The sisters, Gladys and Jamie Scott, smiled and waved as they emerged from Central Mississippi Correctional Facility after 16 years in prison.
“Thank you, thank you,” they shouted as they were driven in a light blue car past crowds of supporters who had come from as far away as Canada to witness their release in the culmination of a long campaign for their freedom.
Barbor, a Republican who is considering whether to run for US president in 2012, suspended their sentences on condition that Gladys Scott, 36, donate a kidney to her ill sister, Jamie, 38, who requires dialysis.
“It’s been a long, hard road but we made it,’” Gladys Scott told a news conference. “There were times when we wanted to give up but I told my sister ... ‘We’re going to make it, we’re coming up out of here, we’re not going to die (in prison).”
“We are not bitter. We never would have made it through 16 years behind bars if we were full of hate,” Gladys Scott said.
Gladys said she was a willing donor for her sister. The sisters plan to move to Florida, according to their lawyer.
They were convicted of robbing at gunpoint two men who were driving them to a nightclub in northern Mississippi in 1993. They had no prior criminal record. Each was sentenced to two life terms.
Civil rights activists said the severity of their punishment far exceeded the seriousness of the crime.
Barbor, chairman of the Republican Governor’s Association, said this week one reason for his decision to order their release was that Jamie Scott’s kidney dialysis and treatment was a financial burden on the state.
Michael Shapiro, chief of organ transplantation at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, has criticized the decision to impose a condition for the release as unethical and possibly illegal.
