore Gerety: Cat went back to jail. But this time, Bonnie was in touch with Diana regularly, and Diana was in touch with the jail commission.
Bonnie: I don't know what strings she pulled, but she said, you need to write them another letter. And after that they came again, they did start giving Catherine double portions and treating her like they should treat a pregnant woman.
Moore Gerety: She also got to go to her appointment with the high-risk pregnancy specialist. She learned she was having a baby girl.
Cat: It was a joyful thing. God, this is hard. Um, they, um, they, you know, pointed out the features of my baby on the ultrasound and told me what, you know, how blessed I was and lucky to have a, a, um, a healthy child, and they treated me with compassion and uh, nothing but compassion.
Moore Gerety: She took a printout of the ultrasound image back to jail and put it on the cell wall.
Cat: I guess this is like seven, this is six, seven months pregnant at this point. You know, it's a good little picture of her.
Moore Gerety: But there’s a rule that you can’t hang anything on the cell wall. So, when a guard came by, Cat tried to pretend the ultrasound belonged to someone else. The officer didn’t buy it.
Cat: Like, I find that hard to believe that's not yours hanging on that wall there.
Bonnie: What did you tell her that it wasn’t yours?
Cat: Probably.
Moore Gerety: Cat got written up for that one.
As she got farther along in her pregnancy, Cat started to worry she might have to give birth behind bars.
Cat: You have no idea what it feels like to know you’re carrying this child and like you’re probably not going to have this child. Like you’re probably going to give birth to this child and the child will be taken away.
Moore Gerety: Three weeks before her due date, when her attorney told her the prosecution were offering a plea deal, she took it. She’d be on probation for 10 years. Any slip-up—a missed appointment, a failed drug test—and she’d be sentenced to seven years in prison.
Cat: I would have taken anything on the planet to get out at that point. They knew I would violate it.
Music break
Clip: “I think it’s colder in here than it is outside…
Moore Gerety: In the kitchen, Bonnie gets out a big box of paperwork from Cat’s case.
Bonnie: I don’t know what I did with the first letter.
Moore Gerety: At the top of the pile is a folder with a few black and white photos of Cat holding her newborn daughter at home.
Moore Gerety: Goish, you look so happy there.
Cat: It wasn’t necessarily all dark.
Bonnie: She would look at the little baby. She’d say, “Oh mama, I just can't believe she's so beautiful.” She loved her so much.
Moore Gerety: Cat starts to tear up looking at the photos. Standing at the kitchen counter, Bonnie wraps her arms around her daughter.
Bonnie: We’ll talk about it now and then we’ll let it go.
Music break
Moore Gerety: Cat’s case has been one of the most difficult things her family’s ever been through. With the legal fees piling up, her mom came out of retirement and took a job teaching high school science again. Her dad has trouble even talking about the whole thing. And just like she thought she would, Cat messed up a few weeks after she started on probation. She ended up going to state prison.
Bonnie had custody of her granddaughter at the time, but the same day Cat left, child protective services came and took the baby away. As Bonnie understood it, the state’s position was that even though Cat had already been arrested, the fact that she’d been living with Bonnie when she broke the law showed that her child was at risk.
Bonnie: It just broke my heart. I mean, how can you just take a three-week baby?
Moore Gerety: By this point, Cat had broken up with the baby’s father, and he’d acknowledged he wasn’t in a position to be involved. When the family got custody back from the state two months later, the baby went to live with relatives. They decided to go to court to get Cat’s parental rights permanently revoked.
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Cat: If you're at the trustee camp, 12 laps makes a mile. If you're at the medium security prison, eight laps makes a mile. So that's what I did. We’d get rec twice, three times a day.
Moore Gerety: Cat started running while she was in prison, doing laps around the yard. 12 miles a day sometimes.
Cat: Just laps and laps and laps. It's a meditative thing. It’s very spiritual for me.
Moore Gerety: In 2016, she was released early for good behavior. She moved back to Austin and got a job at a landscaping company. Now, she gets up at 4:30 each morning to beat the heat and run with a group.
Cat: You know, they're all successful engineers and doctors and lawyers. And I start showing up at these runs, just stepping through my fear because that's what the sober community teaches me to do.
Moore Gerety: She’s been sober for more than five years
Music break
Cat: Those are all medals that I've got, which is not all of 'em.
Moore Gerety: In 2017, she went back to Nacogdoches to compete in a half marathon, and she won.
Cat: That was a good one…With my face and my mug all over the papers for so long, you know, like, organized crime ring criminal woman. And then to have my face, you know, I was like, it's first place female, was, it's kind of gratifying. So, cause who knows if anybody even recognized me, but who cares?
Moore Gerety: That same year, Cat went to the state capitol to testify in support of a bill the Texas Jail Project was trying to pass. Legislative aides for the bill’s sponsor helped her prepare.
