They were found guilty of murdering their attackers. A new law offers a second chance at freedom.

Lisa Rae Moss — serving a life sentence for her involvement in the 1990 murder of her husband, Mike Moss — sat on the witness stand in a Seminole, Oklahoma, courtroom on a frigid January morning in 2025, her hands clasped in her knees. Moss, 60, was asked to recount what she endured in her 20s, when she married an unstable man a dozen years her senior. Her long silver hair and prison glasses accentuated the years between her and the younger me she described.

“Did Mike ever use a gun on you in the bedroom?” » asked his lawyer, Colleen McCarty.

“He had a gun that was usually on the dresser at night,” Moss said quietly. She explained that her husband would place it there before going to bed.

“There were a number of occasions where he picked up the gun – and I wasn’t in the mood for sex and I didn’t want to have sex – and he would move the gun up and down my inner thigh and then put it on the pillow next to the bed.” She paused to correct herself: “Besides my head, I’m sorry.” »

During questioning by her attorney, Moss described a series of abuses that began six months after their marriage, when her husband grabbed her by the throat and threw her against the fireplace. She remembers how, during an argument, he tried to put a tennis ball in her mouth. How she lost consciousness when he slammed her head against their refrigerator so hard it left a gash. How he repeatedly punched her in the stomach while she was pregnant with their son. How he raped her repeatedly, once with a curling iron – an assault that caused lasting injury. “I bled every day for five years until I finally had a hysterectomy,” she said. When her 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage complained that Mike had done something that hurt her butt, Moss feared he might also sexually abuse her little girl.

“Were you afraid for your life?” McCarty said.

Moss nodded. “Absolutely.”

Her testimony places her at the center of an extraordinary legal experiment unfolding in Oklahoma, where a new state law, the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, passed in 2024, offers prisoners like her a chance at freedom. Under the law, a domestic violence victim serving time can request a sentence reduction, which the law requires if a judge decides that the abuse she suffered was a “substantial contributing factor” to her crime.

Moss was the first to appear in court and test whether the law could deliver on its promises. Unlike most other defendants in cases where the law was supposed to remedy, Moss did not commit the violence herself. She was not present when her older brother, Richard Wright, shot her husband. But at her 1990 trial, prosecutors argued that she solicited and helped orchestrate the murder, presenting testimony that she once asked an acquaintance to “get rid of” her husband in exchange for an upfront payment of $500. She was convicted of first-degree murder and lesser charges and sentenced to life without parole. (His brother is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.)

The issue before the court that morning in Seminole was not one of guilt or innocence; it was about whether Moss’ punishment ignored the role that years of physical and sexual abuse played in his crime. McCarty called Margaret Black, a licensed counselor specializing in domestic violence, to the stand. Black, who had evaluated Moss, explained that each time Moss tried to leave her husband, the violence escalated. Black described a lethality assessment she conducted to measure the risk Moss faced of being killed or seriously injured. “Eighteen and up is what we call extreme danger,” Black said. In Moss’s case, her review of the evidence led her to assign a score of 24. “This was a very, very dangerous situation for Lisa and her children. »

That afternoon, District Judge C. Steven Kessinger announced he had made a decision. “The court finds that the defendant has provided clear and convincing evidence that she is a survivor of domestic violence, having suffered physical, sexual and psychological abuse,” he told a packed courtroom. “The court further finds that such violence and abuse contributed significantly to pushing the accused to commit the offenses for which she is currently incarcerated.” Under the law, that finding made her eligible for a sentence of 30 years or less — and because she had already served more than that, the judge ordered her released that day.

The exultation that erupted in the courtroom when Moss kissed her adult daughter, who was 5 when Moss was incarcerated, quickly reached the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. The prison, a stretch of concrete and barbed wire on the outskirts of the small town of McLoud, was where Moss had spent virtually his entire adult life. One of Moss’s oldest friends, April Wilkens, was hunched over the tablet that connected her to the outside world when she received a text message telling her of the judge’s decision. She jumped out of her bunk and ran out of her cell, shouting, “Lisa come home!”

The prison day room erupted at the news of Moss’ release. The outpouring of joy concerned the freedom of more than one woman. Moss’ lawyer, McCarty, had identified dozens of other prisoners at Mabel Bassett, including Wilkens, who she said could benefit from relief under the new law, and the hearing suggested they had reason to hope. “The feeling was electric – pure elation,” Wilkens told me. “The exodus of our survivors had begun. »

When Wilkens returned to her tablet, she saw a text from McCarty: “You’re next!” »

Wilkens first met McCarty when the attorney came to visit her at Mabel Bassett, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, in the summer of 2022. Wilkens was serving a life sentence for shooting and killing her ex-fiance after years of abuse, stalking and police indifference. She had already spent 24 years behind bars. McCarty had just founded the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and in Wilkens’ case, she saw an opportunity to force the justice system to do what it rarely did: revisit harsh sanctions that the criminal justice system had long considered final.

