April Wilkens was 28 years old in 1998, when police arrested and charged her with first-degree murder for fatally shooting a man who had repeatedly stalked, harassed, assaulted and raped her. 

Wilkens had called police multiple times on her ex-boyfriend, Terry Carlton, and had obtained two protective orders against him. But he came from an influential Tulsa family, and police seemed to rarely get in his way. She says she shot him one night in self-defense, after he had already raped, handcuffed, and threatened to sodomize and kill her, at one point holding a gun to her head. When Wilkens went to trial, her lawyer failed to obtain or introduce several pieces of evidence of the ongoing abuse, according to her clemency application, including an audio tape recording where Carlton admitted to beating and strangling her. She was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Wilkens, now 53, has spent nearly half of her life behind bars. 

Troubled by Wilkens’ story, last year Oklahoma state Representative Toni Hasenbeck helped lead a legislative study of sentencing reforms for survivors of domestic violence whose abuse played a role in their conviction. This year Hasenbeck, a Republican, filed House Bill 1639, the Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act, to give criminalized survivors like Wilkens a chance at release. As introduced, the act capped prison terms at 10 years for people convicted of crimes against an abusive partner, and allowed survivors already serving lengthy or life sentences like Wilkens to retroactively seek resentencing and release.

Wilkens said the bill felt like a ray of hope. “It could mean a life sentence won’t mean death by incarceration for me,” she told Bolts. “It could mean I won’t die in a cage. I could start making up for lost time with my family and friends. He had to grow up without his mom. My son was seven when I was locked up. He’s 32 now and has a four-year-old daughter.”  

As the bill wound through the Oklahoma legislature this year, Wilkens helped spread the word about the bill inside the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, urging other women there to tell their families and friends to advocate for the legislation. She also generated and distributed a survey, asking women inside about the role of abuse in their convictions; 156 women responded identifying as survivors of trauma and violence.

But in March, Hasenbeck significantly amended the bill ahead of its vote in the Oklahoma House, Mother Jones reported, effectively gutting it. According to the Oklahoman, the state’s influential District Attorneys Council pushed for a watered-down version that would not have helped Wilkens or any other survivors currently in prison, simply giving judges discretion to impose lighter sentences for people convicted of crimes against abusive partners in the future. 

Even that weakened bill did not make it through the session. After the House unanimously passed it in March and the Senate approved an amended version in April, advocates, including family members of survivors, pleaded with lawmakers to put retroactivity back in. But lawmakers did not budge in preparing a final version, and then they did not even schedule a final vote on it by the end of the session last week.  

Wilkens told Bolts she had mixed feelings about the whittled-down bill. “If what I’ve gone through can help keep future domestic violence survivors from languishing in prison, it will be worth it,” Wilkens said. “On the other hand, it felt like a kick in the gut. Those of us who are already in prison want to feel like our lives—and our families’ lives—matter, too.”

Amanda Ross was seven years old when Wilkens was arrested. Her mother, Wilkens’ sister, had always encouraged her to write letters to her imprisoned aunt, but as a child, Ross only had a dim understanding of why she was behind bars. 

Wilkens, who was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, first became eligible for parole in 2013, after serving 15 years in prison. That year, at her parole hearing, Carlton’s father protested her release and she was denied parole. In 2016, the parole board didn’t even grant her a hearing. That was when Ross, by then in her twenties, became involved. 

“I started a blog to post her commutation application,” she told Bolts. From there, she began gathering other court documents, including Wilkens’ numerous appeals and court transcripts. “I was scanning the documents trying to get her an attorney,” she recalled. 

At first, Ross didn’t fully understand what she was looking at, but reading and scanning gave her a crash course in what had happened to Wilkens. She turned the records into a chronology so others could understand her aunt’s decades-long ordeal through the legal system. 

