Kevin, 19, lived with his parents, but sometimes visited his girlfriend and their infant daughter at the red-shingled apartment complex in Saginaw, a mid-Michigan city where Tanisha, 20, and her 32-year-old roommate, Patrick Martin, shared a basement two-bedroom. It was a dry, frigid winter, and a thin layer of snow coated the ground. That evening, Kevin came by for a drink. Patrick introduced him to Tanisha. She poured two glasses of Crown Royal on ice. Patrick had already been drinking all day. In a bedroom, three of Patrick’s children were watching TV. After a time, Tanisha headed to the kitchen. She heard Patrick’s voice rise and stepped back into the living room, where she saw Kevin bleeding from the mouth and Patrick’s hand raw, ...

...investigating the story of Nicole Addimando, a young mother in upstate New York who had killed her abusive partner in what she said was an act of self-defense. In the course of that reporting, I came upon dozens of cases across the country in which a woman insisted that she had been trying to protect herself or a loved one, while the state countered that she was a cold-blooded killer and sought a harsh prison sentence. The stories were voluminous but anecdotal. Race and socioeconomic circumstances often played a prominent role, which is fitting given the history of gender-based criminalization in the United States. One of the first recorded cases occurred in 1855, when an enslaved Missouri 19-year-old named Celia killed her master, who had raped her since she was 14. She was represented by a slave owner, convicted by a white male jury, gave birth to a stillborn baby, and was hanged.

I found limited studies, conducted in single prisons or states, consistently showing that up to 94 percent of people in some women’s detention facilities experienced physical and sexual violence prior to incarceration. However, I couldn’t find systemic data to support what experts told me, and what I witnessed while reporting: Women’s prisons are populated not only by abuse and assault survivors, but by people who are incarcerated for their acts of survival.

About 230,000 women and girls are incarcerated, an increase of more than 700 percent since 1980. The female prison population is dwarfed by the larger population of more than two million men, on whom conversations about mass incarceration center. For most people in prison, the criminal legal system has stripped away context and circumstance, leaving only a conviction on record. 

Women must also navigate gendered binaries in a system designed by and for men: Offenders are violent, victims are docile; offenders kill, victims die. Female victims should fit a paradigm of innocence: a petite, heterosexual white woman with a clean record. Tanisha does not conform, though she has been unyieldingly victimized. But even women who do square with the paradigm struggle because they survived. “Lawyers say the only correct battered woman when talking about self-defense is a dead one,” Sue Osthoff, co-founder of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, told me. By engaging in violence in order to live, a woman cannot be a victim. Her survival itself becomes reason to condemn her.

In January 2019, I interviewed Rachel White-Domain, a post-conviction attorney for incarcerated survivors of domestic violence in Illinois. I pressed her, as I had others, for data on women in prison for defending themselves. White-Domain did not know the statistics. “If you’re so interested, you could just ask the women directly,” she said. That comment was the seed from which this work has grown.

In consultation with Thania Sanchez, then an assistant professor of political science at Yale University, I designed 16 questions to assess the abuse and trauma backgrounds and unique pathways of women into U.S. prisons. (Sanchez now works in the ACLU’s data and analytics department.)

My two-page survey asked for demographic information—age, race, and sentence length—and posed qualitative questions. Those who speak of abuse are subject to doubt and skepticism; in a courtroom or a prison, they are often accused of trying to avoid consequences by making “the abuse excuse.” To reduce any appearance of dishonesty, I did not ask “priming” questions about domestic abuse, sexual violence, or self-defense. Instead, my queries concerned the respondent’s relationship to the person they were convicted of killing; the days leading up to the event; factors they believed contributed to their conviction.

I contacted the media liaison or public information officer at the departments of corrections in the majority of states and requested a list of all women incarcerated on murder and manslaughter charges. Some officials denied my request, but many sent names: more than 1,000 in Florida, just 11 in Maine. Once I had the lists, I filled in each salutation by hand.

