Silver Dollar

Rosemary was led into the room. She was a Black woman in her mid-fifties with a trudging, labored gait. She lowered herself slowly onto the chair opposite me and seemed to drink in the quietness of the space. “It’s so loud here,” she said. “I just want some peace.” 

She didn’t remember the events leading to her arrest. The police report said she had stabbed the victim over sixty times with a seven-inch butcher knife. Bloodstain analysis painted a gruesome picture of a fight that went from the kitchen, down the hall, into the man’s bedroom. She looked frail. 

Although capital cases take at least three years to go to trial, Rosemary ended up spending six years in Cook County Jail. Over the years I worked there, the feeling of terror as I crossed through locked doors never left me. Yet, during the hours Rosemary and I spent together, I felt fully present in a way that was rare for me. 

I’ve always been against the death penalty. It’s racially biased and inhumane. Too many innocent people have been executed by the state—a mistake that can never be undone. When I heard there was a way to fight back, I signed up immediately. I began training as a Capital Case Mitigator as a student of the Clarence Darrow Death Penalty Defense College. I was awed by our renowned instructor, Andrea Lyon, whom the Chicago Tribune dubbed “The Angel of Death Row.” Our work involved sitting with clients and family members, drawing out their stories, listening for trauma, scrutinizing school, work, and health records, and ultimately weaving a narrative with a human face for the jury. A second goal was to make the state spend as much as possible so that even staunch believers in the death penalty would find it too expensive to impose. One colleague traveled to Okinawa to interview her client’s father. The state had to foot the bill. These costs were a form of guerrilla warfare in the fight to end executions. It was a protest I wholly signed on for. 

Rosemary’s police report said that a trail of blood led from the victim Nate’s apartment to Rosemary’s apartment next door. Rosemary had returned home to call a medi-car to take her to the local clinic to get her hand wounds sutured. The driver saw her stuff a bag into the dumpster of the adjacent building. Detectives found the bag, which contained a black nightgown that Rosemary admitted was hers, bloody knives, and some empty purses belonging to the sister of the victim. Rosemary was charged with first-degree murder with the intent to rob her neighbor for drug money. 

Nothing in the report suggested that the police had found money on Rosemary or in her apartment. Her family members asserted she never used drugs or stole from anyone. Her partner, Ozzie, had recently died and Rosemary was the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. She had no police record. 

Rosemary told me she had gone over to Nate’s apartment to borrow a cigarette. He pointed down his hallway, saying his cigarettes were on his nightstand. When she reached his bedroom, he appeared behind her and pushed her onto her back on the bed. Because Rosemary had congestive heart failure, she needed pillows under her upper body to be able to breathe when lying down. Believing she was dying, she blacked out. 

Her sisters said Rosemary had experienced dissociative episodes since she was six years old. They reported that she “blanked out with her eyes open” and didn’t remember anything for a period of time afterwards. These episodes were accepted as “falling out,” a culture-bound syndrome found in the South or in the Caribbean that the DSM refers to as a dissociative disorder. Medical care wasn’t sought. 

Before the murder, Rosemary’s sisters were worried about her state of mind. Her brother, Corey, with whom she’d been very close, had died earlier that year. Only a few weeks after his death, her partner, Ozzie, was diagnosed with lung cancer; he died just six months later. Rosemary took sole care of him. He died as she held him in bed. Unable to mourn both losses, she attempted suicide three months after losing Ozzie, two weeks before her arrest. 

Rosemary’s daughter gave me a photo of Ozzie and Rosemary at the lakeshore. Ozzie radiated a wide, engaging smile, his arms wrapped around a shy-looking Rosemary leaning back against him. I hid it between the pages of my notebook and presented it to her, imagining she would be happy to have it. She glanced at it for a brief moment, then quickly turned away. It made her too sad. She didn’t want it. 