In 2019, the board granted Wilkens a hearing only to again deny her parole. By 2022, Wilkens had spent 24 years in prison and was once again up for parole. This time, Ross enlisted the help of Project Commutation, which provides free legal representation to people serving excessive sentences, but the board again denied Wilkens a hearing. 

Wilkins’ story is far from unique. The nexus between domestic violence and incarceration is so common that advocates have coined a term for people who have endured it, calling them criminalized survivors. And Oklahoma’s criminal legal system has long been particularly harsh to women. For decades, it had the nation’s highest female incarceration rate; as of 2021, the state trails only Idaho and Montana for this dubious distinction.

Through other activists, Ross connected with Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and eventually lawyers with the organization launched a 12-episode podcast detailing Wilkens’ case. They named it Panic Button, after an actual panic button that Wilkens wore around her neck in an attempt to stop Carlton’s attacks. 

Oklahoma Appleseed lawyers also worked with Hasenbeck on her legislative study, putting together the research and speakers for a September 2022 presentation to the justice and judiciary committee of the Oklahoma House, where they also outlined Wilkens’ story of abuse, survival and incarceration. Other presenters highlighted the outsized impact of criminal punishment on women of color in the state; according to state and federal data, Black and Indigenous women each accounted for 18 percent of Oklahoma’s women’s prison population in 2021, despite accounting for just 7 and 8 percent of the general population in the state, respectively.  

The following year, Hasenbeck introduced the Oklahoma Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. Colleen McCarty, one of the Oklahoma Appleseed lawyers pushing for the bill, begged lawmakers to reconsider after they stripped the provision letting it apply to previous convictions, pointing them again to the cases of Wilkens and other survivors. In an open letter she posted in March, McCarty said Oklahomans have proven supportive of retroactive sentencing reforms. In 2016, voters approved two ballot initiatives aimed at reducing prison sentences for people with certain non-violent convictions, which eventually led to one of the largest mass commutations in the nation’s history. (Hasenbeck didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.)

“Those cases were for low-level drug and property crimes. These survivors’ crimes that could be impacted by HB 1639 are crimes of ‘it was him or me,’” McCarty wrote. “They are crimes of people who resorted to violence when the system gave them no other choice. These survivors deserve the safety and freedom they couldn’t get anywhere else in Oklahoma—not at home, not at church, not at the police station, and not in the courthouse.”

Renetta Boyd had never engaged in any type of political organizing until she learned about the Oklahoma Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. 

Renetta’s daughter, Keabreauna Boyd, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for the 2020 death of her boyfriend, which followed years of her being abused by him. Keabreauna was eight months pregnant and had tried moving to get away from him, but that didn’t stop the abuse. She says he charged at her with a knife during a fight before she wrestled it away and killed him with it in self-defense. After her arrest for murder, Keaubreauna gave birth handcuffed to a bed without family present, despite 2018 legislation prohibiting restraints and allowing family during labor and delivery. That was the last time she saw or touched her baby.

Renetta distinctly remembers attending her daughter’s 2021 sentencing hearing because it was the last time she saw her; because Renetta is currently on parole, she must receive special approval to visit her daughter and she hasn’t yet been allowed visits. The mother and daughter have kept in touch for the past two years through weekly phone calls and biweekly letters.

Renetta and nine of her family members attended a rally at the Oklahoma capitol last month, where she was joined by other relatives of incarcerated survivors of domestic abuse, asking lawmakers to restore the retroactive parts of the Domestic Abuse Survivorship Act. 

Renetta says she feels lucky she didn’t lose her daughter or the baby during the assault. But she says her grandchildren need their mother home; Keabreauna has four other children in addition to the baby born in jail. “I feel like this law should pass so that my daughter could get back home with my grandchildren because they’ve never been away from her a day [before her arrest],” Renetta told Bolts. “She needs a chance to raise her children.”

“If you’re fighting for your life, you shouldn’t be punished,” Keabreauna told Bolts in a call from prison. “Everybody has the right to fight for their lives.” 

