A Woman’s Journey Back From Prison

Nearly 10 years after Joyce Ann Brown walked out of prison, her bitter feelings over the ordeal have given way to brighter thoughts.

“Man maliciously prosecuted me and put me in prison,” she said recently, “but God took the opportunity to cleanse me. . . . I see myself as a better person.”

Brown was released from prison a decade ago thanks to a state appeals court that ruled she had been wrongly convicted in a deadly armed robbery. The fire that still burns inside her fuels a desire to help others she believes are harmed by the judicial process.

Brown, 52, left her post as chief assistant to a Dallas County commissioner in August so she could take full-time control of the nonprofit agency she founded in 1990, Mothers (Fathers) for the Advancement of Social Systems Inc.

The agency helps former prison inmates find jobs and get acclimated to society, and uses public awareness of her name to focus attention on people wronged by the judicial system.

The move fulfilled a pledge she made to use her freedom to help others.

“I made a conscious decision that I needed to come here full-time,” she said.

In 1980, Brown and another woman, Rene Michelle Taylor of Denver, were arrested on charges of robbing a fur store in which owner Rubin Danziger was shot to death in front of his wife. Taylor’s fingerprints were found on the getaway car, and she later confessed.

There was no evidence that Brown and Taylor knew each other, but the car had been rented to a Joyce Ann Brown of Denver.

The other Joyce Ann Brown was located and said she had loaned the car to Taylor.

But in the meantime, a police officer remembered a Joyce Ann Brown in Dallas who had had some brushes with the law and coincidentally was employed in a fur store.

Despite the lack of physical evidence linking Joyce Brown of Dallas to the crime, she was found guilty of being an accomplice, largely because of the testimony of Danziger’s wife and a jail cellmate who said Brown had admitted her participation.

The cellmate eventually was revealed to be a convicted perjurer. Prosecutors had hidden that information from the defense.

The case, featured on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” was overturned, and prosecutors decided not to retry her.

After nine years behind bars, Brown returned to Dallas. Her daughter, 11 at the time she went to prison, had grown up.

Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price offered her a job, paying her out of his own pocket when he couldn’t find a place for her on the county payroll. She climbed the ladder from doing office work to become Price’s chief assistant.

Among the things Brown learned from Price is the value that name identification can lend to a cause.

For a time, she wanted to drop the “Ann” because people had never called her that before her conviction. But at Price’s urging she found out that after her legal troubles her full name now acquired meaning.

“The ‘Ann’ makes a difference,” she said. “If it’s Joyce Brown, nobody’s in. If it’s Joyce Ann Brown, they pick up the telephone.”

A few people probably will always believe she’s guilty, said Brown’s friend, Cleo Glenn-McLaughlin.

“The people who believe she could still be guilty are people who can’t believe they are wrong,” said Glenn-McLaughlin, president of the Black United Fund of Texas. “It’s easier to say she’s guilty.”

Brown said her life has essentially been a path back to the ways in which she was instructed as a child.

“For a while, as long as my family was OK, I didn’t care about my neighbor. That wasn’t the way I was raised,” she said. “Now I’m on the side I was brought up under. I try to give them a helping hand regardless.”