As in any data collection effort, the majority of recipients did not respond. People in prison face particular hurdles in corresponding: censorial mailroom staff, fear of retribution from staff and administration, distrust of media, legal concerns, and constraints that include count times, chow calls, and lockdowns. Incarcerated respondents had to pay for a 55-cent stamp despite working jobs that were unpaid or, in some states, began at less than 4 cents an hour.

Mental illness, which affects nearly half of those in prison, was another hurdle: “Every prosecutor describes women convicted of murder as cunning, diabolical, monster, and evil,” Kwaneta Harris wrote from Texas. “I’ve yet to encounter these ‘monsters.’ Although I’ve met plenty of women with mental illness, untreated and undiagnosed … the ones who you really need to talk to are too mentally damaged to talk to you.”

Still, 604 cisgender women, one transgender woman, and three transgender men replied. They said that they wanted their stories told: sometimes anonymously, sometimes with their identities central. Many wanted to make known their own experiences and those of others. One woman serving life in prison, who had transferred between state and federal facilities for 17 years, repeated a common sentiment: “I have lived amongst thousands of different women prisoners from different countries, ethnicities, and cultures. I have probably come across six of these women whom I would even think were murderers. Many of us were defending ourselves, with the wrong people at the wrong time, taking cases for someone else, or not guilty completely.” 

The racial breakdown of responses roughly mirrored that of the larger female prison population, which is majority white but disproportionately women of color. My respondents were 53.7 percent white; 32.7 percent Black; 8.8 percent Hispanic; 3 percent American Indian and Alaska Native; 1 percent mixed race; and 0.8 percent Asian. Their ages spanned 18 to 83. The median age was 43, which skews older than the median age, 36, for all incarcerated people. Nearly 30 percent were serving life sentences, including life without the possibility of parole. Overall, the average sentence, including life sentences (weighted at 100 years) was 55 years.

Seventy-two percent of respondents had been represented by state-appointed defenders, meaning they most likely qualified as indigent. A 2015 Prison Policy Initiative analysis found that the median annual income for a woman prior to her incarceration was $13,890, 58 percent of the income of a woman who was not incarcerated and 34 percent of the income of a man who was not incarcerated. “No money for attorneys, unfamiliar with the legal system,” one respondent summarized. Another woman wrote that her case was her lawyer’s first-ever murder trial. One wrote that the judge fell asleep and her attorneys “said it was okay.”

Sixty percent of respondents reported experiencing abuse—physical, sexual, emotional, or some combination of the three—before entering prison, much of it during childhood, while only 9 percent reported no abuse. (Thirty-one percent did not give enough information for a determination.) The fact that a majority of respondents had been abused suggests a nexus between abuse and incarceration for women. Abuse is also most likely underreported.

“I have yet to meet a person who hasn’t been sexually or physically abused,” wrote Kwaneta from Texas. Later, Kwaneta told me that she had been kidnapped and gang-raped as a child, and the perpetrators were never charged. (Her mother confirmed this.) Kwaneta is incarcerated for killing a boyfriend who, she told me, abused her. Her attorney, she said, didn’t want her to “disparage” the dead at trial. She did not push back. “The stigma and shame of allowing myself to continually accept abusive behavior is stronger than the shame of being a convicted murderer.” 

Having a female body had opened the respondents up to harm long before they were considered to have harmed others. They reported being raped at gunpoint, raped while being driven home from babysitting, raped by fathers, stepfathers, brothers, grandfathers, cousins, uncles, foster relatives, and sometimes sisters and mothers. “Raised for sex,” wrote one woman. “Ruined before I had a chance,” wrote another. “Not sure how I got off the beaten path, but I was molested by a sheriff from age 7 to about 9 years old, think that pretty much did it.”

“It was supposed to be me,” one woman wrote. “I never thought I would be the survivor and he ‘the victim.’”

