In the January 20, 2020, issue of The New Yorker, I wrote about Brittany Smith, a woman from Stevenson, Alabama, who, in January, 2018, shot and killed a man who she said had raped her, threatened her life in her home, and then attacked her brother after he arrived to help. The man, Todd Smith, who had recently sold Brittany a puppy, had been drinking, and had taken large amounts of methamphetamine. Yet within forty-eight hours of the shooting, Brittany was charged with murder. She went on to spend about four months in jail and six months in a mental institution, despite early attention to her case from the criminal-justice publication the Appeal. On January 14th and 15th, after my piece was published, Brittany finally had a Stand Your Ground hearing. Stand Your Ground is a statute that makes it legal to use lethal force to defend oneself against threats or perceived threats, with no duty to retreat. If Brittany won the hearing, she’d receive immunity from further prosecution. On Monday, she lost that hearing. She faces life in prison.

In a nineteen-page ruling, Judge Jenifer Holt wrote that Brittany’s use of deadly force was not demonstrably justified because she doubted that Brittany had reason to believe that Todd was about to use deadly physical force, assault, burglary, rape, or sodomy when she shot him. The judge wrote this despite the fact that Todd had already assaulted Brittany—a rape-kit evaluation found thirty-three wounds on her body—and despite the fact that Brittany said Todd had been choking her brother when she fired the gun.

Speaking from her home, in Stevenson, on Monday, Brittany told me that she was distressed but trying to remain hopeful. “I was prepared for a no, but I just feel like I’m not gonna get a fair trial here,” she said, and began to cry. “She saw the pictures of me; he almost beat me to death, he did rape me, and he tried to kill my brother, so how can she say this?”

The Stand Your Ground hearing, which was held in the Jackson County Courthouse in Scottsboro, Alabama—a county with more than double the state average of aggravated assaults per capita—began with testimony from Jeanine Suermann, a sexual-assault nurse examiner who saw Brittany the morning after the shooting. Suermann testified that Brittany’s wounds were consistent with having been bitten, strangled with two hands around her neck, and assaulted with “a lot of force.” The nurse listed bruises to Brittany’s neck, breasts, arms, legs, and head, and spoke repeatedly about the petechiae—discolored patches that can indicate the use of extreme pressure—that dotted Brittany’s hairline and neck. “She was probably hit multiple times and held down,” Suermann said. She testified that, during the examination, Brittany had described waking up “with no clothes in a puddle of urine” after having tried to fight back. “Scratched him everywhere I could,” Brittany told Suermann. “He was going to kill me.” At the conclusion of Suermann’s testimony, which lasted for more than two hours and included dozens of photographs of Brittany’s injuries, Jeff Poe, Todd’s cousin, left the courthouse with tears in his eyes. Poe had told me that, after Todd’s death, he’d considered having Brittany killed. But, after listening to the nurse’s testimony, Poe messaged me asking me to convey his apologies to Brittany and her family “for all this mess they have been through.” “It put me in a sick state of mind listening to all that today,” he wrote. “I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart.”

Yet Jason Pierce, the Jackson County District Attorney, attempted throughout the two-day hearing to cast doubt on whether Brittany had actually been raped, because there was no definitive sample of Todd’s semen, which the nurse examiner said is common in sexual-assault cases. The judge cited this detail in her decision, saying that she did not believe the evidence was consistent with a sexual assault. She also cited a 911 call in which Brittany said that she had not been raped; Brittany told me that she had been ashamed to admit it. In the hearing, Pierce questioned whether Brittany had truly feared for her life. At one point, the District Attorney noted that Todd had not had a gun or a knife on him. “But he had his hands. His penis. His mouth,” Brittany replied at the hearing, with controlled frustration. “You saw the thirty-three wounds on my body.”

Brittany and her brother, Chris McCallie, originally told police that McCallie had shot Todd; both believed that a woman would not get a fair trial in Jackson County, a place where advocates say that women’s complaints of violence are often ignored by police. In her ruling, the judge wrote that her decision was influenced by the fact that Brittany had given “inconsistent accounts of the events surrounding Todd’s death.” But Chris argued that, if law enforcement had known that it was Brittany who fired the gun, she would not have been taken for a rape-kit examination until it was too late. Even in court, with the exam’s findings and the photos of Brittany’s injuries splashed across a TV screen, it was clear that documentation of the violence wasn’t enough.

The court also had the opportunity to see a note that Brittany had frantically slipped to a gas-station worker the night of the assault. The employee testified that Brittany came in “very nervous and edgy,” with a reddened neck and a broken nail, wrote down the name “Todd Smith,” and said that he’d raped and beaten her and was holding her hostage. In her ruling, the judge argued that Brittany had had multiple opportunities to call law enforcement for help. But the employee said that Brittany was afraid to call the police, because Todd had said that he would retaliate if she did. McCallie arrived at Brittany’s house not long after, with his .22-calibre revolver. He said that Todd got him in a headlock and would not let go. Brittany said that Todd threatened to kill them both, and so she fired three shots at him. She said that she kept shooting after the first shot because “nothing happened.” A scientist at the Alabama Department of Forensic Services gave credence to this account, testifying that Todd had been on an “extremely high” amount of methamphetamine, which could cause someone to appear unaffected by blows or strikes.

Throughout the hearing, Brittany often sat silently with her eyes closed. She wore her hair tied in a single side braid, “like Katniss,” she told me, referring to the spiky protagonist of “The Hunger Games.” Before entering the courtroom on the second day, January 15th, Brittany read aloud to me from a book of daily wisdom inspired by collected Bible verses. “You are surrounded by a sea of problems,” the entry for that day read. “The future is a phantom, seeking to spook you.” She vowed not to be spooked. On the stand that day, Brittany tried to tell the court that if she did not remember every detail it was in part because she had learned that memory loss was a symptom of P.T.S.D. The nurse had testified that the trauma of sexual assault could last “for years.” But, when Brittany attempted to explain its effects on her, Pierce interrupted, objecting to her comments as “offhand.”