A prosecutor in Oklahoma sentenced a woman to life without parole in the 1990s. Now he says she should not be in prison anymore, but efforts to free her have failed.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Oklahoma has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country. But are there some people in prison who shouldn’t be? That is the argument that one former Oklahoma prosecutor is making about a woman he helped put in jail back in the 1990s. Elizabeth Caldwell with Public Radio Tulsa has the story.
ELIZABETH CALDWELL, BYLINE: Mike Sullivan was the district attorney in the LeFlore County on the Arkansas border for eight years in the 1990s.
MILE SULLIVAN: Well, I’ve held 23 murder cases in my career.
CALDWELL: But there’s one case in particular that still bothers him.
SULLIVAN: I remember she was a small, petite-type woman. I think – believe she was 38 years old when we tried her.
CALDWELL: He’s talking about Cathy Lamb. Her life changed forever on the night of April 27, 1991.
(SOUNDBITE OF AMY GRANT’S “BABY BABY”)
CALDWELL: Back then, Amy Grant was all over the radio with her song “Baby Baby.” But in the darker corners of America’s collective consciousness, fears about violent crime dominated. The New York Times was reporting about a record number of murders in that city. Prison sentences had gotten longer nationally, and they were about to get longer still. The fears of the ’90s were felt from Washington, D.C., all the way to eastern Oklahoma, where Cathy Lamb lived in 1991.
CATHY LAMB: Very difficult to relive the worst day of my life, but if it will help somebody else, I’ll do it.
CALDWELL: Lamb now lives at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud. On a spring evening about 30 years ago, she went to a bar in the tiny town of Bokoshe to get something to eat with her boyfriend, Chris Neilson. As they were leaving, Neilson got into a fight.
LAMB: And somebody at the other end of the bar hollered at him. And so he went back. And, I mean,…
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