Oklahoma’s bill wasn’t the first to address the intersection of abuse and incarceration. New York passed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act in 2019, and since then 40 incarcerated people have been resentenced . In Louisiana, a similar bill filed this year faced intense opposition from the district attorneys’ association, Bolts reported in April; it too was amended earlier this month to exclude resentencing for survivors currently behind bars. 

After Oklahoma lawmakers removed retroactivity from this year’s reform bill, advocates ratcheted up efforts to rally around survivors and tell their stories to lawmakers in hopes of passing reforms that could help them. In March, Oklahoma Appleseed held an art and advocacy day at the state capitol building, where artists created pieces based on survivors’ stories while advocates engaged passersby about the issue. The following day, advocates brought the pieces to Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, holding them up outside so that incarcerated women could see them. Both Wilkens and Boyd saw the pieces from their window; Boyd excitedly told her mother later that she had seen the art and noticed her portrait within one of the pieces.

Ross says she visited the state capitol four times over the past two months to meet with lawmakers. While she had previously participated in marches and rallies for other causes, this was the first time she had joined a coalition working towards a specific outcome, and the first time she had advocated for a change that was so personal. 

“It’s affirming,” she told Bolts. “All this time, I was struggling to get someone to listen.” Now, after so many years, advocates, other domestic violence survivors and even lawmakers are doing so.

“It really made me feel less alone,” she added.

Ross continues to advocate for reforms that apply retroactively, pushing for a pathway out of prison for her aunt and others incarcerated because of the abuse they endured. “We’ve carried the bill on the backs of these women who are incarcerated, on their stories,” she said. “I don’t think legislators realize that the bill has gotten this far because we’ve pushed their stories.” 

From prison, Wilkens continues to share her story, publishing op-eds in local newspapers to urge lawmakers to pass sentencing reforms that apply retroactively to cases like hers. 

McCarty with Oklahoma Appleseed told Bolts she was “extremely disappointed in the failure to advance HB 1639” but also said the final version of the bill “didn’t accomplish any of the goals that the coalition set out to accomplish when we embarked on this survivor justice journey.”

At the same time, she said that advocacy and educational efforts around the bill engaged many Oklahomans who had never before been part of the political process before—and that they intend to continue building the campaign before the next legislative session begins.

“I hope that criminalized survivors know that we’re not giving up,” McCarty said. “This is a much bigger issue than we even realized when we started this.”

The post Sentencing Reforms for Domestic Abuse Survivors Derail in Oklahoma appeared first on Bolts.

Nailah Starks doesn’t recall when her father began taking his frustrations with life out on her mother. He would apologize later and promise not to hurt her anymore, only to abuse her again and again—a pattern so common that advocates call it the cycle of violence.  

Her mother, Tamika, split with her father when Nailah was in third grade, moving her and her three siblings from New Orleans to Atlanta, but that didn’t stop the violence. She remembers her mom calling the police and begging for help when he assaulted her during one visit, pointing to bruises he had left when the officers arrived and saying, “Look at my face.” 

When she was in fourth grade, Nailah and her siblings moved back to Louisiana, but were then abruptly uprooted from their new home in Avondale, across the river from New Orleans, and moved in with an uncle who lived in the small town of Independence, about an hour’s drive north. At first, they were told it was just for a few days, but days turned into months, then years without seeing their parents. Nailah says she assumed that her mother was on a business trip, and that’s what she started telling people until an older cousin corrected her. “Your mom isn’t on a business trip,” he told her. “She’s in jail.”

Nailah later learned that her mother had been charged with the second-degree murder of her father. After a jury deadlocked at her trial, Tamika Starks pled guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a 20-year prison sentence, avoiding a possible sentence of life without parole. “I spent the majority of my childhood angry at her,” Nailah said. She was also angry at her father for putting the family in those circumstances. As the oldest, Nailah felt like she had to parent her four siblings. “I feel like my childhood was taken from me,” she said.  

