Domestic Abuse Survivor, Freed from Prison, Speaks Out
New America Media, News Feature, Abigail Curtis, Posted: Oct 18, 2006
MODESTO - Cheryl Jones stood in the crowded bedroom of her parents' home, smiling as she looked through a suitcase of letters. Her room is decorated with dozens of framed family photographs – but inside the box were the reminders of a different type of family.
Her prison family.
Jones, 53, spent the last 21 years at prisons in Frontera and Chowchilla, serving time for shooting and killing her abusive husband. Although she was acquitted and freed in June after a retrial – the first of its kind in the state – she can't get her other family out of her mind, or her life.
"I'm going to try to help them as much as possible," she said. "This is my family right here."
Jones is doing more than answering letters postmarked from California's state prison system. She's using her newfound freedom to speak out on behalf of women who are serving life sentences for crimes related to their abuse.
She is one of at least 15 featured speakers at "Voices From Within," a fund-raiser performance and art show in Oakland on Saturday, October 21, benefiting Free Battered Women, a non-profit that advocates for women like Jones.
The event is an opportunity for women to share their stories through artwork, poetry, music and dance, said Andrea Bible, Free Battered Women coordinator.
"It's really an opportunity for women who have been released from prison … to talk about their experience and feel embraced, after enduring both the violence of the relationship and the violence in prison," Bible said.
In 1985, Jones was charged with the shooting death of her husband, Frank Orange. The first murder trial ended in a hung jury. Jones later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 17 years to life in prison.
Under state law at the time, evidence of the Orange’s battering of Jones wasn’t admissible in court. Her lawyer couldn’t talk about the beatings that landed her in the hospital twice.
But a new law, passed in 1992 and made retroactive in 2002, allows expert testimony on intimate partner battering and its effects into court proceedings.
Jones, claiming years of abuse by Orange, was granted a new trial in 2005.
This spring, Jones and her lawyers told the new jury that Orange had locked her repeatedly in the trunk of his car, raped her, threatened her with a knife, smothered her and even trained his pit bull to watch her every move.
“It just takes away your self-esteem, your morals, everything,” she said about the abuse. “It just takes everything from you inside.”
The second jury acquitted her after just a half-hour of deliberation.
“God showed up at my trial,” she said. “He put 12 angels on the jury stand.”
Since 2002, seven women have challenged their convictions in court and been released. Ten more women have been released on parole and other legal grounds.
But there are many women who either have not yet had the chance to challenge their convictions, or who were granted parole by the state parole board but had their releases blocked by governors Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bible said.
"We really believe that the more people who know about the many forms of injustice these women have experienced, the more survivors will be released," Bible said.
Jones seems youthful as she describes the life she’s trying to reclaim. She’s planning a trip to Hawaii and since her release has trained to be a forklift driver and earned her driver’s license.
She showed off her first car, a 1985 Ford Thunderbird that she just bought for $560, and talked about her joy at reconnecting with her children and grandchildren.
But the letters from prison are a bittersweet reminder of the family she left behind.
"'I'm so glad you're free," she read from one. "'I know it feels good to be out there and (living) the dream that came true.'"
“Our Voices Within: Out of the Shadows’’ will be from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday Oct. 21, at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. For information, call 415-255-7036, ext. 320 or www.freebatteredwomen.org
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