Betsie Gallardo Freed from Prison, Allowed to Return Home to Indiana

Betsie Gallardo is just 24 years old and she's dying of cancer. But thanks to the efforts of activists across the country, she will be spending her final days surrounded by her family in Indiana, rather than by prison guards in a Florida jail cell.

Betsie was imprisoned by the state of Florida for assaulting a cop with a deadly weapon – the weapon being her saliva. After a 2009 car accident, Betsie – a Haitian immigrant born with HIV – spat at a police officer, which was enough to get her a five – count 'em – five year prison sentence, despite the fact that HIV cannot be transmitted by spitting on someone. That's not to say it's not rude, but it sure as hell isn't deadly.

Soon after being imprisoned, Betsie was diagnosed with terminal cancer. To make matters worse, prison officials in Florida – not exactly renowned for their empathy toward the incarcerated – began obstructing Betsie's visitations with her family. Not only were they providing her substandard medical care, denying her the IV nutrients she needed just to subsist, but they were working to ensure she died alone.

But then the word got out about her treatment. After Betsie's adoptive mother, Jessica Bussert, reached out to the good folks at the Bilerico Project, activists across the country, including just under 700 Change.org members, began bombarding prison officials and Florida lawmakers with demands that Betsie be granted medical clemency so she may spend her final days with her loved ones. And they succeeded.

In a Jan. 7 emergency session, the Florida Parole Board voted 2 to 1 to allow Betsie to be moved from prison to a hospice, where she could be surrounded by family. And now she has been permitted to return to her family home, as her mother Jessica details in a guest post for the Bilerico Project.

“After perhaps the most stressful month of my life,” Jessica writes, “Betsie and I are now finally getting settled into a routine in our little log cabin back in Indiana.”

It wasn't easy, of course. If Betsie's case hadn't attracted national attention, chances are she would have been left to die in prison – just like other prisoners not fortunate enough to have lawmakers making personal appeals to the governor on their behalf, as Betsie did. And her mother, Jessica, is cognizant of that. And it makes her angry.

Noting that other, more famous people that just so happen to have paler skin have gotten off with slaps on the wrist for allegedly doing things much worse than Betsie ever did – like the former Miss Nevada who simply paid a fine for reportedly assaulting a cop – Jessica lashes out (and rightly so, mind you) at the “sound-bite seeking politicians pandering to a misinformed and ignorant population”; i.e., the elected officials who pass laws that treat an HIV-infected person's saliva as a deadly weapon, actual science about how the virus is transmitted be damned.

But mostly Jessica is thankful for the folks who took up her daughter's case – from Bill Browning at the Bilerico Project to the prison officials who recognized Betsie's humanity, despite her incarceration. “Blessed are they who show mercy,” she writes, “for mercy shall be theirs.”

Photo Credit: Jessica Bussert/The Bilerico Project