60 Minutes - 6/7/2020: Nation in Crisis, A Long Siege, Failure to Protect

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, talks to Bill Whitaker about the killing of George Floyd and what its aftermath means for America. Scott Pelley looks at a report on the reopening the city of San Antonio, Texas amid coronavirus and the consequences of the lockdown. An Oklahoma law created to protect children from abuse punishes people deemed guilty of failing to stop the abuse. But Sharyn Alfonsi finds that several sentences were more severe on women than man abusers. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. We keep saying this is 2020. How could this be happening? People are so shocked. It can be happening because we haven't dealt with this. And so we'll constantly feel like we're being thrown back in time. Sherilyn Ifill is the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. As you'll hear tonight, few Americans have more insight into the pain, protest, and rage being felt in the country today. What we have seen now is how fragile a democracy is. San Antonio is America's seventh largest city. Like the rest of the nation, it's beginning a high-stakes experiment in reopening. We talked

with business owners about the city's unique plan to get people back to work while attempting to raise public confidence. The unanswered question? If you cleanse it, will they come? Do you think it's too early to open or too late? Is her case that unusual case where they got it wrong? Was she that one in a million? Unfortunately not. What have you learned? That one in four women sentenced for failure to protect receive a harsher sentence than the actual abuser.

60 Minutes examined public records and identified 14 other women in Oklahoma who received harsher punishments for enabling child abuse than the man who abused the child. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley.

Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Tragically, more than 110,000 Americans have lost their lives to the novel coronavirus. But it was the taking of one American life, George Floyd's, a black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer that has shaken this country to its core. Mr. Floyd's videotaped killing shocked the conscience and triggered levels of protest and rage this country hasn't seen in half a century. Calling for law and order, President Trump launched a military response in the nation's capital. How did we get to this place and where do we go from here? We sought wise counsel from Sherilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, an attorney whose organization has argued cases of racial injustice

before the Supreme Court and has worked with administrations of both parties. Race lies at so much of the core of what is problematic in our society today and that is so easily exploitable because we have not had the courage in this country, and particularly most white people have not had the courage, to really decide that this is your job every day as a citizen, is to deal with the fractures that ultimately, if we don't confront them, will destroy us. We met Cheryl and Eiffel at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. the fractures that ultimately, if we don't confront them, will destroy us. We met Cheryl and Eiffel at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

It's closed to the public because of the pandemic. The center sits just across the mall from Independence Hall and just down the street from scenes of protest and violence that racked the city of brotherly love like so many others. Seeing the life squeezed out of George Floyd by Officer Derek Chauvin's knee on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds has brought to the fore again the ugly reality of racial injustice in America. Why was this incident such a spark? I've been doing this work for a very long time and I've seen a lot of terrible videos. And this one actually struck me differently also. What was different about it? It was long. It was long. And to see someone's life being taken from them with that kind of excruciating deliberation the officer looking out at us like that looks at the camera knows he's being recorded and doesn't seem to care that's important because it was believed and said by many that now that we

had the videos things would be different. And so I think one of the reasons why the George Floyd video set us off so much was the realization that it's not different. We've seen the videos, and the videos seem not to make a difference. And that's why that officer could look like that. He wasn't afraid of being videotaped. He wasn't trying to hide what he was doing. What about the other officers? What is their complicity? The officer who killed George Floyd most directly, Derek Chauvin, who had 18 misconduct complaints against him already, nothing can be done with that officer. But when I looked at the officers around him, they seemed to me like

more of the people who probably are police officers, who stand and watch, who are bystanders. And that's why the other officers are so important, because we will hear once again that this is about a bad apple, a bad apple. And it's not about a bad apple. It's about a system, a system of actors and those who are complicit with those actors. There are moments in this country when there are photographs that are snapshots of the soul of this country. They almost hold up a mirror to this country. And when we see this picture of the nonchalance with which America will put its knee on the neck of Black people and make itself deaf to our suffering, deaf to our cries, deaf to our desperation, that's the snapshot. That's America. That's America that can

see African Americans suffering disproportionately from COVID infection and COVID death, can see us subject to housing discrimination, can see us as the lowest wage workers, can see us being victims of voter suppression, can see our desperation and still won't change, still won't let the knee up one bit. George Floyd's killing reveals an America we haven't seen in generations. Armed soldiers guard the Lincoln Memorial, looting across the country on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, on Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia. And like the storming of the Bastille,

