What should Illinois do with Joy Brown?
Should she be there?
Joy Brown is one of four women on whose behalf the clemency project has petitioned Governor Ryan. Three of the four were convicted in Madison County, which is just across the Mississippi River from and northeast of Saint Louis; Edwardsville’s the county seat. In response, Haine launched a campaign to ensure that all three women–and Joy Brown in particular–serve every day of their sentences. He insisted that the prisoner review board hear the cases, though none of the women had requested a hearing, and he traveled to Springfield to testify against them.
Church members rarely ventured into the outside world, even to shop, raising food on the farm instead. When they did leave it was usually to evangelize to drug addicts. “It was an outreach ministry,” says Joy’s mother, Elizabeth Young, “to help people who had [drug] problems.”
After Micanopy, Joy and her mother bounced around several church communities before arriving at a church in Alton, Illinois, in 1994. Joy had spent her childhood being home schooled and she’d had few friends her own age. In Alton the home schooling continued, but Elizabeth had to work and Joy was left at home to teach herself. “I was 15, and I was lonely,” she recalls, “because there wasn’t anybody of my race or anybody really who could relate to what I had been through.”
“I never stole anything in my life,” says Damien, who in 1997 pleaded guilty to possession of a stolen vehicle. “I don’t know what they were doing.”
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Damien and his two uncles all tried to get Joy to be their girlfriend, she says, and as she tells the story she still seems flattered by their attention. “They were always trying to say, ‘Oh, I want to be your man,’ and ‘We’re gonna get married. I need a nice churchwoman.’ They told me, ‘Because you can’t make up your mind, whichever one kisses the best you’ll go with.’ Me not knowing nothing about nothing, I kissed ’em all like, OK.”
