Death-row women subject of study

Ana's letters arrived at Kathleen O'Shea's home in Virginia only to be left on her desk for days, as she gathered enough courage to read the contents.

"They were total despair. Horrors after horrors after horrors," Ms. O'Shea said, describing Ana's feelings when "she didn't know where her children were."

There were other letters: Suzanne wrote about happy days at a Catholic orphanage, and Karla talked about turning to God.

They did not speak about the murders.

Death row

Ms. O'Shea came to Siena College in Loudonville recently to speak about Ana, Suzanne and Karla: all death-row inmates.

Over the past ten years, Ms. O'Shea has visited every condemned woman in the United States. Ten of the 50 women, scattered in prisons across 18 states, are featured in her book, "Women on the Row: In Their Own Words."

Their stories are interwoven with Ms. O'Shea's own, reflecting her belief that "our similarities were substantial -- and our differences were circumstantial."

Convent to convicts

Ms. O'Shea entered the convent in eighth grade, and became a high school English and Spanish teacher. After ministering for eight years in Chile, she returned to the U.S., shaken by the poverty and repression she saw. She left the convent and pursued a human relations graduate degree at the University of Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma, she became involved with a study of recidivism in women's prisons and found herself face-to-face with the first female death-row inmate she had ever met.

"She sat there and talked to me," Ms. O'Shea recalled, "and all I could do was think about the fact that I was talking to a woman who would be executed. I was asking [myself], 'Were there other women like this?'"

Victims and criminals

During the Oklahoma study, Ms. O'Shea's professor advised that students not look up the crimes of the women they were interviewing in order to keep an objective eye.

Ms. O'Shea sometimes "still has to close down my own emotional reaction" when speaking with an inmate.

People "look at the crime and say that we're so vastly different than them. But, as far as being human, we're all the same. I had the same emotions they had. I hadn't done the same things they did, but I realized that I could have."

God in prison

During her visits and through correspondence, Ms. O'Shea and the inmates have talked about life in prison, loneliness, boredom, family, sadness and faith. Many of the women, she said, have turned to God in some way while waiting for death.

"We should look at these people as human beings and say, 'Why would a human being act like this?' and go after the causes of crime," she said. "Why would a human being like me do these things?"

The recent trial in Texas of Andrea Yates, a mentally ill mother convicted of killing her five children, prompted a death-row inmate in California who had committed a similar crime to write to Ms. O'Shea about the event. The woman, who had been an emergency room nurse and a soccer mom, hoped society could learn from cases like hers.

"She said that she didn't just wake up in the morning and decide to kill her children," Ms. O'Shea said. "These things happen over long periods of time."

Improvements

Ms. O'Shea would like to see certain conditions for female death-row inmates improve. For example, many of them are placed in prison psychiatric units or segregation/isolation facilities not expressly meant for condemned prisoners. In California, correspondents with death-row inmates cannot be put on that convict's visitors list, which makes it difficult for families to connect.

"People ask -- what difference does it make anyway?" she said. "The difference it makes to me is that they're human beings, and they have a right to be treated with dignity, even if they have committed serious crimes."

Ms. O'Shea is against the death penalty but supports life in prison without parole.

"People find it hard to believe that you can learn from [death-row inmates], but it's true," she told The Evangelist. "When you talk to women who are facing death for sure, it makes you face your own. I said to one woman, 'What does it feel like having a death sentence?' And she said, 'Well, you have one, too.'"

(4/29/04) [[In-content Ad]]