I can't breathe! I can't breathe! the 3rd Precinct Police Station, headquarters for the officers who arrested George Floyd, was set ablaze. But as the smoke cleared, the images that emerged were these, Americans of every color, age, and gender filling streets across the country in daily, massive, peaceful protests. Like the one in front of the White House Monday that turned to mayhem when Attorney General Bill Barr approved plans for federal officers and armed troops to forcefully clear the streets. On Monday night, after seven straight days of protests all over the country, President Trump said, I am the law and order president. What did you make of that?

It was, frankly, among the most appalling displays of power I really have ever seen and certainly have ever seen in this country and really constituted a moment of tremendous debasement for this democracy. What do you mean? I mean that the president wanted to show that he was strong. He wanted to do a photo op in front of a church holding a Bible. And he wanted to show and to demonstrate his version of strength, which is tear-gassing peaceful protesters outside the White House.

When you say his version of strength, it sounds like you don't think that that showed strength. Well, we call them strong men because that's their goal is to appear strong. But actually, there is so much more strength in the willingness to lead a true democracy. You are strong because you can hear dissent. And it is not strong to gas people and to stand in front of a building with a Bible. That's not strength. That is a performance. Is that your Bible?

It's a Bible. The president has called the violence across the country domestic terrorism. And he has said that he will be dominating the streets. You know, more concerning to me than the president saying we have to dominate the streets was listening to that phone call and hearing our Attorney General Bill Barr say, but we must dominate the streets. The Attorney General of the United States saying that on a phone call with governors. Part of the thing that has been so alarming is not Mr. Trump himself, but the amount of

people who have been willing to go along with things that we would have regarded as beyond the pale and who have been willing to be part of this unraveling of our democracy. Is that what you think is going on now? I do think that's happening. What we have seen now is how fragile a democracy is. It requires work. It requires people to be vigilant. It requires people saying no to a leader who's out of control. And so I do think that that is where we are. But even so, we have not seen protests on this scale, certainly in a generation.

Doesn't something like this call for an increased use of force. Responding to protests that emanate from anger about the excessive use of force with an excessive use of force strikes me as not a good strategy for law and order. Has Attorney General Barr reached out to the Legal Defense Fund? No. At any Fund? No. At any time? No.

Has anyone in this administration reached out to the Legal Defense Fund? Not that I can think of. Sherrilyn Ifill is used to talking truth to powerful men and institutions. For the last seven years, she has directed the Legal Defense Fund, founded 80 years ago by Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She and her staff of 100 fight civil rights cases all over the country. She told us the job isn't getting any easier.

But this is 2020. This is 2020. But you know what happens when you don't deal with things that you should have dealt with in the past? Is that you keep reliving the past. We keep saying, this is 2020, how can this be happening? People are so shocked. It can be happening because we haven't dealt with this.

And so we'll constantly feel like we're being thrown back in time. When you saw those men in a truck chasing Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and taking a, what I've been calling a hunt video, because that's what it looked like, that looked like something from another century. Eiffel is a former board member of the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. She told us she believes deeply in the law and the U.S. Constitution, which she sees as an incomplete document written by 18th century revolutionary idealists, many of whom held slaves. Yeah, they didn't get the job done, you know. They left this work for the rest of us to do.

