Welcome to “Voice for the Voiceless,” a blog I plan to use to give incarcerated individuals the opportunity to speak to the world vicariously through me.
Indian activist Arundhati Roy once said:
“There is really no such thing as the voiceless… only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.”
She’s right. People behind bars do have voices. But they are forcibly shut up and told no one wants to hear them. With their names replaced by numbers and stigmatized as criminals, it feels like being relegated to the dregs of humanity for eternity.
I know, because for the last 24 years, six months and 24 days of my life, I have lived among them.
My name is Robert Barton and at the age of 16, I was charged as an adult with first-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years to life.
I was not the actual shooter in this crime, but I was judged to be as guilty as the one who was, due to a provision of the law that treats “aiders and abettors” as equally criminally liable. Was I guilty? Yes. I was a voluntary passenger in the car. No one forced me to be there. Did I have the same malicious intent as my codefendant, the…
