Mississippi Woman Faces Execution For Crime Her Son Admitted To
Mississippi Woman Faces Execution For Crime Her Son Admitted To
By Nicole Flatow on March 23, 2014 at 12:32 pm
There’s no way justice was done in this case,” said former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz Jr. “If an execution is allowed to proceed, we all are complicit in it in Mississippi.”
Mississippi is scheduled to execute Michelle Byrom on Thursday. Multiple confessions to the murder by her son were never admitted into evidence. Nor was the fact that she was abused both as a child and in the marriage that ended in her husband’s death. That she was mentally and physically ill, even ingesting rat poison to harm herself.
When her husband, Edward Byrom Sr., died, Michelle was in the hospital for double pneumonia.
son Edward Byrom Jr. wrote in one of several confession letters never admitted into evidence, “As I sat on my bed, tears of rage flowing, remembering my childhood my anger kept building and building, and I went to my car, got the 9mm, and walked to his room, peeked in, and he was asleep. I walked about 2 steps in the door, and screamed, and shut my eyes, when I heard him move, I started firing.”
Byrom Jr., his friend Joey Gillis, and Michelle Byrom were initially all charged in a murder conspiracy. But Byrom Jr. made a deal with the prosecutors to testify against his mother in exchange for a reduced sentence, and said in a letter that he told prosecutors his mother paid Gillis to murder her husband. That was the theory prosecutors pursued, even though Byrom Jr. later confessed that theory was false, also. During questioning in which officers reportedly warned Michelle that “this is going to go really bad on your son,” Michelle said she knew about the conspiracy and that police should not let her son “take the rap.”
More:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/03/23/3417926/mississippi-execution-son/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I guess. It's only somebody's life.
