Courts frequently do not take evidence of abuse into account. Sometimes this is because a woman’s lawyer fails to hire an expert witness to testify about the effects of sexual or domestic violence. A prosecutor may successfully argue that a woman’s self-defense claim is invalid because she didn’t end a relationship with an abuser, didn’t call the police about the violence (as Brittany didn’t), or allowed the abuser into her home (as Brittany did). Or a judge may not permit the evidence of abuse to be presented...
In 2014, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Tracey Grissom was
sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for murder, for shooting her ex-husband, Hunter. The judge did not allow jurors to hear that, in 2010, Hunter had been charged with rape and sodomy after allegedly assaulting Grissom. Grissom said that he had knocked her to the ground, choked her with a drumstick, and sexually abused her until she lost consciousness. She said the attack caused rectal-nerve damage and required surgery, and that she now used a colostomy bag. The day of the shooting, she said, she’d feared for her life, but eyewitnesses said that she had begun shooting without provocation. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Grissom said, sobbing, after her conviction. “All I did was protect myself.” One of the jurors later said that, if she’d been able to hear the details of the abuse, she would have voted to acquit...
In his analysis for
The New Yorker, John Roman, the researcher from the University of Chicago, found that, over all, according to F.B.I. data, Stand Your Ground laws have actually helped both women and men win justifiable-homicide defenses. But in some states the laws have done little or nothing for women. A statistical
analysis of Stand Your Ground cases in Florida, conducted by the political scientist Justin Murphy, looked at two hundred and thirty-seven incidents between 2005 and 2013. The study, which was published in
Social Science Quarterly, in 2017, found evidence of both racial and gender bias. The gender bias applied to “domestic” cases—those which occurred on a defendant’s property. The probability of conviction for a male defendant in such a case was about forty per cent; for a woman, it was about eighty per cent. The analysis suggests that, in domestic cases, Stand Your Ground works better for men than for women.
In Alabama, Roman found, no women received justifiable-homicide rulings between 2006, when the state’s Stand Your Ground law was implemented, and 2010, after which the state stopped reporting its data.