To make America live up to its ideals. Well, at the very least, and we should be creating new ideals. You know, the Constitution doesn't have to just be that static document. We've amended it many times. We amended it to give women the right to vote. We amended it to extend the vote to 18-year-olds. We always have the possibility of improving the republic, but the people have to have the will to do it. And the consequences of not doing the work are what we've been seeing. So for anyone who's lamenting what we've been seeing over the last two weeks, ask them how much they have worked to improve this country. This Instagram post by LeBron James reminded us that before the knee on the neck,

there was the knee on the ground. When professional football players silently protested police killings of black Americans, they were condemned by the president and the NFL. Friday, the league conceded it was wrong. When peaceful protest is cut off, how are legitimate complaints to be heard? When we peacefully protest, we're called ungrateful, we're called unpatriotic, when in fact to do the work of trying to make this country better

is the highest form of patriotism. The highest form of patriotism, and in fact, it is the lack of patriotism in this country, the unwillingness of too many Americans of patriotism in this country, the unwillingness of too many Americans to work to make this country better, that actually accounts for the condition in which we find ourselves. And this is where we find ourselves. In just the last decade, an endless stream of images of Black men and women killed at the hands of law enforcement or armed vigilantes. Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Terrence Crutcher,

Botham Jha, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. After all you have witnessed about race relations in the United States, what gives you hope? Well, I don't know of anything in the history of Black people in this country in which I've read some account in which it ended with, and then they gave up. That's just not what we do. I know that we work for the future of our children and our grandchildren and their children. That's our obligation. We don't have any other choice. From early morning workouts that need a boost to late night drives that need vibes,

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History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. We were pleasantly surprised Friday when the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics said unemployment had fallen to just over 13 percent. But there was a mistake. The BLS says due to a misclassification error, the jobless rate was likely three percentage points higher, above 16

percent. In the confusion of the pandemic, it's estimated nearly five million furloughed Americans weren't counted as unemployed. Friday's report also said joblessness fell for whites and Hispanics, but increased slightly for Black and Asian Americans. It's another sign of uncertainty as the U.S. reopens with no vaccine. Many states are now suffering a surge in COVID cases, including California, Florida, and Texas. We looked for hints of our future in San Antonio, America's seventh largest city. It's known as the Alamo City, and it's preparing for a long siege. What does your business mean to you? It's like a child. It's my family.

It's my dreams. This food is hot. And where do you find yourself today? Working harder than I've ever worked in my entire life, earning a fraction of what we're used to earning and waking up in the middle of the night trying to figure out how we're going to keep the boat floating. Her boat is farm table. Elizabeth Johnson's restaurant floats on the federal bailout that pays her employees and money from charities that pay her to feed the hungry. If we can just make it to October and November without another relapse of COVID,

without another stay-at-home order and shutdown, that gives me hope. If there is a resurgence, can you beat that? I have to. Failure is not an option. She has no option but to improvise. Her federal payroll protection money runs out in July. Can she open and stay open at the state-mandated 50% capacity? It is a hope and a prayer that we do not have a second wave between now and then. It is a hope and a prayer that our customers are going to continue to support and frequent us and that they aren't just trying to quarantine themselves in their homes. The historic $3 trillion federal bailout was far-reaching but not farsighted. Paycheck

protection money for many businesses, higher unemployment benefits, and bans on foreclosures for federally backed mortgages run out this summer. In March, two days after the bailout was signed, the view from the Rose Garden was rosy. We can expect that by June 1st we will be well on our way to recovery. We think by June 1st a lot of great things will be well on our way to recovery. We think by June 1st, a lot of great things will be happening. Nine weeks later, June 1st, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated a full recovery will take nine years. June 1st also saw at least 16 states with rising rates of infection, including Texas, which had nearly 70,000 known infections and 1,700 dead.

