On the night of December 17, 1991, Kim Dadou’s boyfriend, Darnell Sanders, drove up to her mother’s house. He waited for her in his car, parked on the street. It was around midnight and there was snow everywhere from a storm that had hit Rochester, New York, hard. Dadou was happy to see him even though he was high. The car reeked from the fumes of weed laced with cocaine. Her dark wavy hair bounced as she quickly ran back into the house to get air freshener to spray in the car.
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She was hopeful that things were finally going to get better. All she wanted was his love. For four years, Dadou had received beatings and death threats from Sanders, the six-foot tall, 250-pound man who said he loved her.
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When she returned, the two 25-year-olds started kissing. Then he told her to perform oral sex on him. She refused. “Bitch, who are you giving my ass to?” he yelled incessantly. Dadou has maintained since then that Sanders often raped her if she didn’t comply with his demands for sex.
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This time, she pushed him off. He hit her in the face and thigh before grabbing her throat. He used his left hand to choke her and his right to push her head down. The last thing she heard was “This is it, bitch!” She recalls his entire upper body leaning over on her and pressing her down and forward. Sanders outweighed Dadou by about fifty pounds, and was much taller and stronger than her.
She tried to yank the door handle, but realized that the power locks were on. He was too heavy to push off. “I couldn’t breathe and I started to panic for my life,” she says. She reached for the gun Sanders kept under the passenger seat.
The police found Sanders’s frozen body collapsed in a snow bank. He had been shot six times.
Dadou was charged with manslaughter in the first degree and sentenced to eight to 25 years. She was denied early release five times by a parole board even though she stayed out of trouble while incarcerated, and spent seventeen years behind bars before her release in 2008.
Dadou, now fifty, has been out of prison for seven years. She’s actively lobbying for a bill that could have potentially saved her from incarceration. The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DJSJA) — sponsored by New York State Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson and Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry — has been inching its way into state law since 2011. “Sending survivors of domestic violence who act to protect themselves to prison for long sentences is incompatible with modern notions of fairness and humanity,” Hassell-Thompson wrote in a 2013 press release.
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Portrait of Kim Dadou in Seneca Park, Rochester, NY.[/caption]
Dadou wants to change the system that failed to protect her. “I don’t get paid money to do this, but I want to prevent survivors from losing years of their life like I did,” she says. “So anything to make sure this bill gets passed, I’m happy to volunteer with.” She’s been telling her story to legislators, legal experts, and advocacy groups for five years.
In 1989, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence found that while the average prison sentence for men who kill their female partners was two to six years, the average sentence for women who killed their male partners was fifteen years. This, despite the fact that, as stated by NCADV’s findings, “most women who kill their partners do so to protect themselves from violence initiated by their partners.”
Dadou says she had Sanders arrested for physical assault five times during the four and a half years they were together, but that didn’t stop him. According to The National Hotline for Domestic Violence, it’s common for victims of trauma to go back to their abusers because while they want the violence to stop, they don’t want the relationship to end.
Their relationship wasn’t violent in the beginning. The trouble started with a marriage proposal. She and Sanders knew each other in high school, but didn’t date until they were 21. After two months, he proposed. He wanted her to have his grandmother’s wedding ring. She was in love with Sanders, but wasn’t ready for marriage, she explains. After yelling at her for being ungrateful, he smacked her in the face.
Another evening, Sanders accused Dadou of flirting with one of his cousins while they were at a party. She told him she hadn’t, and tried to comfort Sanders for feeling ignored. But he didn’t listen. They got in the car and she started driving away from the apartment complex. He slapped her and shoved her into the car door until she begged him to let her pull over so she could use a restroom.
She knew Genesee Hospital was nearby and speedily turned into the emergency room entrance. Sanders told her to park close to a window so he could watch her. “If I see you talk to anybody, I’m going to burn your car to the ground,” he warned her while holding up a bottle of whiskey and his lighter. She walked into the emergency room with her face swelling and the taste of blood in her mouth. On-duty police officers were standing in the emergency room triage area. As soon as she saw a nurse, she asked for directions to a bathroom.
When the nurse asked about her face, she told her, “I just need a bathroom. He’s in the car. He’s going to kill me if you do anything. Help me, please.” While the nurse treated the injuries on her face, the two officers came over. “I kept trying to explain to them that Darnell was very dangerous,” she says. Dadou said the officers asked her to settle down then handed her a warrant to sign so they could arrest Sanders. Sanders was released from jail the very next day. Dadou woke up to him standing over her at her home.
A few years later, on that winter night in 1991, Dadou knew Sanders kept a gun under his passenger seat because she always feared it would accidentally go off and shoot her in the ankle. She felt the butt of his gun while her head was down. “I had just wanted him to see it,” she says. “I thought if he saw the gun he would get off me. I grabbed the gun, and in one second, the gun was going off and bullets were coming out.” She thought she had shot into the roof of the car.
