By ANDREA LOPEZ
Multimedia Editor

(WARRENSBURG, Mo., digitalBURG) — A simple jog around her Mississippi neighborhood quickly spiraled into a case of capital murder.

“In 1989, I was accused of killing my son,” said Sabrina Porter, an exonerated death row survivor, in a phone interview. “When I went jogging that night, I left him in the house by himself when he went to sleep. When I got back, he wasn’t breathing.”

Distressed, Porter said she began performing CPR.

“When you’re scared and you’re panicked, you don’t know what to do,” she said. “I didn’t apply CPR right. I applied adult CPR.”

At the age of 18, Porter was wrongfully convicted of killing her 9-month-old son, Walter.

“My case, they just did what they wanted to do,” Porter said. “I didn’t have anyone in my court to help me. I was young, black, uneducated, and I’m from the south – it’s more or less a race thing.”

During her 6 1/2 years in prison, Porter spent two years and nine months on death row. She was innocent.

“You don’t suffer just because you’re in jail,” she said. “You continue to suffer. They ruined my life. They took that from me.”

Today, she is just one of two women in the U.S. to be freed from death row.

“I want people to really look at what’s going on – they’re killing people,” she said. “Then they find out, ‘Oh, that person was innocent, my bad,’ but, it’s too late, you already killed them. They’re taking people’s lives. Destroying families.”

Through an honors colloquium course titled “Wrongful Convictions,” taught by Ashley Wellman, UCM assistant professor of criminal justice, Porter will come to campus to speak about her experiences in and out of prison.

“What a better way to learn about wrongful convictions than to hear from someone who has experienced the entire process,” Wellman said. “She had this horrific experience where her child died, was blamed for his death, was sentenced to death for it, and then now is a free woman, raising her family in the same town where she was convicted. Mind-blowing.

Whether or not people support the death penalty, Wellman said she encourages everyone to hear Porter’s story because she finds her experience to be unique as it exposes people to human error and the long-lasting effects of the criminal justice system.

“(Sabrina) has a passion to change the face of sentencing in our country, of investigations in our country, the way suspects are treated, and she’s part of the Witness to Innocence Project, so she’s an advocate for ending the death penalty in the United States,” Wellman said. “She just wants to share her story so that other people don’t have to go through what she went through.”

Porter will share her story beginning at 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, March 2, in Hendricks Hall. A question-and-answer session will follow her presentation. The event is free and open to the public.

“It can be draining at times because you have to put yourself back in that situation,” Porter said. “The date that you were sentenced to death. I have to pray about it before I do it. Once I tell my story, I have to get away in order to come down from that. It’s hard to do that when you’re just pouring yourself to everybody, and everybody is staring and looking at you. I do it because I know it can help somebody.”