Cat: They groomed me...like maybe leave out the part where, um, you got re-you know-arrested, maybe just like kind of touch on the parts where you, uh, were denied medication and denied the basic necessities for a healthy pregnancy.
Hallway sounds
Moore Gerety: The hallways of the capitol building are full of tourists taking pictures and people with briefcases who look like they’re on a mission.
And if you go to testify, you usually end up waiting a few hours. Cat was terrified. But then…
Clips: “The chair Calls, Catherine Wyndham…”
“This is really hard for me… “I’m definitely not the victim in this situation, I’m not here to point fingers. I’m just trying to help somebody going forward who might be pregnant. I feel like my child was...”
Moore Gerety: This bill would have required jails to release pregnant women on what’s called a personal recognizance, or “PR bond,” without bail—unless prosecutors could show “good cause” to keep them incarcerated. Cat told legislators how she’d lost weight in jail during her pregnancy, didn’t get to see a doctor for weeks on end, and it seemed like they listened.
Clip: “I just want to say that we appreciate you bringing your experience to us, I know it’s not easy to recount these things...”
Moore Gerety: But this was the year that so-called “Bathroom bills” were taking up all the oxygen in state legislatures across the country, including Texas. The clock ran out on the legislative session before the PR bond bill Cat spoke about even got a vote.
And this is the way it’s been. The Texas Jail Project got two new state laws passed in 2009—banning shackling during labor and delivery, and requiring the state to tally the number of pregnant women in county jails. Everything else has been slow going.
Clip: Like teachers were yesterday and today might be senior day. They go around and lobby...
Moore Gerety: The first thing you see when you enter the Texas State Capitol is a rotunda lined with portraits of past governors under a dome 300 feet high with a single star on the ceiling.
Claitor: They built it 10 feet higher than the U.S. Capitol.
Moore Gerety: Earlier this year, Diana and the Texas Jail Project came back to the legislature to try once more and get a vote on the bill that Cat spoke on.
Claitor: Let's go someplace else and we'll come back. Where the hell is Romero?
Moore Gerety: Diana and her team have been stalking the hallways for months. This year, for the first time, she’s got full-time help. TJP got a grant from a foundation in Texas that advocates for access to mental health treatment.
Kevin Garrett: My name is Kevin Garrett. I'm the peer policy fellow with the Texas Jail Project.
Moore Gerety: Kevin’s in a sharp grey suit. He’s got a firm handshake, a laptop bag over one shoulder. He’s also got a special qualification: a personal history with incarceration.
Garrett: I had a lot of, uh, criminal justice involvement early on, fell into alcoholism, drugs, started running with gangs and, and, uh, as a result, I had some, uh, pretty stiff legal troubles.
Moore Gerety: That was about 25 years ago. Since then, he’s done his time, put himself through law school while he was on parole in Oklahoma, and decided to come back to Texas. From now until June 2020, he’ll be trying to build support to help TJP pass new state laws shuttling around the capitol from meeting to meeting with Diana.
Claitor: Well that was good. They were really committed to that bill.
Garrett: Uh, White? He’s right here… He’s a long-timer too, he’s got seniority.
Moore Gerety: Kevin has been taking the lead recruiting state legislators.
Garrett: They were a little more lively, but still…
Hallway chatter
Moore Gerety: They’re trying to push four different laws along—three of them have to do with pregnancy. But there are constant reminders of how tiny a sliver of the jail population that represents.
In a cavernous hallway in the basement, they pause to get on a conference call.
Claitor: Kinnu’s been handling this case for months and months...
Moore Gerety: Kinnu is Krishnaveni Gundu, a co-founder of Texas Jail Project. The woman she’s been working with says her schizophrenic son has been in a county jail with no psychiatric treatment for the better part of a year.
Clip: “Every time I'd see him, he has things stuffed in his ear. I guess due to the loud noise, it irritates him… And um, I, I mean it's just, I mean, it, it's just stressful ...”
Claitor: Could I ask something? Yeah. So it's been nine and a half to 10 months he's been without proper medication?
Moore Gerety: They decide to try and get a lawyer to draft a writ of habeas corpus, Latin for “show me the body,” so the family can at least get a court hearing where a judge will have to consider whether their son is getting the right treatment. Kinnu and Diana say pleas for help for people with mental illnesses account for at least 80% of the calls and emails they get these days.
But Diana says it’s still important to try and pass bills on behalf of pregnant women. She says even hearing testimony about going through pregnancy behind bars helps legislators relate to the experiences of everyone else in jail.
Claitor: We have the same woman available that testified at the previous.
Clip: Cat?
Claitor: She said I’m a better speaker now and I’m not so afraid.
