Mandatory sentences are a factor in stuffing prisons with non-violent offenders, but that’s not the biggest issue. By removing the ability of judges to consider all the aspects of a case, mandatory sentences often effectively serve as a club for prosecutors who use them to bolster artificially high conviction rates. Faced with the prospect of going to trial where conviction would guarantee a sentence of 10 years or more, often with no possibility of parole, defendants will often plead to a lesser charge, even if they feel they are not guilty and stand a good chance of being acquitted at trial.
For survivors of domestic abuse who strike back against their abusers, this cruel calculus can seem like yet another source of violation. With judges unable to take any circumstances into account—even if those circumstances include decades of physical and mental cruelty—domestic violence survivors face the potential of long prison sentences on top of everything else they’ve been through.
For two decades, [LadyKathryn Williams-Julien] said, her husband beat and abused her. She grew accustomed to living with a perpetual black eye. Then, one September night in 1997, she said, he wrapped his hands around her neck and did not let go. She knew he was going to strangle her to death. …
She reached for a knife and stabbed her husband once, then fled the apartment. When the police arrived, she confessed and they arrested her.
Williams-Julien was charged with murder, carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years. Eventually she pled guilty to manslaughter, which came with five years of probation, rather than face the potential results of losing a trial on the murder charges. But now she’s fighting to restore some flexibility to judges so that the abuse suffered by survivors of domestic violence can be factored into sentencing.
The bill, sponsored by New York state Sen. Ruth Hassell-Thompson and Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry, both Democrats, is now awaiting a vote in the state Senate codes committee.
Under the legislation, judges could consider the role of domestic abuse in a case during sentencing, and bypass mandatory minimums set by the state. They could opt to give survivors shorter sentences, or let them avoid prison altogether by sentencing them to alternative programs.
Note that this is not permission for survivors of domestic abuse to commit murder. It simply restores the ability that judges had before mandatory minimum sentences took away judges’ discretion and turned the system into a brutal all-or-nothing gamble. Domestic violence survivors will know that what they suffered can be a factor in the results, which will mean more willingness to take their case to trial.
And victims of domestic abuse have endured plenty of brutality already.