Domestic violence victims convicted of crimes in Maryland could present evidence of how the abuse factored into their crimes while seeking a lighter sentence under a bill being considered by state lawmakers.
A handful of states across the country have passed similar legislation in recent years, including Georgia, New Yorkand Oklahoma.
Known as the PATH Act, short for providing alternatives through healing, the bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Shaneka Henson (D-Anne Arundel County) and Delegate Stephanie Smith (D-Baltimore City). It awaits a hearing before the state Senate on Tuesday in Annapolis. The Maryland Alliance for Justice Reform, a nonpartisan advocacy organization, has named the bill one of its legislative priorities this session.
The architect behind the bill, Carmen Johnson, said the PATH ACT is aimed primarily at women whose offenses are directly linked to abuse, coercion or trauma. Without including domestic abuse as a mitigating factor at sentencing, Johnson said, domestic violence survivors convicted of crimes are re-traumatized.
“We’re asking that the judge consider domestic violence,” Johnson said. “Psychological, financial, physical, all of that.”
Johnson, co-founder and executive director of the social justice and research institute Helping Ourselves to Transform, took on the work for personal reasons. Formerly incarcerated herself, she said she’s also a survivor of domestic financial and psychological abuse. Johnson and her team spent months gathering research and information on domestic violence for an impact report alongside the bill.
In a letter addressed to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) published in the report, the women of the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women wrote that many of them have experienced domestic violence.
“These experiences were not fully acknowledged or understood at the time of sentencing,” the women said in the letter. “Many of us reflect on our lives and hope that someone will one day take the time to understand our full stories with care and compassion.”
On a recent morning, Johnson, alongside Olinda Moyd, an attorney and executive board member of the Maryland Alliance for Justice Reform, went door to door lobbying for the PATH Act at lawmakers’ offices in Annapolis.
Moyd said victims don’t always report domestic violence to police. She explained to staffers the need to allow evidence from a variety of sources, including counselors, teachers or family members, which the bill would mandate.
The PATH Act would also allow those already incarcerated to introduce evidence of domestic violence if they qualify for a hearing for a new sentence. Prosecutors can introduce evidence that would rebut that evidence.
If a judge finds that domestic abuse contributed to a defendant’s crime, the sentence could go below the mandatory minimum or sentencing guidelines. The judge could also impose one that is “otherwise just and appropriate in light of the circumstances,” according to the bill.
Johnson doesn’t want to stop there. She would like to see commutations. Johnson said more than 20 women incarcerated in Maryland whose nonviolent crimes were related to domestic violence submitted commutation applications to the governor’s office.
In 1991, former Maryland governor William Donald Schaefer similarly commuted the sentences of eight women whose partners had abused them.
Lydia Watts, executive director of the Rebuild, Overcome, and Rise Center at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, works with survivors of intimate partner violence.
Bills such as the PATH Act aren’t meant to avoid accountability for offenders, but to take into account all the circumstances, said Watts, who supports the bill. Alternatives to incarceration should also be explored, she said, such as providing services to help address root causes like poverty.
“That’s where things like the history of domestic violence become so critical so that we can actually come to a full assessment of what’s happened in this particular circumstance,” Watts said. “Why did this person feel like they had to act in this way? And what’s the appropriate way to hold them accountable?”
Reverend Melody Hession-Sigmon, an assistant to the bishop of the Delaware-Maryland Synod, part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said their church includes people at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women.
Hession-Sigmon thinks about the case of a 63-year-old woman, who submitted testimony last year for another criminal justice reform bill. The woman wrote that she had only known her co-defendant for 30 days. She was sexually assaulted, held against her will and forced to take drugs, she said, before the crime, first-degree murder during a botched robbery, which she said she doesn’t remember.
“I had no desire to live,” the woman wrote in her testimony. “This would explain to me why I did not run away once I gained my co-defendant’s trust and he untied me.”
She was sentenced to life without parole and has been in prison for 36 years, Hession-Sigmon said.
“She got that harsh sentence without any of her traumatic context considered,” Hession-Sigmon said. “I don’t want that to happen to more women in the future.”
The post Judges should consider toll of domestic abuse during sentencing, advocates say appeared first on Washington Post.