Now a senior in college and a mother herself, Nailah says she has forgiven both parents. And every other week, she drives with her three-year-old son nearly 100 miles to visit her mother in Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. Tamika always insists on cooking them a pizza she buys at the vending machine, one of the few ways she can still mother her daughter. Each time the visit ends, Tamika’s grandson cries.

Nailah is part of a coalition of Louisiana activists, called Louisiana Survivors for Reform, who have experienced violence, including the murders of their loved ones, and who are pushing for sentencing reforms for domestic violence survivors. They are urging state lawmakers to pass what they are calling the Justice for Survivors Act, filed on March 31 in the state legislature by Senator Regina Barrow, which would enable domestic violence and trafficking survivors behind bars to apply for reduced sentences if their convictions stemmed from their abuse. 

The bill would also allow judges to sentence survivors to less time than those dictated by the state’s sentencing guidelines. Barrow says she was moved to introduce the bill after meeting with survivors incarcerated at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. She listened to story after story about women’s attempts to stop or escape domestic violence and, in court, the barriers they faced in presenting evidence of that abuse in their defense. 

“It’s very apparent that there’s a gap in our law that does not allow that,” she told Bolts. The Act, she hoped, will provide domestic violence survivors the opportunity to have a fair trial in which all of their circumstances, including abuse, is taken into consideration. 

Harsh sentencing isn’t the only way the state of Louisiana fails victims of domestic violence, says Mariah Wineski, executive director of Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence (LCADV). For years, Louisiana has ranked among the top five states for homicides of women murdered by men. In Louisiana, over 90 percent of those killings were by men who knew them and over 50 percent were by intimate partners. “That represents a massive systemic failure,” Wineski said. “We struggle with our systemic responses to domestic violence. In some ways, it’s completely insufficient,” she said, referring to the lack of shelter beds and other resources throughout the state. The scarcity creates a barrier that prevents many survivors from safely escaping abusive relationships. In 2020, the state had only 386 beds in 16 domestic violence shelters. That year, these shelters took in 2,212 people but each year between 2015 and 2020, turned away an average of 2,659 abuse victims.

In other ways, Wineski says, the response—which directs police to make arrests during domestic violence calls and does not take abuse into consideration during prosecution—can be “heavy-handed.”

“When we say survivors are criminalized and incarcerated for killing their abusers, no one [among domestic violence advocates] disagrees with us because everyone knows at least one survivor incarcerated for killing their abuser,” she reflected.

Katie Hunter-Lowrey, herself a crime survivor and an organizer with Louisiana Survivors for Reform, says harsh prison sentences against domestic violence survivors highlights how detached the victim-versus-offender binary painted by politicians and prosecutors is from reality. 

“Those of us who have interacted with law enforcement and have been criminalized or victim blamed or denied resources, we know that the system, as it exists, isn’t making us safer,” Hunter-Lowrey told Bolts, “and that those experiences with the system have been further traumatizing when we’re just trying to get and stay safe.”

Like many of the women advocating for Louisiana’s Justice for Survivors Act, Beatrice Taylor spent decades in prison for defending herself and wants to make sure others aren’t similarly punished for it.

In 1997, a jury sentenced Taylor to life without parole for the death of her abusive ex-boyfriend. The pair hadn’t been together long, Taylor recalled but, during their first month, she was already calling police about his violence. Each time she did, he would flee before officers arrived. Even after they split, he continued to harass and assault her. Once, he attempted to rape her, stopping only when she burned his ear with a lit cigarette. Taylor changed the locks, the window panes and even the entire door frame, but he continued to break in. “It wasn’t that I kept letting him come back into my life,” Taylor told Bolts. “He kept breaking into my house.”

The morning of December 2, 1996, after Taylor walked to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes, he ambushed her when she got home—first shoving her to the ground, and then pushing her into the kitchen of her small shotgun house. Blocking the front door, he threatened to kill her. 

