““I never thought at the time that this would be the man, my main man, who would be responsible for changing my whole life.””
Recently released after spending 34 years in prison on a wrongful life sentence, Rosemary “Rosie” Dyer powered up her electric wheelchair shortly after 8 a.m. Tuesday to make a beeline four blocks to the Ship Shape Community Center. First in line, she cast her ballot in favor of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in his recall election.
Rosie Dyer joined the millions and millions of Californians that exercised their fundamental right to vote. The governor's victory serves to vindicate his leadership of the state.
But just a year-and-a-half ago, Newsom vindicated Dyer, offering her freedom from behind bars for the first time in three decades. Newsom commuted the 68-year-old abuse survivor’s life without parole sentence for shooting her husband with the same gun he was using to threaten, rape and brutally abuse her physically and emotionally for years. Laws prevented her and about 100 abused women in California serving similar sentences from offering evidence of their abuse at their trials. When the laws were changed, Newsom granted her the freedom she had only dreamed about. Since then, Dyer has lived at Home Free, a transition shelter on Treasure Island.
“I just wanted to say thank you in a big way to a man who never even knew me, but took a chance on me and set me free,” says Dyer, who has not voted since she cast a ballot in the 1984 presidential election, shortly before she was sentenced to life behind bars. “Even though we could only hold mock elections in prison, I campaigned heavily for Gavin in his run for governor. He was the candidate we wanted hands-down. I never thought at the time that this would be the man, my main man, who would be responsible for changing my whole life.”
She will never forget the day and time, about 4 p.m., March 27, 2020, during count, when her housing officer and warden at the California Institute for Women in Corona tapped on the wicket of her cell, keyed the door open and said, “Rosemary, you’re going home. Gov. Newsom has given you your freedom.”
But getting her vote to the ballot box was no easy feat. A cancer survivor who suffers from congestive heart failure and recently had heart surgery in August, Dyer cannot lift her left arm (which harbors a blood clot) and therefore cannot hoist herself up and into the Home Free van.
“I was determined to put the ballot in the box myself and ripped up my mail-in ballot because I wasn’t going to take any chances with that,” she says. “I just revved up my buggy (electric wheelchair) and was going to head over. But Home Free leadership, Dorick Scarpelli, insisted he would drive me, so in the end I took him up on the offer.”
“I felt so empowered and filled with joy to be able to exercise my right to vote for Gavin,” she says. I hope someday I can meet him in person and express how tremendously grateful I am to him.”
About Home Free
San Francisco’s nationally recognized restorative justice organization, Five Keys Schools and Programs, is leading Home Free, a new program that created a residential community in San Francisco and plans to open a second transitional housing site in Los Angeles offering access to life skills and survivor empowerment programs, as well as training and job placement, to criminalized survivors of domestic violence. The women of Home Free are formerly incarcerated domestic violence survivors who spent decades behind bars for simply defending their lives, or being at the scene of a crime under the coercion of their batterer. However, the unfair treatment continues as too many of these women are placed in inappropriate halfway homes, most often residential drug treatment programs, where their unique struggles and untreated trauma continue to go unaddressed.