They wrote, too, of enduring physical violence: forced to kneel “on uncooked grits until my knees were bloody,” kicked “with steel-toed boots,” hit in the head with “a tire wrench.” They wrote of crushing poverty and upheaval....

“That morning he said, ‘One of us is going to die today,’” wrote a woman who had been brutalized for decades. “I just snapped.” 

Respondents found it hard to prove that they had been abused, because domestic violence and rape are private violations, usually without witnesses. But even if they had evidence, they faced another problem: There was a dead body, and it wasn’t theirs.

Jema Donahue wrote from Missouri, asking me to contact her mother, who shared legal files with me. The files showed that in 1999, Jema, then 13, was raped by a 20-year-old man. Jema’s family was devastated by their attempts at seeking justice. The man’s mother was the town mayor, and police and prosecutors, Jema said, resisted investigating and prosecuting. The perpetrator eventually pleaded guilty to statutory rape, though Jema said he had used force, and experienced bleeding and physical pain for days. The rapist’s friends harassed the family. Jema was bullied and switched schools. Later, Jema fell into abusive relationships. Her husband physically, sexually, and psychologically terrorized her for eight years—attacks that she sometimes reported to authorities. In 2017, Jema’s mother took out an order of protection. Within two weeks, Jema’s husband broke into the family home and attacked Jema. Jema shot him. A judge sentenced her to 10 years, noting that “everybody stayed in the relationship” and “somebody died.”

Motherhood figured prominently in a woman’s decisions; 64 percent of my respondents said they were parents, 22 percent said they were not, and 14 percent did not answer the question. “One topic … affects the majority of female prisoners: Our children,” wrote Kwaneta in Texas. “We care about our children. Bars and razor-wire don’t erase motherhood.”

Some women said they were in prison for trying to protect a child. A white woman was serving 40 years in the South for shooting the man she said had beaten her daughter and raped her toddler grandson, and a Black woman was serving life in a mid-Atlantic state for shooting a man she witnessed molesting her five-year-old son.

Other women were convicted because they had not protected a child. In Michigan in 2010, Corrine Baker, a 25-year-old survivor of childhood sexual abuse, threw her body in front of her four-year-old son in an attempt to bear the brunt of her boyfriend’s attack. Corrine and her son were hospitalized after the beating. The boy died, and Corrine gave an interview to a local TV station; in the video, she has two black eyes and wounds dotting her face. She is serving 13 to 30 years for her failure to save her child.

In Florida, Mary Rice wrote that she was forced to accompany a man on a multistate killing spree, during which she was starved, drugged, and raped. She never tried to escape, she told me, because her kidnapper knew where her mother and three children lived. In the end, he shot himself in the head, and police took Mary, who had injuries across her face and body, into custody. Mary was prosecuted. The assistant state attorney told the jury “she wanted a bad boy and she got one.” Mary was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. “I just lived through it,” Mary wrote to me. “The state needed to blame someone. I was the person they blamed.” 

Mary went to trial, but about half of respondents pleaded guilty—often because they were marginalized or did not trust their lawyer. I received a response from an indigenous woman in the Northwest, who said she had pleaded guilty to murder, despite acting in self-defense against a man who was “abusive physically, emotionally, verbally, and mentally,” had raped her daily, and threatened to keep her child if she left. I called her public defender. He told me the woman had a weak case and added that in court, women often played the victim. “Women get a lot of fuckin’ benefit of the doubt,” he said.

“I see a lot of pleas,” White-Domain, the Illinois attorney for incarcerated domestic violence survivors, told me. “People who have lived their whole lives not being believed— if they are women, people of color, maybe also a sex worker, maybe a drug user—think they won’t be believed by a jury. And they are correct.” In my data set, those who went to trial received a sentence nearly two times higher than those who did not, and were approximately five times more likely to receive a life sentence. Black women, whether they went to trial or took a plea, received a sentence length that was roughly 10 percent higher than all others.

