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FREED FROM DEATH ROW, SHAREEF COUSIN
HAS REASON TO BE AN OPTIMIST
1996. at the age of 16, Shareef
Cousin was convicted and sen
tenced to 003th for a murder in New
Orleans. In 1998, the Louisiana Supreme Court
overturned his conviction because of evidence
improperly withheld during his original trial. The
district attorney decided not to pursue
Cousin's case further, and the charges
in his death penalty conviction were
dropped. He maintained always that at
the time of the murder he was playing in
a videotaped city recreation department
basketball game. He remained in prison
until 2005 serving out a sentence for an
armed robbery conviction that resulted
from a plea in the 1996 murder case.
Cousin now lives in Atlanta, where
he attends Morehouse College and
works with the organization Fairness
for Prisoners' Families, a project of the
Southern Center for Human Rights that
seeks in part to form a support network
recognizing the difficulties faced by
the families of the incarcerated. Cousin
plans to attend law school and to one
day represent capital defendants. He will
be speaking about his experiences with
the capital punishment system in the
UGA Chapel this week.
Flagpole: So, you grew up in New
Orleans...
Shareef Cousin: I grew up in New
Orleans, in the Ninth Ward, which is, you
know, kind of famous because of Katrina.
FP: Speaking of Katrina...
SC: Actually I was in prison right outside of
Slidell when Katrina hit. which, we were affected
by some of the wind from Katrina.... We had to
evacuate to Angola [prison].
FP: What was it like being in jail during the
hurricane?
SC: It was terrible: one of the main parts was
you didn't know what happened to your family.
And then the prison cut off all the telephones,
so you couldn't really call out. So you were in
limbo, not knowing what happened to your fam
ily. That was the most dreadful part of being
incarcerated.
FP: And how about your family? How did they
make out during the hurricane?
SC: Well, they were in New Orleans, and one
of my sisters, she was at the convention center.
So she experienced everything at the conven
tion center, but now they're... no one got hurt,
everybody's fine, but, you know: still affected.
FP: And are they living bock there, or where is
your family now?
SC: Well, some went to Boston, and some
went to Texas, and some went to Alabama.
FP: Now that you're working with Fairness for
families in Atlanta, that's one question I had
obout while you were incarcerated: what was that
like for your family?
SC: For one, I couldn't talk to my family
often because I come from a poor family; we
couldn't—my family couldn't—afford the high
telephone calls. They couldn't afford those col
lect calls. And just, you know, I went
to jail when I was 16, so it's like they
have this whole stereotype of going into
prison young. So it didn't matter what
I told my family, that I was okay; they
still had their own thoughts.
And, not being able to visit my
family because I was four or five hours
away, so there was no transportation.
And it was like, the little money my
mom did have, had to keep at home
to pay for the attorney. So she moved
to Boston before the hurricane, and she
was broke!
I think one positive effect it had
on my family was that before my whole
ordeal, they were never aware of legisla
tive policies, or voting, they weren't into
those types of things. Even community
work. And with my incarceration, they
got more involved in community service;
they got more involved in, you know,
not just voting for people because it's a
name they might see on the television,
but really got involved in the issues and
the platforms that people were running
on. So I think that was one of the posi
tive aspects that my whole incarceration
had on my family. Probably the only one.
FP: And what’s the rest of your family doing
now?
SC: Well, my mom, she wasn’t a high school
graduate before my incarceration, but once I
went to death row. that kind of inspired her to
go back to school. So she went on and got her
GEO and went on to college, and graduated and
got her Masters, and she's a social worker for ju
veniles in the system.
And my oldest sister, who lives in Cambridge
[MA], she had graduated-fTom college already
and was an electrical engineer, but once I went
to death row, that kind of inspired her to go
back and she's at Harvard right now, in Harvard's
PhO Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School
of Government. So that inspired her to not just
want to work in corporate America, but to want
to make some type of change.
FP: So, 11 years in jail, and you were released
when?
SC: Oecember of 2005.
FP: So it's been just over a year. What is it
like?
SC: For one, it's hard out here! [laughs] It's
hard out here, man. I can tell you, if I didn't
have the attorneys in the death penalty com
munity—because that's a small, knit community,
those attorneys that do death penalty work—if
it weren't for that small community, then, you
know: I went to jail when I was 16. I didn't
have any job skills, so I came home with no job
skills.... It's like, life can really be much harder
than what it is for me, but one of the adjust
ments is having to pay bills!...
That was the biggest adjustment, because I
didn't have the opportunity to just go through
the transition from teenager to young adutthood
to adulthood. I went to jail when I was 16, and
I came home when I was 27 years old.... I've got
to work full-time to pay bills, and I want to go
to school full-time because it's something I want
to do. And just working full-time and going to
school full-time, just trying to balance those two
is a hard task. After 11 years, you might want to
come home and just relax for a minute, just to
get used to being free. I really didn't have that
opportunity.
FP: I don’t know if you saw that article in the
Atlanta paper last month obout Pete Williams,
who was just released from prison. One of the m
funny things in that article—not to make light of
it—was that a reporter asked Williams what things
were strange about being out of jail and he said
he can't believe everybody's walking around with
cell phones. It was kind of like a time warp, and
the change in technology was remarkable. Did you
have any experiences tike that?
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