Taylor says she grabbed a kitchen knife—a small one, she clarified—and raised it, yelling “Let me out!” She got halfway across the living room floor when he grabbed the hood of her coat, spun her around, and then started to lunge at her.

Taylor still remembers that moment: His full body weight came crashing down on her left foot, breaking her toes and leaving her in excruciating pain. “Then I saw his fist coming towards my nose as he yelled, ‘I will kill you now,’ and I raised my forearm so he wouldn’t hit my nose,” she recalled. “And I still have a knife in my hand.”

Taylor maintains that she didn’t realize that he had lunged into the knife. Instead, she focused on escaping—hobbling down the stairs and across the parking lot to a pay phone to call 911 yet again. This time when police arrived, he was dead.

The prosecutor didn’t see it as an accident or self-defense, charging her with second-degree murder. While preparing for trial, Taylor learned that her former boyfriend had a history of domestic violence, a history that was never introduced in court. The jury found her guilty. Taylor was sentenced to life without parole or, as she puts it, “death by incarceration.” She was one of 1,868 women imprisoned in Louisiana that year (and, anomalously, one of 590 white women compared to 1,275 Black women). 

By 2016, Taylor had long exhausted all of her legal appeals. The laws around domestic violence and self-defense remained unchanged. Her only hope was clemency, or a shortening of her sentence, and she already knew that Republican Governor Bobby Jindal had signaled that he was reluctant to grant clemency. But John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, had replaced him earlier that year.

One morning, Taylor picked up two bundles of a Catholic newspaper to bring to the prison chapel, where she worked and saw that Edwards, who is Catholic, had taken office. Instead of reporting to work, Taylor, who is also Catholic, sat on the chapel steps, opened the newspaper and read a speech they had reprinted from the new governor.

“I could feel the compassion in his words and I said to myself, ‘It is time,’” Taylor recalled. But after she began preparing her clemency petition, the prison flooded, destroying all documents and displacing the women to a shuttered and deteriorating juvenile prison. Taylor started over again. Three years later, the Domestic Violence Clinic at Tulane Law School picked up her case and presented it to the state’s parole and pardon board. They unanimously approved her petition and sent it on to the governor, who granted her clemency in summer 2020. She was released in October 2020.

Regardless of their conviction, Taylor says every woman she met in prison had similar experiences of violence and abuse. She has been determined to fight for them since getting out. She has thrown herself into advocating for the Justice for Survivors Act since learning about the bill.  

In January 2023, members of the state’s Human Trafficking Prevention Commission invited Taylor to speak and introduce the man who had granted her clemency. She accepted, not only to personally thank him, but to seize the opportunity to ask him to sign the Justice for Survivors Act into law. 

Taylor shared her story with the commission members, then introduced the governor. When she said his name, he flew from the back of the room to the podium, wrapped his arms around her and gave her a big hug as cameras flashed around them.

But Taylor wants more than just a photo opp with the governor. She wants to see him use his powers to grant clemency to help others still languishing at LCIW and to pass the Act to enable future survivors to avoid her fate. Edwards drew attention early in his first term with a spree of commutations and then picked-up the pace again after securing a second term in 2019, but state advocates have pushed him to do more. 

“No one should die of incarceration because she had to choose—instantly—her life over someone else’s,” Taylor recalls telling Edwards when they met. 

Time is running out since Edwards’s tenure ends in January. He is barred from running again this fall, and one of the frontrunners to replace him, Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, is an outspoken foe of decarceral measures, adding pressure for a legislative solution this year.

In 2021, Republican state Senator Patrick McMath filed a resolution to create a Survivor Informed Taskforce to study the link between trauma, abuse, and subsequent incarceration and to make recommendations to Louisiana’s legislature. The task force—which included staff from legislators and the governor as well as prison officials, Wineski, Hunter-Lowrey and advocates for domestic violence victims—found that approximately 75 percent of the people imprisoned at Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women had identified as survivors of violence. The task force recommended several legislative pathways, including adapting affirmative defense statutes to consider self-defense and compulsion or duress, allowing judges to deviate from mandatory sentencing when presented with evidence of interpersonal violence or trafficking, and creating opportunities for resentencing for abuse and trafficking survivors.    

