Barbara Sheehan with daughter Jennifer Sheehan-Joyce who is expecting her first child with husband Jesse in February. The family is hoping Barbara will be able to see her first grandchild without being behind bars. Facebook
A large chunk Barbara Sheehan’s fate may well rest in the hands of the public after a petition to support her bid for executive clemency from Governor Cuomo was filed at online site Change.org, the world’s largest petition platform. The former school secretary, accused of shooting her husband to death in 2008 and subsequently acquitted on murder charges, is being represented by the NYS Prisoner Assistance Center in Troy New York, who joined the more than 45 million users of the site from 196 countries who have used the tool to transform communities and lives.
Mario Vredenburg, the Executive Director of the NYS Prisoner Assistance Center says that the road to successful clemency must be paved with strong support from the court of public opinion. And strong support is evident in the nearly 1,000 signatures collected in a few short days from people from all across the country—Florida, Colorado, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Montana, Texas were some of the states represented in a chronicle of support from friends, family, strangers, victims of domestic violence, law enforcement officials, attorneys, and a myriad of other citizens who state their recognition of a “travesty of justice and the abuse of judicial discretion.”
“Barbara Sheehan was the victim of unspeakable abuses and she is now being made the victim again by a sentence that does not fit the facts of this case,” Vredenburg told The Forum in an interview. He explained that another issue facing Sheehan is that she was assigned a Central Monitoring Case (CMC) designation, often applied to high profile cases and often clogs the path to parole and work release. “It’s something we are working on removing immediately,” he said.
After the collection of signatures and the removal of the CMC a formal request for executive clemency will be delivered to the governor’s office.
Meanwhile, time passes for Sheehan under tying circumstances. “I just want to go home,” she said in a phone interview from Albion State Correctional Facility. “I missed my son’s birthday and now I’m missing Christmas,” she said. Adding to the list of “misses” will soon be the birth of her first grandchild; daughter Jennifer and her husband Jesse are expecting their first child in February. “I’m trying the best that I can,” Sheehan said, “but I don’t belong here.”
Sheehan keeps busy, taking several classes a day and also counsels other inmates with similar domestic violence profiles.
And although she has no access to the Internet and cannot view the petition, Sheehan is greatly encouraged by the daily reports offered her by Vredenburg, and says she hopes people will read the petition and be moved to sign it. “I really hope it works—I have faith that it will.”
In addition to the petition on Change.org, part of the appeal process to facilitate release is to create broad exposure. To that end, a web site was created– Justiceforbarbara.org–which familiarizes viewers with the background of the case, offers the chance to contact Barbara and is directly linked to the petition.
Sources say the petition will be delivered with the formal clemency request probably sometime around March.
Vredenburg asks anyone interested in signing the petition to go to Change.org or Justiceforbarbara.org.
By Patricia Adams