We're not ever going to be out of the woods until there's therapy, until there's vaccine, and we have to learn to live with that. Ron Nurenberg is mayor of San Antonio. Are there metrics that you look at every day, every hour, to see if this is the right thing at the right time? There are. The ones that we look at most day, every hour, to see if this is the right thing at the right time? There are. The ones that we look at most closely are the hospitalizations, but we also want to make sure that we're not seeing a spike in the severity of cases, people that are needing ICU treatment. And the data right now are telling you what? We are seeing an increase in transmission

as a result of new activities being introduced in the slow opening of the economy, but we are also seeing a stable rate of capacity in our hospitals and an increase in the amount of testing that allows us to assess the breadth of this infection. He's managing the breadth of this infection with a plan San Antonio developed itself, including testing door-to-door to try to contain outbreaks before they explode. We've put our public health professionals, our medical experts out front to give us the data,

the plain truth of what this is, good, bad, and ugly. Texas had one of the shortest stay-at-home periods. In May, it opened most businesses with significant limits. The early result is a record spike in known infections, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. So you want to go up here? Zanell Pizarro is reopening a licensed daycare in her home.

If one child gets sick, we have to close. So praying that everybody stays healthy and we can continue operating, we'll just have to ensure that we are able to have enough revenue to continue operating. She has three teachers on federal payroll protection. That will last her about four more weeks. She has a mortgage deferment that ends this month. That money that we're not paying on mortgage allow us to pay for food and to keep the lights on.

You had how many children in the daycare before? Twelve. How many parents are bringing their kids back? About eight. What happened to the others? The others decided to keep their children home for safety reasons. That question of public confidence is in the impatient eyes of every masked business. If you cleanse it, will they come?

Do you think it's too early to open or too late? I think it's a little too early in my personal opinion in the sense that we have not yet seen the drop in the numbers that we were supposed to see, but then again, I'm a chef. You know, I want to cook. Geronimo Lopez took the leap and reopened his restaurant, Boutique, at 50% capacity after retraining many of the 45 employees he laid off. What are you training your employees to do?

The minimum contact with the plate and with the guests that we can. People can download the menu and look at it in their phone. Contactless pay options for our guests, so there's less interaction there. Can you make a go of it at 50 percent? This is our best bet at the moment. To tell you that I'm confident that we can do it will be a lie. He can't be confident until humanity returns to the empty halls of the 15 billion dollar San Antonio tourism and convention industry. The city anticipates losing $40 million in hotel taxes alone and had to furlough 270 city workers. The virus turned a battle cry into a question.

Remember the Alamo? This was the 2018 Final Four at the Alamo Dome. Today, the venue is known for images of thousands of cars lining up for food. The San Antonio Food Bank is spending about $6 million a week, much of that donated by local businesses. Those pictures are an illustration of the level of desperation that millions of Americans have had prior to this pandemic. San Antonio had the highest poverty rate among the largest metro areas, about 15 percent. But poverty among Hispanics and blacks is double the rate for whites. The economy was strong.

Prosperity was fragile. Those food bank lines doubled almost overnight when this crisis began and things began to shutter and shut down, up to about 120,000 families in a week in those lines. That means that prior to this pandemic, when we were at 3% unemployment, when we had an economy that was on a roll, 60,000 families a week in San Antonio were dependent on the food bank for food. And those pictures represent the desperation that far too many American families have had to deal with. Among the desperate, Jackie Galvan. In 2010, she was San Antonio's Realtor of the Year.

Then, the pandemic killed the market. There's nothing going on. A lot of my clients just are at fear of the unknown. She, too, had little to fall back on. I got my first unemployment check. Woo-hoo! First time ever? First time ever. That was an ordeal. Now she's fighting eviction.

