Personal Injury Law

Lawyer wife fights for inmate husband

By Edward Bills

Pamela Griffin and her husband have a challenging relationship.

At 36, Pam had just moved to Omaha from Sacramento to take a job as an associate in the banking department of a respected law firm in an old building on Farham Street. Pam and Robert had fallen in love during the 11 years she was married to his older brother, Gerry.

In prison visits and letters, they shared their private struggles and a nascent awareness of an intense emotional bond. Robert proposed to her in the visiting room at Folsom, in front of the vending machines. The place smelled of burnt popcorn. She laughed him off. She had just signed her divorce papers.

But she felt no one could ever know her the way Robert did. A few months later, she agreed to do it and the Griffins were married in the visiting yard at Folsom State Prison in July 1984. He had been incarcerated since 1970, first for an armed robbery in Fullerton, then for an assault on a fellow inmate in San Quentin and the murder of an inmate at the state prison in Chino. He had an almost mythic reputation in the system as a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, or the Brand.She didn’t tell anyone about their marriage — not her parents, brothers or friends. She knew women who fell for prisoners were viewed as naive, delusional or possessed by some fetish for outlaws. She didn’t want to carry that burden as she started her career.

Pam graduated from McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento a year after the wedding and took the job in Omaha. When an appeals court threw out Robert’s murder conviction, Pam expected he would be paroled soon and they could start their life together.

Instead corrections officials sent him to Tehachapi and locked him down, under new security measures meant to control prison gangs, which were becoming increasingly potent.

Guards barely let Robert leave his cell. Robert was 38 now and trying to convince everyone he was done with the gang — that he just wanted to live a quiet life with his wife in the Midwest.

Prison officials gave him the choice all gang members were now given: “debrief” and become an informant, or stay locked up in the hole.

But becoming an informant put an inmate, and even his family, in danger. Robert told Pam he could not go down this path. He said he wanted to walk cleanly away from his life of crime. He did not want to be beholden to the government, “dancing for his dinner.”

Full post as published by Bodily Injury Blog on December 02, 2008 (boomark / email).