Domestic Violence

Women who are in prison for killing their husbands after a clear public record has documented the domestic violence visited on them and a determination that the battered woman has tried all of the other means to protect herself—restraining orders, previous calls to police, etc.—should not be in prison for what is often pure self defense, and this story from the Daily Beast examines a prison support group for those women.

An excerpt.

“When Brenda Clubine killed her husband in 1983, there were 11 restraining orders against him and a warrant for his arrest. He’d put her in the ER more than once—tossing her across the room, fracturing her skull, and puncturing her lungs. But “domestic violence” was scarcely on the public radar back then: local police considered it a problem to be worked out in private; there was no hotline to call and few shelters to escape to. So when Brenda says her husband locked her in a hotel room and told her to hand over her wedding ring—so it would be “harder to identify her body”—Brenda knew she had only one option: she had to kill him first.

“Her husband, a retired cop who was twice her size, lay down on the bed, and Brenda saw her chance. “Everything started flashing before my eyes,” Brenda, now 63, remembers. “I started thinking about my son, and I thought, how could I have ended up here?” She grabbed an open wine bottle and swung it toward him, but he grabbed it. She backed up and swung again—connecting with his forehead. “All I remember from that point is grabbing my keys, my ring, my shoes, and running six miles down Colorado Avenue home.”

“Brenda would spend 26 years in prison for her husband’s murder—the blow to his head shattered his skull. At her trial, a judge would not permit a psychologist to testify about her mental state, nor friends or doctors who’d witnessed the physical scars of her abuse. Battered women’s syndrome, at the time, was still an untested theory (it remains highly controversial). So Brenda would face a sentence of 17 years to life—trading, as she puts it, “one prison for another.” But Brenda, who was once a licensed vocational nurse, would also change the way lawmakers think about domestic violence in this country—where one in four women is a victim of abuse.

“Clubine is one of half a dozen women featured in a new documentary Sin by Silence, which premieres on Investigation Discovery on Oct. 17—the directorial debut of filmmaker Olivia Klaus. Set on the sprawling brick campus of the high-security California Institution for Women, the state's oldest women’s prison, it tells the story of the prison support group Clubine founded—aimed at women like her, who’ve been imprisoned for killing the men they once loved.”