And how far back on the rent are you now? It's three eviction. And how far back on the rent are you now? It's three months now. There's a ban on evictions from property with federally backed mortgages, but that ends nationwide in about two months. Galvan's landlord doesn't have a loan, and so he wants her out now. She endures on the extra $600 a week in unemployment, but that program ends nationally next month. I thought, we're all in this together,

like every commercial says, and it wasn't the case for me. The balled-up rage after the death of George Floyd in police custody rose in San Antonio, too, and, as elsewhere, anger caused amnesia. Face masks were forgotten. Before George Floyd, this was a protest in Texas over the masks themselves. Reopening pitted the Republican state government, which wants fewer restrictions, against the mayors of Dallas and Austin, who are Democrats, and Ron Nuremberg,

who's independent. You received a letter from the Texas Attorney General's office saying that your controls in San Antonio were too strict. Nuremberg mandated masks with the penalty of a fine. He included houses of worship in his ban on gatherings of more than 10 people. It even accused you of, quote, trampling religious freedom. So we have had a groundswell of support within our faith congregations that have allowed us to begin to open. The attorney general's letter was simply trying to score cheap political points, which he has been doing his entire career. The governor overruled Nuremberg's mask mandate and exempted houses of worship.

The Texas Attorney General's office told us that the city's, quote, grossly exceeded state law to impose their own will on private citizens. How did a public health emergency become political? Well, unfortunately, that's the era we live. People are starting to get antsy and frustrated. There are people in political positions that want to take advantage of that. The conflict confused business owners,

but restaurateur Geronimo Lopez found a way to cut through. Well, what we decided to do was follow the higher standard. So that's how I think we can clear all the misinformation. You know, just whatever is the higher standard for safety, that's the one that we're going to follow. In late May, cars lined up again as they had for food at the Alamo Dome. But this time they carried a nervous hope. San Antonio's reopening plan gave away protective gear to 5,000 small businesses.

Business name? It's going to be Farm Table. Including Elizabeth Johnson's restaurant. Thermometers, face masks, face coverings, hand sanitizer. And you signed the pledge. I did sign the pledge, and it is now posted on my front door of my restaurant. The San Antonio Pledge is a commitment by businesses to masks, distancing, temperature checks, sanitizer, CDC cleaning protocols, contactless payment, and employee training.

Not on the list? Holding your breath for the results of the great reopening experiment. What gives you hope? What gives me hope is our community, my colleagues, my employees. What are your fears going forward? My fears are that we have not even begun to see the bottom of this economic downturn and that the next six months to a year is going to be the most trying time of our lives. 18 years ago, Oklahoma adopted a law designed to stop child abuse. It's commonly known as failure to protect, and on paper, it makes perfect sense. Any parent or guardian who knows a child is being abused and fails to protect the child can be charged with

a felony and sent to prison. But in practice, Oklahoma's courts and prosecutors have treated women differently than men under the failure to protect law. We found more than a dozen cases in which mothers who were never found to have abused their children were given much harsher punishment than the men who did. Half of those women were victims of abuse themselves. Mabel Bassett Correctional Center is Oklahoma's medium security prison for women and home to Tony Hall for much of the last 15 years. And how often do you get to see the kids? It's been a while.

When we met her, she was halfway through a 30-year prison sentence for failing to protect her 20-month-old son and three-month-old daughter from being abused by their father, Robert Braxton. You never suspected that he was hurting the babies? No, I didn't think that he would hit. So they never found any evidence that you hit the children? Mm-mm. But that you allowed him to hit the children is what... That's what they say. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's what they say. But you never saw those babies get hit? No, I would have took them away.

We would have went away if I would have seen it. No, that's just... that's not me. Hall was just 16 when she fell in love with Braxton. They lived in this apartment complex in Oklahoma City That's not me. Hall was just 16 when she fell in love with Braxton. They lived in this apartment complex in Oklahoma City where Hall has stated in sworn affidavits that he physically abused her. His rage, she says, was fueled by resentment because she worked while he stayed at home with the kids. He would scream at me, call me different names.

He told me that if you put yourself in a man's position, then you deserve to be hit. He told you that you deserved to be hit? Mm-hmm. Yeah. After two years of abuse, she'd had enough and asked her father to take her apartment hunting one night after work in 2004. Did you have money to do this? Yeah, I had saved some checks, and so I put them in my baby's diaper bag, and I got in a truck with my dad and ended up finding a house that night.

