August 26th 2023.
Betty Tyson, a Black woman who was wrongfully convicted and spent 25 years in a New York prison for a 1973 murder, passed away at the age of 75. She died on August 17 due to complications from a heart attack. Her sister, Delorise Thomas, shared that despite her wrongful conviction, Tyson made peace with her time in prison.
"She enjoyed herself, going out driving, playing cards, going out to different parties... She enjoyed her life," Thomas said from her Rochester home, where Tyson also lived.
It was in February 1974 that Tyson was given a 25-year-to-life sentence for the murder of Timothy Haworth. The incident happened when Haworth left a Rochester hotel around midnight in search of a prostitute. He was found strangled with his necktie the next day in an alley. Both Tyson and another prostitute, John Duval, signed confessions to the murder. They claimed the police had beaten the confessions out of them, but at the trial, two teenage runaways said they saw Tyson and Duval with Haworth shortly before his death.
It was not until 1998 that Tyson and Duval's convictions were overturned when the police kept hidden a report that contradicted one of their key witnesses. As part of her settlement from the City of Rochester, Tyson received $1.3 million. Despite this, she still struggled financially, working cleaning a day-care center for $143 a week.
When asked about her time in prison, Tyson maintained her innocence. "All that bitterness and anger left me in the late '70s," she said in a 1999 interview. "I wasn't a goody two-shoes, but the fact of the matter is, I didn't kill anybody." Despite her wrongful conviction, Tyson was a model prisoner. She counseled female offenders with AIDS, got a printer's apprenticeship, led aerobics classes, and was known as "mom" to the younger incarcerated women in the facility.
At the news of her passing, Thomas remarked to the Associated Press that she felt that now Tyson is finally "free." It is a heart-breaking and yet reassuring thought that after so many years of wrongful incarceration, Tyson is now free from her prison.
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