Tanisha, for her part, pleaded guilty in 2010 to second-degree murder while held in Saginaw County Jail, a situation she found herself in largely because she had tried to make amends for Kevin’s death. “I was ignorant to the system and its workings and it worked against me on every facet,” she told me. “The rules weren’t articulated for a person with zero understanding to understand.”

In late December 2002, Patrick wrapped Kevin in a blanket and put him in a closet. Within days, aided by two associates, he removed the body and dropped it down an embankment on the outskirts of town, above a river. About three months later, on March 23, 2003, during the spring thaw, two fishermen came upon Kevin’s corpse. On March 24, Kevin’s family was informed. Police made no arrests. The case went cold.

Two weeks after the killing, Tanisha and Patrick moved to a more isolated apartment. Tanisha had no car and no money. She slept during the day, when Patrick was gone, and kept a gutting knife tucked in her waistband. “Something was gonna happen bad for someone,” she told me. “Most likely me.” Within two months of Kevin’s death, Tanisha gathered some $200 and four outfits and fled to a roadside motel.

“I sat on that ugly bed,” Tanisha said. “I had to make a decision.” She was 20, without a home or anyone she trusted enough to talk to. She had been involved in a murder with a known drug dealer who threatened to kill her and knew where her family lived. Tanisha decided her only chance was to stay moving, and be quiet. “I pushed what happen to me to the deepest depths of consciousness,” she recalled. For the next two years, she fell into a cycle of sex work, drug use, and dealing. She lived on the run, involved with men who hurt her.

“I didn’t dream,” she said. “It was just darkness.”

But in 2005, Tanisha was pregnant and determined to get clean and make a change. In November, she gave birth to her third daughter, whom she named Hon’Esty. As Tanisha raised Hon’Esty, she began to see a man around town who bore an unnerving resemblance to Kevin. She thought constantly of Kevin’s mom. She feared intensely for her daughter’s safety, concerned that by having a fixed address, they were a target. Each time Tanisha entered her home at night, she left her child locked in the car, on speakerphone with her sister, as she swept the place with her gun cocked. Only once it was clear would she carry Hon’Esty inside. Later, two people testified at trial that Patrick said he was thinking about killing Tanisha; he worried that she would talk to police and had unsuccessfully attempted to convince her to meet up with him several times.

Tanisha made a New Year’s resolution for 2009: She would tell the truth. That February, she called an attorney she’d heard of named Steven Snyder. Tanisha told Snyder that she wanted to talk to police but needed immunity. Snyder called Lisa Speary, a Michigan State Police detective who had been handed the cold case in 2006. On February 17, 2009, Snyder, Tanisha, and a Saginaw County prosecutor signed a proffer, a written agreement that allows a person to speak of a crime with the assurance that their words won’t be used against them in criminal proceedings. After an initial proffer, a client typically provides a piece of evidence that allows authorities to determine their value; then a better deal is negotiated. But Tanisha signed a single agreement that offered her no protection from charges. Then she gave Speary a two-hour interview, the first time she had ever spoken of the crime.

I showed the proffer letter to David Moran, co-founder of the Michigan Innocence Clinic. He characterized it as “lousy.” I asked Moran if it was unusual for an attorney to allow a client to give a full statement to police without discussing the content beforehand. “The lawyer would want to hear the client’s story before having her tell it in a proffer,” he said. (Snyder, who no longer practices law, did not respond to my interview request.)

Over the next months, Tanisha worked with Speary. They met in person at least five times, Tanisha underwent two polygraph exams, and she led Speary through the crime scene. She told Speary that Patrick “had this rage … he frightened me ... he was more dangerous than the average guy that I have been involved in ... he was dangerous without maybe knowin’ it.” And she told Speary that following the killing, she had “spiraled like super down.” Tanisha explained that she was coming forward to give closure to Kevin’s family—and to get closure for herself. “I just wanna apologize to the family … for even takin’ this long to get the strength to tell ’em what happened.”