For years, only a handful of states had attempted to tackle cases like those of Moss and Wilkens, and even then, survivors faced significant obstacles in having their sentences reconsidered. That began to change in 2019, when New York passed a law allowing judges to reduce sentences when they believe abuse was a “significant contributing factor” to a defendant’s crime.

That day, McCarty was accompanied by Leslie Briggs, another lawyer who would later become the center’s legal director. Briggs had heard about Wilkens’ case from Wilkens’ niece, who had collected boxes and boxes of files related to her aunt’s conviction. Both attorneys had reviewed transcripts of the long-forgotten case and viewed Wilkens’ prosecution as a stark example of a justice system that often fails to arrest attackers but is quick to punish those who fight back.

The case had particular resonance for McCarty. One of her earliest memories was of her teenage sister sitting at the kitchen table one morning with a bruised eye and a split lip, after being thrown down a flight of stairs by a boyfriend. McCarty’s mother had escaped an abusive relationship only to be victimized again by another partner before McCarty graduated from high school.

The lawyers wanted to pass a law modeled on New York law, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act. They believed that drawing attention to Wilkens’ case, in which the abuse was both extensive and thoroughly documented, might be the best way to proceed. But McCarty first needed to know how many women were imprisoned at Mabel Bassett for crimes related to their own abuse — a phenomenon sentencing reform advocates call criminalized survival.

Although there was no system to identify these women within the prison, Wilkens found a solution: she wrote an informal questionnaire for survivors of domestic violence. A friend of hers inside the penitentiary managed to type and print hundreds of copies, and in September Wilkens and her contacts in other parts of the prison began circulating them. (“It certainly helps to have friends in low places,” Wilkens told me.) The questionnaire asked each respondent to provide the length of their sentence, the county of their conviction, and an account of their crime, and to send the responses to Appleseed’s office in Tulsa.

One hundred and fifty-six questionnaires arrived over the course of several weeks in the fall of 2022. Each envelope contained a poignant narrative, some in polished, looping handwriting, others in block letters. Respondents were black and white, Native American and Hispanic, young and old, from large and small towns. “I kept asking for a divorce and he was threatening to kill my children.” “His wife before me had her nose broken twice.” “Whenever I didn’t want to have sex with him, he would twist my wrists as far as he could until I gave in to him.” Another woman described the sense of liberation she felt behind bars, where her partner could no longer harm her: “I was in a very abusive and sick relationship,” she wrote. “I’m FREE now.” A few were vague about their crimes. Others were blunt: “One night I just snapped, shot and killed my husband. »

Oklahoma is consistently ranks among states with the highest rates of domestic violence; the country also has one of the highest rates of imprisonment of women. McCarty believed the two were related, and investigations seemed to confirm this. Some interviewees said they participated in robberies or other crimes under threat of violence from their attackers. Others were convicted under Oklahoma’s “failure to protect” law, punished for failing to do enough to protect their children from their partners’ brutality, often while they were experiencing that violence themselves. But the women serving the longest sentences tended to be those who fought back against their attackers. McCarty began talking to lawmakers about these findings, and in 2023, an early version of a domestic violence survivors bill was introduced.

Nothing seems to stand a better chance in red-colored Oklahoma than an effort to reduce penalties for violent crimes, but overcrowded prisons and rising costs were already forcing a rethink of tough, decades-old sentencing laws. In 2016, voters approved a historic ballot initiative reducing penalties for certain minor drug and property crimes; three years later, lawmakers made those changes retroactive, leading to one of the largest single-day prisoner releases in American history.

McCarty hoped to continue this momentum. Wilkens advocated for the bill from prison, writing an opinion piece in The Oklahoman and telling her story on a local television news program, and she became the focus of a social media campaign, #FreeAprilWilkens.

Not everyone in Oklahoma supported the bill for domestic violence survivors. Prosecutors warned that the law encouraged exaggerated or bad faith allegations that would be difficult to disprove years after the fact. The law, they argued, opened a Pandora’s box, in which anyone who had suffered violence could potentially seek a lesser sentence.

Arguing that the bill took too broad a view of who should be eligible for resentencing, Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler wrote in an email to a lawmaker in 2024 that the legislation “presents a risk to public safety.” He then cited an infamous case, which he had prosecuted, to make his point: “The Bever brothers, who massacred their family in Broken Arrow, would be eligible for sentencing modification under this bill in its current form.” »

The case, dating from 2015, fell well outside the scope of the law. Robert and Michael Bever had killed their parents, who a surviving sister said were not physically violent, as well as their three younger siblings. The proposed legislation required any allegations of abuse to be corroborated by some sort of documentary evidence – proof that this case did not have.

Kunzweiler had expressed a broader concern among prosecutors: that undeserving and dangerous defendants could exploit the law to seek sentence reductions. Reaction from elected prosecutors led to changes to the bill; cases involving death sentences were excluded. It would take two legislative sessions and a sustained effort by a bipartisan coalition to pass a version that lawmakers could agree on. The Oklahoma Survivors’ Act was signed into law in May 2024.

