A Secret Injustice

When you take a mother, put a gun to her head and tell her if she does not cooperate, you'll kill her children . . . she will comply. When you take a mother, as during slavery, and you tell her you will sell or whip, lash or lynch her children unless she meets your sexual needs, she will comply. A mother will do anything when her children are endangered.

The police took me at age 24 years old in April 1982 into an interrogation room. They slapped and kicked me, ordered me to tell them the whereabouts of my children ages 9, 4, and 1 years old. They brought them down to the police station, put my sons ages 4 and 1 years old, in that interrogation room. As I was handcuffed to the wall, they whisked away my 9-year-old daughter to some "undisclosed" area. They were all male officers. And they denied them food, beverages, sleep, or any female matron supervision.

Then they stood over me yelling that if I did not cooperate, and "confess," that I'd never see those children again. I never signed a statement. I never court-reported a statement. I could not get to a lawyer. And I faced the worst torture a human being could bear. I had a nervous breakdown and was sentenced to 60 years, on psychotropic medication for the first 5 years.

No evidence exists against me. The statement doesn't corroborate with the crime scene or pathologist report. Other than the information they told me, I did not know because I did not do it.

Your question is "Who am I?" I am a woman, a mother, who found in your opportunity a chance to be acknowledged. So I can hopefully be restored to the children, now also 6 grandchildren. They were once the weapons of torture used to put me behind walls for now 22 years for a crime I never committed.

I am the female part of the broken system Governor Ryan forgot existed when he paraded numerous men across televised nationwide media and spoke of their torture, their abuse, their injustice. Yet out of approximately three thousand women in the Illinois Department of Corrections, not one did he exonerate. Not one did he acknowledge as also victims of a broken system.

Did he only envision the system broken for men, and imagine that women had access to the true justice part? I am the voice of the women.

What can I do to make me better? I am praying that through me the boundaries of reform will be looked at by the overseers of law at both sides of the broken system. Men and women equally. I pray that the next time a statesman stands up for justice that it be for all, not one-sided.

I am that skeleton in the system's closet, that female version kept secret while all the noise was going on about the "broken system."

LaJuana Lampkins

Back to Top