I sent Rosemary books she requested. The guards confiscated them during routine checks for contraband. I spent months securing supportive shoes to mitigate her back pain. Three weeks later, a guard seized them. But, after two years, Rosemary told me the guards stopped bullying her because they believed my frequent visits meant she must be someone important. She said she finally felt safe.

Over time, our conversations deepened. Rosemary revealed that she had been assaulted when she was five years old. Ralph was a friend of her father’s who visited their home almost daily. She described him as a short, bald, light-skinned Black man with brown “bunched-up” teeth. She said he looked a lot like Nate. She would “catch” Ralph smiling at her and she would run and hide under the bed. But she also didn’t want to miss out on the liveliness and excitement of these visits, so she peeked around the corner of the door jamb. He always carried silver dollars and showed them to the children but never let them touch them.

One day, Ralph found her on the street and took her into an alley. He made her lie down and rubbed his penis between her legs. Afterward, he gave her one of his coveted silver dollars. Her mother knew immediately something was wrong. She carried Rosemary into the bathroom and found blood on her thighs. Rosemary clutched the silver dollar, hoping to hide it from her parents. They pried open her fist. When they saw it, they knew it was Ralph’s. They took it away and she never saw it again. Her father attacked Ralph. But her parents never talked with Rosemary about her experience. 

Rosemary’s story of the silver dollar jogged loose a memory from my own childhood. When I was eleven, we drove three hours to a regional ski race where I won a first-place medal. An hour later, we were in a car accident and my mother was killed. I wasn’t allowed to enjoy the medal. When I returned home, I was given phenobarbital to get me out of the way of the grieving adults. I wasn’t allowed to mourn. 

I spent decades in states of dissociation. I had trouble focusing in school. I was emotionally numb with no way to express my complex feelings about the medal or my mother’s death. 

 Over time, I came to understand the cost to me of having two such juxtaposed feelings—the most exalted and the most horrific. When I was able, finally, to hold both emotions at once, I remember the instant sensation of gentle stillness, muscle fibers giving up their tension. There was space to choose, to respond. For the first time, I understood freedom.

Rosemary coveted the silver dollar and finally got to hold it in her hands. She may have felt she won it. But she wasn’t allowed to enjoy it or to grieve Ralph’s assault on her body. She seemed caught between opposing feelings of horror and desire, not being able to fully feel either. She learned not to mention the incident, even to her sisters. I now understood why Rosemary’s episodes of “falling out” began shortly after the assault. 

I asked Rosemary about the silver dollar. I wanted her to be able to talk about it, in the way I was never allowed to talk about my ski medal. She was hesitant at first but, as she spoke, her body became more animated. “It was something magic,” she said. “The fairy with the crown of sparklers. The brightly polished silver. They looked like treasure. I wanted to hold one so badly. He knew how to put them just out of reach. He liked to tease us that way. I finally got to hold it that day, but I wasn’t allowed to keep it.” We sat there quietly, just thinking about her desire to touch the magic, inflamed by Ralph’s constant taunting. “That man…oh, that man,” she added after a while, shaking her head. “He was a bad one.” Her arms gently loosened at her sides. Her body seemed at peace, something I hadn’t seen before. 

That conversation opened the door to more, exploring Rosemary’s inner landscape of mixed feelings. Her movements, her voice, became more spirited. In those moments, I could sense her experience of inner freedom, even as she lived behind bars. 

The last time we met, she knew I was mulling over getting remarried. She said, “You should marry that man. He sounds a lot like Ozzie. He’ll be good to you.” I loved her calm assurance. And I loved her. 

The prosecutor “de-deathed” Rosemary’s case (removing the possibility of the death penalty) after reading the mitigation report. But he refused to allow the jury the option of self-defense. The defense argued that Rosemary’s childhood assault and her dissociative states were factors in her response to Nate’s attempted rape. But successful dissociation defenses are rare; prosecutors view this argument as an excuse. With no choices other than first-degree murder or acquittal, the jury found her guilty. The judge sentenced her to fifty years.