Gessen writes: "A story can defy belief and appear ordinary at the same time. This is such a story. Siwatu Ra, a twenty-six-year-old woman with no prior criminal record, was sentenced by a Detroit court, in March, to two years in prison on felonious assault and felony firearm charges, after brandishing a gun at another woman during an argument."
Siwatu Ra, who gave birth to her son while she was incarcerated, was reunited with her family after being released from prison on bond. (photo: FreeSiwatu.org)
24 November 18
story can defy belief and appear ordinary at the same time. This is such a story. Siwatu Ra, a twenty-six-year-old woman with no prior criminal record, was sentenced by a Detroit court, in March, to two years in prison on felonious assault and felony firearm charges, after brandishing a gun at another woman during an argument. Ra maintained that she pointed the gun in defense of herself, her mother, and her two-year-old daughter; her gun was unloaded and licensed, and she has a concealed-carry permit in Michigan, which is an open-carry, Stand Your Ground state. Ra was incarcerated as soon as she was sentenced, even though she appealed her conviction, and even though she was nearing her third trimester of pregnancy. Three months later, she gave birth in St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, in Ann Arbor, in the presence of four armed guards. Her son was taken from her two days later.
Ra is a prominent environmental activist, and her case became a cause for much of the activist community in Detroit. Last Wednesday, eight and a half months after Ra was imprisoned, a judge finally ordered her to be released on bond, pending the outcome of her appeal. Her release, and the campaign to free Ra, were the unusual aspects of the case. Otherwise, every step along the way, the system functioned exactly as it usually does—and as it is designed to work.
The story begins on July 16, 2017, at the house of Ra’s mother, Rhonda Anderson, who was a Sierra Club organizer for eighteen years and is a den mother to many Detroit activists. Ra was visiting that day with her two-year-old daughter, Zala. Also present was Ra’s teen-age niece N’Deye, who lives in the house. A schoolmate of N’Deye’s came over, intending to spend the night; the adults of the house did not want her there, because the girls had recently had an altercation at school. The girl’s mother, Chanell Harvey, came to pick her up, and that is when a conflict occurred between her and Ra.
Some facts are not in dispute. Whatever happened took place in front of the house, where Zala was playing inside Ra’s parked car. It involved Harvey bumping Ra’s car with her own, although there is disagreement about when and why this occurred. (Harvey claims that she hit the car by accident while attempting to drive away.) Ra pulled her licensed handgun out of her vehicle and pointed it at Harvey to force her to leave—the sides agree on this fact, and it’s uncontested that the gun was not loaded. Anderson told me that, before Ra brandished the gun, Harvey revved her engine and brought her car within inches of her. After Ra took out the gun, Harvey snapped a couple of photos with her phone and left.
Both women went to the police. Harvey went immediately after the incident; Ra went a couple of hours later, after she had dropped off Zala at home. Ra was charged with assault and released on a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond. Ra faced a jury trial; the jury was not told that a conviction for a felony firearm charge would carry a mandatory two-year sentence. Nor did the jury know that Harvey had thrice been convicted of felonies, including assault with a shotgun.
The sentencing was scheduled for March 1st. As several people have recounted to me, all of activist Detroit seemed to come to the courthouse that day, filling the courtroom and spilling out into the hallway. Ra has been an environmental activist since she was fifteen years old; she worked as a youth organizer in Detroit neighborhoods and schools, and has taken part in protests as far away as Paris, during the 2015 global climate talks, with her baby Zala strapped to her. Some activists wonder if the show of support in the courtroom might have made the judge, Thomas Hathaway, less sympathetic to Ra. The judge had no discretion over the length of the mandatory sentence. But Ra was six months pregnant, and the defense asked that either the sentencing or the sentence itself be deferred until after she gave birth. Hathaway denied these requests.
Ra told me that, after she was sentenced, she spent the night in the Wayne County Jail. The next day, she was driven to the Huron Valley Correctional Facility, a women’s prison about half an hour outside of Detroit. Like all inmates, she was at first placed in quarantine. For the first three days, she was confined to a dimly lit, cold cell, with a single bunk with dangerous rusty edges. She was allowed no phone calls or mail. She was given a Bible; Ra is Muslim, and asked for a Koran, but she received no response, she said. “Most of the time I didn’t even know what time of the day it was until it was nighttime,” Ra told me. “I just lay on the bunk looking up at the little window, praying at the moon.”
