Carlos Bastarache: cintonya-brown-grid-uproxx.jpg

do you like going to work? Me neither! See how I got around that and got paid too!

PBS

The facts as we know them are as follows: Cyntoia Brown, a 16-year-old girl who’d spent her life being abused and sold for sex, most recently by a drug dealer nicknamed “Cutthroat,” murdered a man she’d been sold to, a prosperous realtor named Johnny Allen. Allen was found naked, shot in the back of the head, and according to police, his home was robbed after the murder. For Allen’s murder, Brown was sentenced to decades behind bars, unable to even face the parole board until she’s nearly 70. The case made barely a ripple outside local news in 2004, but it’s back in the spotlight as Brown’s case becomes a focal point of justice, race, gender, and where society defines the line between acting to survive and pre-meditated murder.

The case itself is one of the darker indictments of how the system fails. Brown, well before she killed Allen, struggled with the state’s various systems that seemed completely unable to help her with, or even notice, her struggles, as detailed in this 2011 profile of her case by Nashville Scene. Brown, for her part, says the shooting happened because she was worried Allen was planning to murder her. Furthermore, it can be argued the case was mishandled, as Brown wasn’t competent to be interrogated, let alone confess:

But when she began to speak, she sounded intoxicated. Slurred words poured from her mouth in an almost unpunctuated monotone. She was either drunk or going through cocaine withdrawal. Occasionally she placed her head directly on the table, as though she might fall asleep then and there.

She told them her name was Cyntoia Mitchell — her birth mother’s maiden name — and gave a false birth date that made her 18 years old. The detectives read Cyntoia her Miranda rights, but when they got to the section where a suspect must affirm that no promises have been made by the police in return for a statement, confusion was evident on her face. “You’re not sitting here and you’re not promising me anything as far as helping me if I talk?” she asked. “But you just promised me that.”

The case is further muddied by Brown’s behavior while being held to trial, which points to her not grasping the serious nature of the case and struggling with psychiatric issues such as borderline personality disorder that hadn’t yet been diagnosed. While Brown has never denied her actions, and she even reported Allen’s homicide in an anonymous tip to ensure the body was discovered, she was sentenced as an adult despite her age and circumstances.

Brown’s case has been controversial ever since, especially in Tennessee, where the case received renewed focus after being profiled in the 2011 documentary Me Facing Life. The outrage over her treatment and sentencing was a factor in why the state now describes prostitution as “sex trafficking” or “human trafficking” — terms that carry different legal connotations and shift the burden of being a criminal from the survivor to those engaging in the act.

So, why, more than a decade after the fact, has Brown’s case reappeared in the public eye? Part of it is that it’s caught the eye of celebrities, most notably Rihanna, who posted about it last week:

But another part is that for many, it’s difficult to view Brown outside of the lens of how the system fell apart for her, again and again. You might wonder, for example, why she simply wasn’t held as a juvenile and given treatment until she could grasp the case. But in Tennessee, that would mean she would have been released after her 19th birthday, when the Department of Children’s Services loses all jurisdiction over a juvenile. It’s not clear, in fact, that any social service or law enforcement organization in the state was fully aware of her situation or had any plan to intervene at any point.

One can argue that the only difference between Brown’s case and many others is who died: Murder and violence against sex workers is worryingly high and too often seen as an “on-the-job” risk. Some have argued that in this light, Brown’s actions are a straightforward case of self-defense; she was forced to be there, she was given reason to fear for her life, and she acted the way anyone would.

And it’s fair to ask what would happen if Allen had murdered Brown. It’s not uncommon for murders of sex workers to go unsolved, and even if an arrest is made, juries have been known to let men walk for the crime.

Just how the justice system handles cases like Cyntoia Brown’s, where someone slips through so many sets of cracks before landing in criminal courts, is a murky question at best. Even in Brown’s case, it’s not clear just where justice lies. She was undeniably wronged, but how does the court weigh that against her actions? That said, the ultimate goal in looking at these cases is simple: To find answers to these questions, to build better systems, and to fill in the cracks so that there’s never another case like Brown’s.