And the next morning, that's when my youngest son, he wasn't walking, and that's when I noticed about his leg being hurt. What did you see? His leg was swollen and so I immediately called the doctor. You called the doctor? Days later when her one-year-old son didn't get better, Hall brought her son to the emergency room. And so you take him to the hospital, what happens? And the lady was like, you know what's going on. You know what happened to him. That's when the nurses had told me that his leg was fractured. Hall told them the broken leg may have been caused by rough housing, but x-rays told a different story. The little boy also had 12 broken ribs and was put in a body cast. A medical exam of his three-month-old sister found similar injuries,

which doctors believe were inflicted sometime in the previous two weeks. Oklahoma City Police had plenty of questions for Tony Hall and Robert Braxton. Did you ever turn to Robert and say, did you hurt the kids? I had asked him, I was like, did you do something? And he was like, shut up him, I was like, did you do something? And he was like, shut up. And I was like, what? He was like, don't say nothing, shut up. People will say, how did she not know? I didn't know. I was working, trying to make money so that I could leave the situation of him abusing me. I didn't know that he did that to my kids. You were trying to get out. Yes, I was trying

to leave. Both Hall and Braxton were arrested and put in county jail. He was charged with child abuse while she was charged under the state's failure to protect law with enabling the abuse. In Oklahoma, that means you know or reasonably should have known that a child is at risk of abuse. Paul agreed to testify against her boyfriend, but she says he continued to threaten her in jail while awaiting trial. He was writing you letters? Yeah, because I was going to testify against him. He outlined a picture of his hand, and what did he write?

He said, slap yourself, bitch. From jail, and he sends that to It says, slap yourself, bitch. From jail. And he sends that to you? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Tony Hall says the abuse she suffered was not introduced in her failure to protect case because she pleaded guilty

in hope of getting a light sentence. Instead, the judge accused the young mother of being less than candid about what happened to her children. Tell me about when you were sentenced and walk me through that day, what happened. My heart just broke because I didn't understand. I still don't understand. And then next thing you know, that's when I found out I got 30 years.

And what's going through your mind when they say 30 years? It's over. My life is over. As for Robert Braxton, he pled guilty to child abuse. The judge decided the two years he'd served a waiting trial in jail was enough. He walked free as Tony Hall went to prison. How can that happen? Sexism. The belief that women are culpable for everything that goes on in the home. Megan Lambert is a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and a lifelong Oklahoman. She became Hall's lawyer four years ago.

People will look at Tony's case and say, mothers know if hair is off on the baby's head. They know when something's wrong. She should have known. You don't always. The women are not always in charge of taking care of their kids. It is sometimes difficult to recognize those patterns of abuse, especially if you're in the throes of abuse yourself. Your entire worldview is clouded

and you are truly in survival mode. Is her case that unusual case where they got it wrong? Was she that one in a million? Unfortunately not. What have you learned? That one in four women sentenced for failure to protect receive a harsher sentence than the actual abuser. 60 Minutes examined public records and identified 14 other women in Oklahoma who received harsher punishments for enabling child abuse than the man who abused the child. You can't have a cookie cutter for these cases. They're so

different. Emily Redman was not involved in the cases we examined, but she is one of the few district attorneys in Oklahoma who has prosecuted failure to protect cases and was willing to talk to us about the law. The penalties range from fines up to life in prison. Do you think Oklahoma's got this right the way that the law is written now? I think Oklahoma does have it right. I mean, to me, the most important duty that parents have, citizens have, is to take care of our children. You like that the law is broad. I do. I have had defendants who were charged with failing to protect that got county jail time because the case, that's what it was worth.