Sanders turned to his side and suddenly stopped choking her. As soon as he let her go, she unlocked the car door and opened it to flee. While running back into her mom’s house, she says she heard him scream, “Bitch, get back here.”
As she ran from Sanders, she heard the car pull away. He managed to drive away even while wounded. Not realizing her shot had hit him, she was worried that he would be out looking for her. “I thought to myself, I’m glad I didn’t shoot him, but I was so scared he would find me and kill me,” she says.
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If passed into law, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act would allow judges to sentence domestic violence survivors, like Dadou, to fewer years behind bars or to alternative-to-incarceration programs. The legislation could also lessen the sentences of survivors who were forced into criminal activity by abusive partners. In 2012, California passed similar legislation, called The Sin by Silence Bills and championed by Assemblywoman Fiona Ma.
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“I don’t get paid money to do this, but I want to prevent survivors from losing years oftheir life like I did,” says Dadou.[/caption]
Gail Smith, director of the Women in Prison Project at the Correctional Association of New York, a criminal justice advocacy group, says that this proposed legislation is in no way a “get out of jail free card.” She says the criteria for a survivor to be eligible for resentencing or alternative sentencing is stringent, emphasizing the fact that there are safeguards in place to make sure individuals don’t falsely claim abuse to excuse violent behavior. Smith explains that past abuse during childhood would not make someone eligible; the individual would have to be a victim of domestic violence at the time of the offense. The abuse would have to be a “significant contributing factor” in the defendant’s participation of the offense, and the judge would have to find that sentencing the survivor under current law would be “unduly harsh.”
Currently incarcerated domestic violence survivors could apply for resentencing, but they would be obligated to provide hospital records or police reports to prove they were reacting to a life-or-death situation when they killed their abuser.
Research by the Alliance for Rational Parole Policies has shown that survivors who kill their abusers in self-defense typically have no criminal record or violent past. In fact, they are highly unlikely to pose any threat to society after fighting for their lives against their abusers. The recidivism is extremely low — nearly nonexistent — when survivors are released after serving time, says Saima Anjam, director of public policy at the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, demonstrating that they were acting out of desperation, not malicious, violent intent.
“This is not for someone who decides one day that they’re going to kill their partner,” Smith says. “These women aren’t violent unless someone is choking them or trying to kill them.”
If the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act had been law when the investigators arrived at Dadou’s mother’s house the day after her altercation with Sanders, the next twenty years of her life could’ve been drastically different. Instead, when the officers told Dadou that Sanders had been killed in a car accident, they were starting to build a case against her. Sanders’s red 1982 Chrysler Fifth Avenue crashed into a home just two blocks away from Dadou’s mother’s driveway. The police found his frozen body about twelve hours after Dadou shot him.
The police escorted her to the precinct to identify the car. She recalls being in shock when she went with the officers. She believed the investigators when they told her that he died in an accident. “It made sense since he was so high on base joints [weed laced with cocaine] and there was a heavy snowstorm,” she says. “I had no idea I had shot him.”
While at the precinct, the officers interrogated her for about twelve hours. When she told them about Sanders’ violent nature, the police said she would not be convicted if she confessed. She gave them an eight-page statement about the fight along with a history of the physical, mental and psychological abuse she endured while with Sanders.
Shortly after, Dadou — who had never before been in legal trouble — was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. She had no lawyer present. She says that it wasn’t until the statement was processed that she was allowed to make phone calls.
In June of 1992, about six months after Dadou’s arrest, Metro Justice, a non-profit social justice organization based in Rochester, raised $15,000 and posted Dadou’s bail. In a fund-raising letter Metro Justice wrote that: “Kim is not a danger to society! She acted in self-defense! She was emotionally traumatized and physically brutalized.”
When Dadou’s hearing came in October, Dadou says that, her attorney told her not to testify because she would be crucified by the prosecutor. Instead, he advised her to find an expert witness to testify that she was in fact abused while with Sanders. Hiring Thea DuBow — who worked at My Sister’s Place, an agency that runs a shelter for abused women and their children in Yonkers — cost Dadou an additional $500. She wanted the well-known expert, Lenore Walker, but she says that would’ve cost her just shy of $10,000. “Would that have saved me from prison?” she still wonders.
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Dadou (far right) and fellow advocates for The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act in Albany. Five out of six of the women have been incarcerated. (Photo courtesy of Kim Dadou)[/caption]
Angela Reyes, Monroe County’s assistant district attorney at the time, prosecuted Dadou’s case. In a statement made on June 29, 1992 to Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester’s local newspaper, Reyes said that Dadou harassed Sanders and that she refused to accept that their relationship was over. “Everyone said they fought like cats and dogs,” she maintained in a recent interview. Reyes says that they didn’t have police records corroborating that Dadou had harassed Sanders; investigators and the District Attorney’s office concluded the nature of the relationship after interviewing neighbors and family members.
