In 1994, Tyra Patterson—then 19—was involved in the assault and robbery of a of a group of young women that left one of them—15-year-old Michelle Lai—dead from a gunshot wound to the head. It is known beyond doubt that Patterson did not pull the trigger, but her participation prior to Lai’s death remains unclear.
Patterson is currently serving a life sentence for murder and robbery at the Dayton correctional institution in Dayton, Ohio. (In Ohio, participating in a robbery that leads to someone’s murder leaves you liable for the murder.) She’s been in prison for over two decades and throughout that time, she has maintained her innocence—not only of any involvement in Lai’s death, but of participating in the robbery itself. The key evidence that convicted her—a videotaped confession in which Patterson admits to pulling a necklace off one of the victims—was, according to her, coerced. She also maintains that her trial was unfair: Her assigned lawyers were not prepared, evidence was left out, and she was never called to testify in front of a jury because she spoke “too hood.”
Yesterday, The Guardian launched a series of investigatory articles on Patterson’s case. Now two parts in, much remains a murky “he said-she said,” but what’s emerged as crystal clear are the deep flaws within the U.S. criminal justice system, an entity that exists less to carry out justice and more to incarcerate as many people as possible. (Bonus points if the convict happens to be a poor, illiterate black girl from a bad neighborhood.)
“For six months the Guardian has been exploring Patterson’s life story, tracking her journey from elementary school dropout in poverty-stricken Dayton, Ohio, to a life sentence in the city’s female prison,” writes the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington. “The story that emerges is one woman’s struggle to have her claim of innocence heard within a system resistant to listening anymore.”
The Guardian’s report begins on the night On September 20, 1994. Patterson was out late with a friend when they happened to run into some vague acquaintances. Among them was LaShawna Keeney.
Pilkington writes:
One of the five, 21-year-old LaShawna Keeney, was “acting crazy,” Patterson would later say. Keeney had a black .22 caliber gun, which she proceeded to wave about in her green Chevrolet Caprice. Patterson recalled in a videotaped confession filmed by police later that day – which we’ll examine in chapter two – that the older girl was “talking big shit”, saying things like “I don’t give a fuck about nothin’”.
Sometime after 2am, as Patterson and Stidham were on their way home, the group came across a separate bunch of five young people: white girls from a different part of the city, including two sisters, Michelle and Holly Lai. They were sitting in another car, a grey Chevy Chevette, in a lot down the alleyway just a few hundred feet from the Pattersons’ place. This second group had been driving around the area “rogueing” – that is, looking for stuff to steal from garages.
The two groups’ encounter led to an altercation in which the Chevy Chevette was blocked in the ally and Keeney—along with her then-boyfriend Joe Letts and friends Kellie Johnson and Angie Thuman—robbed the girls and shot Michelle Lai in the head.
To this day, Tyra Patterson maintains that she did not participate in the violence and only tried to help deescalate the situation. When that failed, she left the scene of the crime and committed what she says is the biggest mistake of her life. She picked up a necklace that had fallen to the ground (the necklace belonged to one of the victims). She then ran home and called 911.
It was that necklace—along with differing accounts from the girls within the car and a confession that Patterson says was forced—that would lead to her conviction of aggravated murder. Her 911 call was never played for the jury.