While these women served their prison sentences, views about domestic violence were evolving. As early as the 1970s, feminists had rallied around individual battered women accused of violence. The most famous was Francine Hughes, who set her husband on fire while he slept. Hughes was found not guilty by reason of insanity, but other survivors served decades in prison for their crimes. Many of the groups that emerged to support accused women dissolved after their sentencing.

But in 1999, the Department of Justice released a report focused on past experiences of abuse among people behind bars, which found that approximately half of incarcerated women had experienced past physical or sexual abuse. No government agency tracks how many women are imprisoned for acts stemming from domestic violence, but in some states, researchers began studying this as best they could. In New York, for instance, the Department of Correctional Services found in a 2007 report that in the year 2005, two-thirds of women incarcerated for killing someone close to them had been abused by that person. (Black women experience domestic violence at a higher rate than white women, and are imprisoned at nearly twice the rate.)

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This growing body of research expanded public awareness of the role of abuse in women’s incarceration, and advocates began exploring legislative avenues to address it. They argued that courts often excluded evidence of abuse or expert testimony that would enable jurors to understand the circumstances of the survivor’s crime, resulting in convictions, and then judges’ sentencing decisions, based on incomplete information.

When LaDeamMa McMoore was released from prison in 2009, she began attending advocacy trainings run by the Coalition for Women Prisoners. That was when she learned more about recent efforts to draft the proposed New York bill. It would allow a judge to consider whether abuse is directly related to a person’s crime and, if so, depart from the state’s sentencing guidelines for violent felonies. (The bill does not mandate that a judge do so.) This would extend not only to acts of self-defense but also coercion by the abuser into a crime. If abuse was a significant factor, the judge would have the discretion to sentence that survivor to an alternative-to-incarceration program, which generally provides access to supportive housing as well as services such as drug rehabilitation and mental-health counseling, or allows for fewer years in prison. For survivors already in prison, the bill would allow those who meet certain qualifications to petition the courts for resentencing with the effects of abuse taken into judicial consideration.

McMoore and other formerly incarcerated abuse victims plunged into advocacy. “This was a campaign that, from the start, centered the leadership of currently and formerly incarcerated survivors,” says Tamar Kraft-Stolar, a longtime coalition member and a co-director of the Women and Justice Project, a nonprofit that works with currently and formerly incarcerated women advocating for policy changes. They met regularly to review drafts of the legislation, discussing the bill’s language and the implications of each phrase. They included still-imprisoned survivors in the process, sending them drafts and incorporating their feedback. The process took two years. In 2011, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act was introduced in the state legislature.