During his presidency, Jimmy Carter held one unique title in particular—parole officer for Mary Prince, a woman convicted of murder who found strong allies in the recently deceased former president and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter after she became their daughter Amy Carter’s nanny.
Prince, then known by her married name Mary Fitzpatrick, was convicted of murder in 1970, but maintained her innocence. Both the former president and first lady became advocates for her cause, and brought her to work in both the Georgia governor’s mansion and the White House.
In his 2005 memoir Sharing Good Times, Carter called Prince an “integral member of our family” and called her a “binding force” keeping the Carter family tied together as the couple’s children grew older.
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Prince grew up in the small town of Richland, Georgia. She dropped out of school in seventh grade in order to take care of her younger sister, according to a profile of her published in People magazine shortly after Carter’s inauguration in 1977.
In 1970, Prince went to a bar in Lumpkin County, Georgia with her cousin, who was carrying a gun. When her cousin got into an argument with another woman at the bar, Prince tried to intervene.
“I didn’t know anything about guns, but I tried to take it away and it went off. We didn’t know it had hit anyone,” Prince told People in 1977. However, the other woman accused Prince of deliberately shooting and killing the woman’s boyfriend.
A court-appointed defense attorney spoke to Prince only twice for about 10 to 15 minutes, she said. “He advised her to plead guilty, promising a light sentence,” Carter wrote in his 2005 book, Our Endangered Values.
“She was young, black, and penniless, so she did as he told her and got a life sentence in return,” Rosalynn wrote in her own memoir, First Lady from Plains.
However, Prince soon was able to secure a job at the Georgia governor’s mansion as a trusty, where she quickly found herself working as a nanny for Carter’s eldest daughter. “Amy and I—we hit it off on our first day,” Prince told journalist Kate Anderson Brower in her 2015 book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.
“Our daughter was three years old at the time, and Mary’s intelligence and dedication convinced us that to let her help Rosalynn care for Amy while I was governor,” Carter himself wrote in Sharing Good Times.
But after Carter’s term as governor ended, Prince was forced to return to prison. She told People that Amy cried when saying goodbye, and Rosalynn came to visit her at Fulton County Jail.
Prince was given permission to travel to Carter’s inauguration in January 1977, where she told the New York Times the new First Lady offered her a job in the White House as Amy’s nanny once again. The parole board eventually agreed to her release, and the newly sworn in president was tasked with serving as her parole officer.
Prince’s case was eventually reexamined and she was granted a pardon, Carter later confirmed in his 2006 book.
According to Brower’s account, Prince remained close to the Carters for years after he left the White House, moving to a house only three blocks away in the former president’s hometown of Plains, Georgia. In 1993, Prince told the Tampa Bay Times she was still doing housework for the Carters—and still saw Amy when she came home for the holidays.
In his own words, Carter also praised Prince for all the work she did for his family. Carter dedicated his 2005 book, Sharing Good Times, to his former White House nanny, who he said was “always willing to travel to any other home when one of our children has a special need or crisis.”