But how do you make sense of these cases where the abuser, who's a man, goes to prison for less time than a woman who's charged with enabling? Maybe one party asked for a jury trial and the jury is incensed by what they see and hear. Maybe the other party took responsibility early on and admitted their guilt and took a plea offer. So every case is different. She says the case of Cheyenne Wolfe is a good example. The 12-year-old endured abuse for years at the hands of her stepmother, Denise. Her father, Abel Wolfe, knew about the beatings and did nothing to stop it. He had become uncomfortable with the situation. And he walked outside and smoked

a cigarette. So he left. He left. Cheyenne died hours after a beating in their home. Emily Redmond successfully prosecuted the stepmother on charges of abuse that resulted in five life sentences. The judge gave the girl's father 100 years in prison for failure to protect. This particular case, the facts were so bad and the abuse went on so long that the fact that that range of punishment is so broad was helpful because Abel Wolf deserved every second of time that he got. But when it comes to failure to protect, there is a gender gap in Oklahoma. According to the latest data provided to 60 Minutes from Oklahoma's district attorneys,

there are 41 women in prison for failure to protect, which is 16 men. Even though government statistics show men and women abuse children at nearly the same rate. What's working in the past has not got us where we want to be. Oklahoma's Republican Governor Kevin Stitt campaigned on a promise to take a hard look at the state's laws and tough sentencing. With the enabling child abuse laws, you can serve up to a life sentence. That's how broad that is right now, the sentence. Does that sound right to you? It doesn't. It sounds too long, and that's some of the things that we want to address in our state. Oklahoma has the highest incarceration rate for women

in the country. Why are women being incarcerated at such a high rate in Oklahoma? I mean, it's double the national average. I think it goes back to our just laws, our sentencing over time has just kind of gotten away from us. If something should be six months sentence, let's not give it six years just because we want to be tough on crime, right? What has the effect been on the state of these heavy incarceration rates? When you have heavy incarceration, it affects everything in society. You think about the foster system and then the statistics. If you have a parent incarcerated, the likelihood that the kid is going to be there as well just goes up astronomically.

In November, Governor Stitt signed the biggest single-day commutation in American history, releasing 527 nonviolent offenders. A week later, the parole board asked him to approve Tony Hall's release. Anybody in that type of situation with abuse, but especially someone who didn't commit the crime, it was time to give her a second chance. After 15 years, Tony Hall finally walked out of the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center and into the arms of her children, now teenagers. Blessed to be with my family. Dozens of inmates line the fence to say goodbye.

I love you! What's the thing you've enjoyed most about just being free? Man, being able just to be around my children and family, you know. When we caught up with Toni Hall, she told us she was rebuilding a relationship with her kids and savoring the get-togethers she dreamed about while in prison. She has a new job as a hairstylist and plans to speak up for abused women who the law has failed to protect.

Some of the women that are in there, they're broken. They don't want to talk about it. So I just hope to help somebody, anybody. A friend said wistfully last week that he sure wished sports were in season. He didn't mean as entertainment during a weighty time. He wished that sports were here to amplify He didn't mean his entertainment during a weighty time. He wished that sports were here to amplify the public mood about George Floyd's killing and the outcry over police brutality. He wished that pro athletes were on fields and courts, locking arms and scrawling messages of resistance on shoes, and yes, kneeling in protest.

Then something remarkable happened. The same athletes who have effectively been furloughed by COVID since early March limbered up and spoke up. This was in keeping with the tradition. Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and yes, Colin Kaepernick, are among the athletes who have fought systemic racism. But last week, liberated from the grind of a season unencumbered by risk-averse team owners and publicists, athlete voices echoed extra loud. They flooded social media, of course, but they also took to the streets. Put together, the George Floyd story became, at least in part, a sports story.

Like an athlete coming back from injury, we'll see what role sports will fill now, where the leagues themselves will stand, and what conversations will fill locker rooms. We envision sports emerging not as distraction or lightness, but something heavier, more relevant to repairing this deep tear in the national fabric. Athletes may grip rackets and clubs and the seams of balls, but as we've just been reminded, they have a unique grip on us as well. I'm John Wertheims, and we'll be back next week with another new edition of 60 Minutes.