Wrongfully convicted shine needed light on ‘The Lynched Among Us’

Before Michael Sutton could walk across the stage in 2006 to receive his diploma from South High School in Cleveland, Ohio, on the way to a full-ride college scholarship at the University of Akron, he was wrongfully arrested and charged with attempted murder. He then served 15 years of a 46-year sentence before the efforts of the Innocence Project led to his exoneration and release in May 2021.

Four years later, Sutton will stand on a different stage at the Lincoln Theatre, recounting his experiences in “The Lynched Among Us,” which features a mix of personal monologues, raps and staged scenes based on real-life events

The production was conceived, written and directed by Alfred Cleveland, cofounder of Voices of Injustice, a group of formerly incarcerated men who have either been exonerated or are fighting to prove their innocence, and is designed to spur conversation and action in a public that has for too long remained indifferent to just how broken the criminal justice system can be.

“I don’t know if society cares. Maybe it’s too painful for people to care. Maybe they can’t do this work. And maybe I was put through all of this to help them understand,” said Cleveland, seated in the Lincoln Theater where the group will stage “The Lynched Among Us” at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 15. “I want people to understand what really happened. And I want you to feel our pain. The pain of having to call my dad after being given five more years by the parole board. … The problem we’re having is not enough people come face-to-face with the truth that really happens in these cases, which can be almost too much pain for people to accept. And if they did, they would be forced to act because of the outrageousness of it.”

Sutton recalled how he was arrested on false accusations four days before his high school graduation, expressing sadness for the time taken from him – “It was prom weekend … and I was on my way to becoming a young adult,” he said – as well as gratitude for a second chance he at times struggled to envision during his incarceration.

“This is giving me a chance to tell my story,” said Sutton, who compared the process of taking part in the play to picking at scar tissue. “It’s still hurtful, because I’ve been home three years, but what is three years compared to losing 15 years for something you had nothing to do with? … When I get up there [on the stage], it’s not a character. I’m reliving everything I’ve been through, to a degree. It’s about me and my life, and my mother and father. And it’s trauma. But in the end, it’s also joy.”

Ru-El Sailor, who will be making his stage debut in Columbus, said part of what he hopes to convey with his story are “those in-between moments that don’t get talked about.” Often, he said, the public will learn a person has been wrongfully convicted and celebrate that justice has finally been restored. But what they don’t see are those indeterminate months that can pass between exoneration and release, or the struggles to adapt to life on the outside following years of imprisonment. In Sailor’s case, for example, he said the prosecutor visited him in prison in October 2017 and told him he was not guilty of the murder for which he had been convicted, but he wasn’t released until five months later, in March 2018.

“So, I’m sitting in prison all those months when the world knows I’m innocent,” Sailor said. “It wasn’t an instant thing, like, ‘We know you’re innocent and we’re gonna get you out of here.’ No, it was, ‘We know you’re innocent. We’ll come back and holler at you.’ And a lot of people don’t know the mental struggle of that.”

While it would be understandable for any of the men interviewed to want to place as great a distance as possible between their present selves and these past incarcerations, each of the three described being motivated by a similar, mission-driven perspective, determined to raise awareness of the plague of faulty imprisonment to the benefit of those still ensnared by the system. “This is something that’s bigger than me, and I’m just so willing to help,” Sutton said.

“There are two ways to deal with the trauma [of incarceration]: You can let it overtake you, or you can take control of it and use it for good,” said Sailor, who owns the Comma Club Collections clothing store in Euclid, Ohio, and whose sole acting experience prior to “The Lynched Among Us” came via a small role in the independent film “DNA II: Bloodline” in which he portrayed himself. “Since I’ve been home, I’ve been exercising my care for others. I mentor. I speak at colleges, high schools, junior high schools. I run turkey drives in my neighborhood, pass out clothes. … I do everything I can to provide people with opportunities.”

Sailor views his participation in “The Lynched Among Us” as an extension of this work, instilled with a belief that sharing his story onstage with the requisite vulnerability could sway the hearts and minds needed to bring about greater structural change.

“When you get the right people in a room to watch a play like this, those conversations get to getting had among people who maybe never had that skin in the game, who haven’t been to prison and who don’t know nobody in prison,” he said. “Us? We’re supposed to be shouting from the rooftops that the system is broken. … But if you get somebody talking who doesn’t know anybody in prison, then it’s like, ‘Why are you shouting?’ And then more people are shouting, and now the public sees all this outcry and it’s like, ‘Okay, now we gotta do something about this.’”