The Justice for Survivors Act incorporates these recommendations.  

The bill is not the first to address the intersections of abuse and incarceration. In 2019, New York passed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, which allows a sentencing judge to consider whether abuse was directly related to the person’s conviction, granting them the flexibility to deviate from mandatory sentencing guidelines. The Act also allows incarcerated survivors to apply for resentencing. The Act faced opposition from the state’s district attorneys’ association, which repeatedly claimed that such a law would flood the courts with applications for resentencing.

The predicted flood never materialized. The Survivors Justice Project at Brooklyn Law School has been tracking resentencing applications. Since the Act’s resentencing portion took effect in August 2019, the Project estimates that 100 incarcerated people have filed for resentencing under the Act. Three-quarters are in women’s prisons. Of those 100 people, 40 have been resentenced. Another 31 applications were denied and 28 applications are still pending. As of March 2023, New York prisons incarcerated 31,616 people. 

Last year, survivors and advocates testified before the Louisiana Senate about the need for a similar protection. During sessions, it’s not unusual for legislators to be on their phones, chatting with one another or walking in or out of the room. But when Taylor and another survivor shared their stories, senators snapped to attention. “You could see the true perplexity on several of the senators’ faces,” Hunter-Lowrey recalled. “You could see them wondering how a person who called the police, filed restraining orders, [or] legally owned her gun in a state that is very pro gun rights could be sentenced to life in prison for killing an abuser in self-defense.” Despite the hearing, the bill did not make it to the floor for a vote. Advocates are hopeful that it will do so, and pass, this year.

Taylor, who had knee surgery this month, is determined to testify when the hearing is scheduled. She cannot walk, but she plans to borrow a wheelchair from her church and members of the Promise of Justice Initiative have offered to push her across the Senate floor. She knows that, without the law, those she left at LCIW will die behind bars. 

From prison, Tamika Starks is allowing herself hope. “After suffering many years of all types of abuse and numerous phone calls to local authorities, I reacted in a manner I will regret all the days of my life,” she wrote from prison. “However, I am not sure which is worse. Given the revictimization i have experienced through my incarceration and in light of the trauma and loss my children have endured, I would rather ball up in the fetal position, cover my face and abdomen, then take a shower in my own bathroom instead of being confined to a facility which feeds the statement my [husband] told me, ‘No one will believe you.’ The Justice for Survivors Act will provide healing to souls which have suffered quietly from the epidemic of Domestic Violence. Additionally, the Justice for Survivors Act will correct a long standing social problem that has divided families and crowded prisons.”

As for her daughter Nailah, advocating for the Justice for Survivors Act is the first she’s publicly speaking about her family’s history with violence. In late February, she appeared on a panel at Louisiana State University to talk about her family’s experiences. All of her siblings came to support her, but she was still nervous. 

She hadn’t known that the other panelists all knew her mother. Three were formerly incarcerated survivors themselves; the fourth was a supervisor at the women’s prison. They welcomed and encouraged her, telling her how much they loved her mother. 

Starks shared her perspective of being the child of an incarcerated survivor. The attendees—a mixture of college students and community members—were receptive and engaged and she felt that she allowed them to see the ways in which incarceration affected not only her mother, but their entire family. 

She plans to continue sharing her experience and hopes that her college schedule will allow her to testify at the yet-to-be-scheduled legislative hearing about the bill. Meanwhile, she plans to attend the annual Survivors of Violence lobby day at the capitol in late April, the first time she will ever engage in direct advocacy.

“As a child of a domestic violence survivor, you don’t want to talk too much or say too much,” Nailah reflected. “You’re told that what you have to say isn’t important, so you stay quiet and hope for the best. But eventually you learn you’re not the only one so you have to say something.”

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