Moore Gerety: In the end though, the 2019 legislative session wrapped up in May, before the PR bond bill came up for public comment.
Music break
Diana and Kinnu are still in touch with Diane Wilson. Her notes from the Victoria County jail got the Texas Jail Project started. When Diane went to jail for her environmental activism in 2005, she started publicizing stories of the other women incarcerated alongside her, including the story of Shandra Williams.
Wilson: She's a beautiful woman. I think of all of the people I met, I remember her, the, the clearest.
Moore Gerety: When I first called Diane, she and Shandra hadn’t spoken in 15 years, But Shandra’s story stayed with her: how she was arrested when she was almost five months pregnant, how she went into labor in jail, and how her baby Anthony ultimately died.
Shandra remembered Diane, too.
Franklin WIlliams: When I came home, I remember I was telling my husband one time, I said, I got to find this Diane Wilson.
Moore Gerety: Shandra had no idea about the Texas Jail Project’s work until I reached out on Facebook earlier this year. She told me she only replied to the message I sent because it mentioned Diane Wilson.
Phone call sounds
We spoke on the phone, and a few weeks later, I went down to Victoria, where she and Dawayne still live.
Music playing
She invited me to a birthday party for one of her aunts in a huge field outside town.
Music playing
Birthday party doesn’t quite do it justice, actually—there were probably 500 people there. There was a live zydeco band, people hanging out in lawnchairs outside dozens of RVs parked in the field. Most of the crowd was related one way or another.
Clip: Got back in that line again. Where’d your grandma go? [Laughter]
Moore Gerety: Shandra spent the evening sitting in a plastic lawnchair picking at a plate of chicken wings, trying to corral her nieces.
Clip: [Talking with nieces]
Moore Gerety: Diane Wilson still lives just 45 minutes away from Shandra, so after I got in touch with them, I arranged for all three of us to meet at Shandra’s house in Victoria.
Wilson: Hi. How are you doing? Come on. I never thought I'd see you again.
Franklin Williams: He found me.
Wilson: That’s great, that’s great.
Moore Gerety: They talked for an hour on a couch in Shandra’s living room, about the last15 years, and about the legacy Shandra never knew her son Anthony had. She still keeps a photo of his gravesite in a small green frame in the corner of the room. October, his birth month, is especially hard for her.
Franklin Williams: It’s not a day that I don’t. When October hits—I go into a depression, because it gets hard.
Wilson: Yeah, yeah.
Moore Gerety: Both Diane and Shandra remembered talking about the possibility of a lawsuit against the county jail. But after they lost touch, Shandra put it out of her mind. She says it was hard enough just trying to disentangle herself from the criminal justice system while she still lived in Victoria.
Towards the end of their conversation, though, Diane brings it up.
Wilson: If you ever want to do something, I know a slew of lawyers…
Franklin Williams: I know my husband’s over there, and I’m going to tell you what he’s saying: “Hell yeah, I want justice for my son.”
Wilson: Seriously, I’ll help you.
Franklin Williams: I want justice for him. I want them to feel what I felt. I do.
Moore Gerety: Regardless of the merits, it’s not clear that a lawsuit would be possible after so many years—for most wrongful death claims in Texas, the statute of limitations is only two years.
But even without a day in court, Diane says Anthony lives on with each pregnancy case the Texas Jail Project works on, and with each new state law they try to pass.
Wilson: Your little baby was the one that’s going to get things moving for all the pregnant women in these county jails in Texas. That’s the legacy from that baby of yours.
Franklin WIlliams: That's the way I try to look at it now. I mean he passed in order to help someone else. That's how I look at it. Took me years to get to that point. It took me years. It took me years.
Music break
Moore Gerety: Shandra and Dawayne spend lots of time with the children in their family. They’re even helping to raise their two-year-old godson. But they’ve never been able to have children of their own. All she and Dawayne have is Anthony’s burial site, in that little family plot in the next county over from Victoria.
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Miller: Rowan Moore Gerety is a reporter based in New York City. Special thanks to Kevin Sullivan, Alissa Figueroa, and Aura Bogado for their help with this story.
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This podcast is a production of Lantigua Williams & Co. It’s edited by Jen Chien and Casey Miner and mixed by Luis Gil. Our associate producers are Adizah Eghan and Cher Vincent. Our marketing specialist is Kate Krosschell. Our staff writer is Nissa Rhee, our intern is Emma Forbes, and our fact-checker is Sarah McClure. Juleyka Lantigua-Williams is the creator and executive producer. I'm your host, Mitzi Miller.
CITATION:
Moore Gerety, Rowan. “A Pregnancy That Changed Texas Law, Part 2.” 70 Million Podcast, Lantigua Williams & Co., September 2, 2019. 70millionpod.com.