Students at Yale Law School’s Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic are working to bring legislation to Connecticut to help domestic violence survivors who are facing criminal charges use the abuse they suffered as a contributing factor in their defense.
The legislation, which has been enacted in both Oklahoma and New York, allows courts to reconsider the sentences of domestic abuse survivors who can show that the abuse was a significant element to the underlying offenses.
Claire Sullivan, Ivetty Estepan, and Kevin Chisolm are law students with the Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic, and are working to put together a coalition to would help pass the legislation in Connecticut.
They say women and people of color are disproportionately survivors of domestic violence and that 75% of women in prison have experienced domestic violence.
“The bill would help survivors seek more proportional and just sentencing that accounts for their traumatic histories,” the students said in a joint email to CTNewsJunkie. The students say that the link between domestic violence and criminal conduct is well documented.
“Not only can domestic violence lead a survivor to harm their abuser as a survival mechanism, but domestic violence can also cause mental health and substance abuse problems that result in arrest and prosecution,” the students wrote. “Moreover, survivors can be forced to participate in, or accept blame for, criminal activity at the behest of their abuser.”
The students said the bill could help provide context behind the crimes at sentencing, “instead of criminalizing survivors and punishing them without considering the impact of their victimization.”
Alexandra Bailey, senior campaign strategist for The Sentencing Project, helped push the bill toward legislative approval in Oklahoma. The bill was passed into law there in May.
Bailey points to the Oklahoma case of April Wilkins, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1998 after she killed her abusive former partner. Bailey said Wilkins had multiple restraining orders against the man, who had her handcuffed when she managed to get the gun from him and shoot him eight times.
“She didn’t flee the scene; she called the cops,” Bailey said. Yet Wilkins was convicted of first-degree murder, and is now 20 years into her sentence.
“And they knew all those circumstances,” Bailey said.
Attorneys for Wilkins, under the new law – titled the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act – have now filed a request to apply for resentencing.
Bailey said that, in addition to giving the courts the ability to re-sentence, the legislation also allows for the courts to impose lower sentences on survivors of domestic violence in the future.
“20 years ago, I mean, even in the last 10 years, the space that we’ve come in terms of understanding trauma, context and domestic violence, as it relates to extreme sentencing in general, has come a long way,” Bailey said. “Which is why we need the ability to go back and re-sentence people.”
Legislators in Oklahoma were moved to pass the bill, Bailey said.
“What became very clear is that this had touched the lives of just about everybody in the state legislature in some way or another,” Bailey said.
According to statistics from Oklahoma’s Attorney General, that state “has consistently been ranked in the top 10 states for women murdered by men in single-victim/single-offender incidents since 1996. The most recent state rankings placed Oklahoma as second in the nation for women killed by men.”
Officials say that Connecticut averages about 14 intimate partner homicides per year with 309 lives lost from 2000 to 2021. Within that number, 86% of victims were women and 14% were men.
There have been three deaths leading up to October, which is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, including Bridgeport resident Krystal “Kae” Alston on Sept. 9 and Ansonia resident Miguelina Lebron on Sept. 12. Additionally, a 33-year-old woman from Bridgeport and her two children, 4 and 6, were beaten with a baseball bat in their home on Sept. 25, resulting in the death of 6-year-old Janthan Escobar.
In late September, the Yale Law School’s Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic hosted a reception to kick off the campaign to work on passing the legislation in Connecticut.
The clinic has spent the past year working to build a coalition to generate support for this legislation.
Liza Andrews, director of public policy and communications at the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, declined to comment until she has a chance to discuss the concept with the CCADV’s member agencies.