It’s almost impossible to imagine that a teenage girl who’d been sexually abused and groomed for sex work starting at age 11 would serve a day in prison—much less 18 years—for murdering the man who’d abused her. But that’s exactly what happened to Sara Kruzan when she was just 17 years old. On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom granted her a pardon.
In 1995, Kruzan was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the shooting death of George Howard in a Riverside, California, motel room, The Los Angeles Times reports.
California’s Republican governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, commuted her nearly two-decade-long sentence in 2010. And in 2013, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown allowed her release.
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Kruzan was 16 when she killed the man she calls “GG.” However, criminal justice advocates say the system worked against her. The judge ordered she be tried as an adult, and her attorney wasn’t allowed to provide evidence of her abuse at the trial, the Times reports.
Kruzan says her first trafficker by law was Howard, but she believes her first trafficker was actually her mother.
“It’s frankly outrageous that she was convicted for the length of time in the first place, given the long history of abuse and trafficking,” Lenore Anderson, founder of Californians for Safety and Justice, told the Times.
“Sara is one of many thousands of youths who are exploited, sexually and commercially, who find themselves in the defendant’s seat when it’s more than obvious that the extreme abuse that they were suffering is what was underneath the crime,” Anderson added.
Since her release, Kruzan has worked to change the bias and misunderstanding around sex trafficking. She created the curriculum called “Free from Within,” and says she is actively involved in “policy reform advocacy around the protection of victims of sex trafficking and ending juvenile life-without-parole sentencing on a national level.”
In her pardon, Newsom wrote that Kruzan “has provided evidence that she is living an upright life and has demonstrated her fitness for restoration of civic rights and responsibilities.” He added that her “clemency” does not “minimize or forgive her conduct of the harm it caused,” but, since then, she has “transformed her life and dedicated herself to community service.”
Through her literary agent, Kruzan told The New York Times, “I will never forget what happened that night and fully acknowledge what did, but I am immensely grateful to feel some relief from the burden of shame and social stigma,” adding that she “felt an overwhelming influx of emotions: primarily awe and elation, but also shock and grief as I thought about everything that led to this moment.”
In May, Kruzan released a memoir titled I Cried to Dream Again: Trafficking, Murder, and Deliverance, chronicling her abuse and attempted suicide, and her battle for release.
Dolores Canales of the advocacy group California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement told The Los Angeles Times that although she was glad for Newsom’s pardon, she remains deeply concerned about the lack of accountability and treatment of child sex abuse victims.
“Yes, society’s saying it, everybody’s saying it, but the system was never held accountable,” Canales told the Times.
Kruzan was granted her pardon along with 17 others, 15 commutations, and one medical reprieve, Newsom’s office announced Friday.
Kruzan’s pardon does not “expunge or erase” her conviction, but as her pardon reads, it will “remove counterproductive barriers to employment and public service, restore civic rights and responsibilities, and prevent unjust collateral consequences of conviction.”
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