“Having No Say” then “Finding Voice”: Making Sense of the Exoneree Experience Through Embodied Narrative

• In Event: Inmate Culture, Identity, and Transitioning to Release

Abstract

The experience of individuals who are wrongfully convicted of a crime and subsequently exonerated, “exonerees,” is poorly understood. Based on an analysis of video testimony from Witness to Innocence, the only national organization in the United States composed of and led by exonerated death row survivors and their family members, this project answers several questions: 1) How do exonerees publically makes sense of their wrongful convictions, incarceration and subsequent release? 2) How does embodiment figure in these representations? 3) What are the implications of these narrative representations for how exoneree activists and those they reach think and feel about wrongful conviction and the death penalty? This study shows that within cultural and social parameters, exonerees make their experiences sensible through narratives that highlight embodied experience. Using sensitizing concepts from critical victimology and social movement theory, the study makes two arguments. First, the embodied backgrounds of storytellers are imprinted on the stories they use to make sense of their experience. Second, these narratives cannot be interpreted in entirely instrumental terms as they concurrently embody and test the norms and processes that the abolitionist social movement seeks to change. Study implications are discussed.

Authors

• Valli Rajah, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY

• Christopher P. Thomas, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY

• Amy Shlosberg, Fairleigh Dickinson University

• Evan Mandery, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY