DETROIT _ Siwatu-Salama Ra knows what injustice feels like.
It's cold, she'll tell you, and heartless.
One year after going through labor while shackled to a bed, forced to give birth during her prison sentence, she can still vividly recall police officers passing time on their cellphones as she cried and screamed through unrelenting pain to push life through her body, with no family at her side.
"No woman should have to sit and bear the pain of giving birth alone while officers laugh and chuckle and play on their phones while you're trying to bring life into this world," said Ra, who has been in limbo for more than a year following a 2018 conviction that continues to torment her.
The lawful gun owner with no criminal record went to prison for waving an unloaded gun at a three-time felon who, she said, was threatening her family. An appeals court overturned her conviction, but the prosecution isn't letting it go.
On Oct. 18, an emotional Ra appeared in Wayne County Circuit Court, tears dripping down her face as she learned that prosecutors plan to retry her on assault and gun charges.
Ra has long maintained that the incident was an act of self-defense.
An appeals court threw out her conviction in August, concluding that her actions were "reasonable" and that the jury was not properly informed about the self-defense claim. "The trial court's failure to give the jury instruction regarding the use of non-deadly force in self-defense was erroneous," the appeals court wrote, concluding it was "more probable than not that the lack of proper instruction affected the outcome of the case."
Ra had hoped that prosecutors would drop the charges, which was an option following the appeals court decision.
But prosecutors have chose to retry the case instead, which has sparked local outrage and national attention in part because Ra is a registered gun owner, living in a "stand your ground" state, with no criminal record. She's also a prominent activist in the community: The 28-year-old, married mother of two is co-executive director of an environmental justice group who represented Detroit at the Paris climate talks.
Sitting on a bench in the courtroom hallway last week, Ra hung her head and wiped away tears as her 4-year-old daughter patted her leg. She, her kids and her husband, a building engineer, have suffered enough, she said. That day was one more blow.
"It felt like they just wanted to punish me more," Ra said.
In 2017, Ra pulled an unloaded gun from her glove compartment to scare off a woman who, she said, had rammed her car into a parked vehicle while Ra's toddler played inside and drove toward the family on the front lawn.
No one was hurt. No shots were ever fired.
But the prosecution argued that Ra acted in anger, not self-defense, when she pulled out the gun, and that Ra was the aggressor, not the woman in the car.
Guilty verdicts followed, along with a two-year mandatory sentence on the charge of using a gun to commit a felony _ a charge that was added after Ra refused to cut a deal and opted for a jury trial instead. Bond was denied twice.
"I expected that this case would be simple. I thought that I had the right to protect myself and my family. That's why I thought we had gun laws," said Ra, whose case has garnered the support of the NRA. "I thought that justice would be served. ... I prayed that justice would show itself ... and I was wrong."
Ra's attorney, Birmingham lawyer Wade Fink, has called the case "a parade of errors" that led to a gross miscarriage of justice. He's frustrated that his client was sent to prison at seven months pregnant, that a judge wouldn't let her have her baby first and then start her sentence _ a plan that prosecutors agreed to _ and that the trial attorney was not allowed to cross-examine the woman in the car about her criminal history.
The jury never knew that the woman in the car had three prior felony convictions, including assault with a shotgun. On the night of the incident in question, she was on probation for felony assault and faced jail time if she got into trouble again.
Fink believes that Ra's lawyer should have been able to argue to the jury that the woman in the car was lying about what really happened that night because she knew she was on probation, and feared going to jail again.
Given all his client has been through _ Ra has already served nine months in prison _ Fink said he is hopeful that Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy will change her mind and drop the charges.
"That's justice. Just dismiss it," said Fink. "For God's sake, let this woman get on with her life."
The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office declined comment on Fink's request for a dismissal, stating only:
"The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office will re-try this case. The Michigan Court of Appeals remanded the case for a new trial. The court's ruling was largely based upon the absence of a requested jury instruction," Maria Miller, spokesperson for the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, said in a statement.
