How Georgia Convicts Innocent Women

This story is co-published with Capital B Atlanta, which is part of Capital B, a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization reporting for Black communities across the country. Follow it on X @CapitalB_ATL and sign up for its weekly newsletter.

A law in Georgia allows prosecutors to charge people for crimes they never committed. I know this firsthand — I was charged under that law and have been incarcerated for the past 20 years.

In 2004, I was with three young men who devised a plan to rob a man after their attempts to use me in a sex-trafficking scheme failed. They lost control of the robbery, which escalated to murder. I was waiting in the car and unaware of the violence taking place. Yet I was sentenced to life in prison as a “party” to my co-defendants’ charges.

In Georgia, people like me can be charged with being a “party to a crime” if they intentionally aid or abet the commission of a crime or intentionally advise, encourage or hire another person to commit a crime. But if a jury finds someone guilty, they are convicted of the original crime itself. 

That means a person can be charged with participating in a crime no matter how slight their involvement. For example, if you drive someone to steal candy from a convenience store, but they shoot and kill the cashier instead, you can be charged with murder, even if you had no knowledge of their plan. There’s no upper limit; that charge can become a felony conviction — imposing sentences such as, quite frequently, life without the possibility of parole or as harsh as the death penalty. 

This is not a rare occurrence, though few records track these cases. 

After informally surveying 150 women in my facility this summer, I found 38 percent of the women were charged as a “party to” the crime and convicted of a violent felony. Of that number, 15 percent were sentenced to life without parole, 55 percent were sentenced to life or life plus, and 10 percent received more than 20 years. 

In other words, more than one-third of the women imprisoned alongside me are here because they were near other people who committed crimes — often men or abusive partners. This tracks with a 2020 survey by the Appeal of more than 600 women convicted of murder across the United States. Approximately 33 percent of those who responded to the survey were convicted alongside a male co-defendant. Nearly half of those women were convicted alongside their abusive partners.

One woman, Karen Eckman, was considered a party to the crimes of felony murder and armed robbery. She received a life sentence for a crime that happened when she was 15 years old, even though she says she was coerced by her co-defendant and didn’t directly participate. Since her boyfriend, the perpetrator of the crime, killed himself before they were apprehended, Eckman, along with another male co-defendant, was held responsible for his crime. She continues to be denied parole 28 years later. 

Another woman, Elizabeth Joyner, faced similar charges and received a lengthy sentence even though she never set foot on the crime scene. Joyner was an alleged victim of domestic abuse and says she was coerced into involvement. These cases, along with my own, raise concerns about gender dynamics, coercion and disproportionate punishment. Multiple studies across numerous cultures have found that women are often coerced into illegal conduct by men, but Georgia’s laws fail to take this into account.

My survey also indicated that women with male co-defendants were sentenced more harshly than those with female co-defendants, revealing how these charges disproportionately affect women in Georgia. 

This disproportionate punishment is detrimental to women’s mental health, families and sense of justice.

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I was sentenced to life in prison for my minimal participation in a crime that was carried out largely by one of my three male co-defendants. The initial shock I experienced after my trial damaged my mental and emotional health — injuries that have since been compounded by decades of stress and trauma within the prison system. At first, my family and I were in disbelief that I was then convicted and sentenced like I was the principal perpetrator of a violent crime. Our pain left us with a distrust of the judicial system and a deep sense of insecurity. My incarceration was proof that life can be dangerously unpredictable and that the people and social systems we interact with cannot be trusted.

For me, that insecurity has led to chronic anxiety and depression, which present themselves through avoidant behavior, irritability, inflexibility, poor self-care, low self-esteem, hypervigilance, night terrors and sensory intolerance. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to function as the years of disproportionate punishment have destroyed my health along with my life.

Once in the carceral system, incarcerated women face rising rates of lethal violence and negligence, deteriorating conditions and parole systems that minimize every opportunity for re-entry. Programs and educational opportunities have declined. Consistent staff shortages, rising gang violence and the presence of narcotics have turned institutions volatile. All of this fosters an environment where women, who in some cases have had very little involvement in a crime, are left to languish in torture and injustice.

Within my community at the largest women’s prison in Georgia, the people charged with party to a crime seem to grapple with learned helplessness, mental illness, physical disease and substance abuse at higher rates than the rest of the population. Living with injustice within the hostile environment of prison life has left our strength faltering, our hope diminished and our health irrevocably compromised. But we are still calling out for help.

Several months ago, as I was walking back to my assigned dorm after an evening meal, I looked across the short distance to a neighborhood that backs up to the institution. The nearby subdivision serves as a reminder that freedom is unreachable, even though it exists on the other side of the fence.

As I walked, the mood was relaxed in the absence of guards, and the conversations around me were casual and comfortable — a camaraderie I often experience in my community despite the instability of our environment. That evening, the reality of my circumstance — a sentence to life of imprisonment — was far from my mind, as it is most days: a testament to the human ability to adapt and endure. The tree branches were bare and the view was clear. As I glanced toward one of the houses across the yard, a woman was taking out her trash. I watched her lift the black plastic bag into a garbage can, seemingly oblivious to me, and I was overcome with an urgency to call out to her for help.

It was an absurd notion. I have been convicted of criminal charges — violent felonies — by a court of law. I have exhausted my appeals. The mandatory sentence I am serving is public record and plenty of people who know and love me know exactly where I am. But for a moment, my subconscious reached beyond all of the accountability I try to take for myself and my actions, beyond the inescapable guilt assigned to me by Georgia law. 

For a moment, I felt the full weight of disproportionate punishment made possible by being party to a crime. I felt as if I had been abducted, trapped, hidden and tortured for the past 20 years in the Georgia prison system. I realized it’s likely that very few people know the prevalence of this issue — made possible by party to the crime rulings in this state.