Dadou’s diary, according to Reyes, proved that she couldn’t be a victim of partner abuse. In it, she says, Dadou wrote explicitly about having a sexual relationship with a man who wasn’t Sanders. “That’s why she wouldn’t take the stand, because she didn’t want that information from the diary to come out,” Reyes explains during a phone interview. Reyes says the diary had no written entries about any abuse Dadou might have endured during her on-and-off relationship with Sanders.
Patricia Marks, Monroe County’s Judge during Dadou’s trial, says she didn’t allow the diary to be admitted as evidence in court because it was too “prejudicial” to Dadou. “It wasn’t probative or relevant to the case,” Marks explains. But Reyes says that Judge Marks’s decision didn’t stop her from keeping the diary visibly on her desk during the trials. “I wanted Kim to know that I had it with me every single day of that hearing,” she explains. “That’s why she never took the stand.”
Since Dadou didn’t testify, the judge refused to admit all of the police reports, hospital records, battered women’s shelter reports and witness statements attesting to the abuse. Dadou says that Judge Marks allowed some evidence about battered woman syndrome, but it wasn’t enough to convince the jury.
To this day, Dadou finds it difficult to understand why no one took note of the fact that she had Sanders arrested five times. She says that Reyes presented her as a calculated killer. “So put me in prison for seventeen years because I wrote in my diary about seeking comfort in a former lover while Darnell was beating me up,” she says. “That makes the abuse go away?”
During her sentencing, protestors stood outside the courthouse with signs reading “Bring justice to battered women: Free Kim Dadou.” In October 1992, Dadou was found guilty. She spent more than six thousand days waking up in prison.
* * *
In the next legislative session, which starts in January, advocates hope that New York State Senators will finally cast their votes on the bill that could save abuse survivors who are in same position as Dadou was 25 years ago from harsh prison sentences.
New York Senate Democratic Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins says she’s hoping that her colleagues will keep in mind that “those who have suffered due to domestic abusers deserve to have our laws reformed to recognize the uniqueness of their situations.” She said that “common sense legislation which would address this situation has been stuck in committee and denied a vote by the Senate Republican Majority.” In May, the bill gained some momentum and was passed by the State assembly with bipartisan support. It remains uncertain if the bill will reach the full Senate for a vote during the upcoming session. John Flanagan, temporary president and majority leader of the New York State Senate, didn’t respond to multiple attempts for his comment on the bill.
The only significant opposition to the legislation has come from the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York who in 2012 wrote that the bill “denies jurisdiction to prosecutors who are otherwise empowered to bring cases that impact their counties; it disrupts well-established criminal procedures; and it fails to achieve its purported goal of providing cost savings.”
Saima Anjam, the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence director, disagrees. In fact, she says that if the bill passes, it’s proven that New York will reap significant savings every year. In New York, it costs up to $55,000 per year to send one adult to prison, but sentencing to an alternative-to-incarceration program would cost $11,000, according to a report from NYC Reentry Coalition Services. “We’re in a time when legislators everywhere are seeing very evidently the economical and social costs of mass incarceration,” she says.
Since Senator Hassell-Thompson left the Senate to join the Governor’s office in July, Senator Roxanne Persaud of Brooklyn is stepping up as lead sponsor. “Too often in these cases where victims defend themselves, the domestic violence is discounted,” she says. Persaud is educating legislators and community members about what domestic violence victims like Dadou face when they are fighting for their lives.
When Dadou was behind bars, Jaya Vasandani and Tamar Kraft-Stolar from the Correctional Association in New York visited her and other incarcerated women frequently to assess and report on the quality of living conditions in state prisons. In 2011, Vasandani and Kraft-Stolar asked Dadou to be a survivor advocate for DVSJA.
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Kim Dadou and her wife Annie-Bell Brown in Seneca Park, Rochester, NY.[/caption]
“It helps me heal knowing that I can raise awareness about domestic violence and what this bill can do for survivors who acted out in self-defense,” Dadou explains. “Prison is not a place for survivors of abuse who have been through extreme trauma – they deserve rehabilitation and support.”
Now, Dadou works as a customer representative for the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Rochester and spends her free time with her wife, Annie Bell Brown. The couple met in prison about 25 years ago and fell in love.
Dadou tells her story – alongside fellow survivors, legal advocates, and families of currently incarcerated victims – to legislators at public education events and DVSJA lobby days in cities like New York City and Albany.
“If there was a bill like Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act over twenty years ago, it probably would’ve given me back ten years of my life,” Dadou says. “Maybe I would have had kids.”
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