But its passage did not assuage criticism from state prosecutors. They will play a central role in enforcing the law, as they will have the power to object to any request they deem unfounded. Prosecutors could challenge a survivor’s account of abuse or argue that she played no significant role in the crime. A judge would make the final decision, but the law’s promise of reduced sentences would depend, in part, on the discretion of prosecutors.

New York’s Justice for Survivors of Domestic Violence Act offers a glimpse of the challenges that lie ahead in Oklahoma. The law produced very different results from county to county. In a 2025 article for the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Alexandra Harrington, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, found that whether a defendant’s sentence is reduced depends largely on the local prosecutor.

When prosecutors supported a request for resentencing, judges often granted relief. When prosecutors have opposed a request, only a fraction of them have won their case. Opposition from district attorneys was more common when the crime was considered too egregious; or when the defendant had a criminal history or substance abuse problem, or was perceived as aggressive or otherwise unfriendly; or when the plaintiff had already received a plea deal in the case. “In some jurisdictions, the prosecutor’s office has served almost entirely to block the path to help,” Harrington wrote.

McCarty was clear-eyed when we first spoke last spring about the challenges ahead. Most of the sentencing cases she worked on — including Wilkens’ — were in Tulsa, where Kunzweiler was the lead prosecutor, and they had very different visions of what justice looked like. McCarty, animated and intense, with big brown eyes that widened as she spoke, spoke passionately about the possibility of second chances for those the system had failed. Kunzweiler, a phlegmatic, gray-haired career prosecutor from an older generation, appreciated the finality of the jury’s verdict — and the punishment that accompanied it. In a sign of how seriously he took Wilkens’ request for punishment, he chose to represent the state alongside one of its top prosecutors, and he repeatedly asked for more time to prepare. After numerous delays, no hearing was still scheduled and McCarty was growing impatient. “We wrote this law with April in mind,” she said.

Wilkens had filed her request for resentencing on August 29, 2024 – the day the law took effect – and she expected to lead the way. But Moss was the first to receive a hearing, and following her release, four other Mabel Bassett wives were summoned to court, the first in July 2025. Wilkens would have to wait.

Wilkens grew up in the 1970s and early ’80s in Kellyville, a town without stoplights, where his father’s mood swings and brutal discipline ruled the house. Wilkens says he whipped her with a belt or switch for minor infractions and once punched her in the mouth. Wilkens cultivated a sunny, energetic personality: cheerleader, honor student, the kind of girl impervious to turmoil. She propelled herself out of Kellyville by excelling academically and graduating from high school two years early. She attended Oklahoma State University and completed a graduate program in prosthetics at Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago.

An early marriage to her college sweetheart produced a baby boy, Hunter, but ended after four years. In 1995, when she was 25, she was newly divorced, running her own prosthetics business in Tulsa and ready to start a new chapter. She started dating again. Tall and slender, with long brown hair and a dazzling smile, she attracted attention.

That fall, she met Terry Carlton, 12 years her senior and the son of a major car dealer. Handsome and magnetic, with an impulsive side, he took them first class to Dallas and rented a chauffeur-driven limousine for their first date. He proposed two months later, on Christmas Eve, when he slipped a $25,000 engagement ring on her finger. She didn’t yet know that he had both a drug problem and a history of violence against women. Two of his previous romantic partners had gone to the police to report abuse; one of them, citing repeated choking and “severe emotional trauma,” obtained a protection order against him.

Four months after Wilkens’ engagement to Carlton, he grabbed her by the throat during an argument. Then he swore to her that he would never hurt her again. But over the next two years, during their on-and-off relationship, Wilkens called 911 at least 10 times for help. She obtained three emergency protection orders and sought medical attention for injuries sustained during a rape and multiple beatings.

Police reports, medical records and trial testimony document what Wilkens endured – sometimes in front of witnesses. A neighbor saw Carlton chase her down the driveway, grab her by the hair and drag her screaming toward his house. The same neighbor also saw him, on another occasion, knocking on Wilkens’ back door with what looked like a metal pipe. A doctor who lived across the street from Carlton discovered Wilkens in her car, bleeding, after Carlton smashed her driver’s side window and grabbed her keys so she couldn’t leave.

Yet Carlton — whose family wielded influence in Tulsa — seemed untouchable. “When the police were called, his timing was impeccable,” a neighbor, Glenda McCarley, testified at Wilkens’ trial in 1999. “He could be in his car and leaving just as they turned the corner.” Officers responded but rarely intervened. Their attitude toward Wilkens was epitomized by an officer McCarley remembered as “upset, impatient, in a hurry.”

Carlton, whose sports car was often seen idling outside Wilkens’ house at odd hours of the night, was arrested only once, after police found him at her home in February 1998, with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol and a stun gun. He faced no significant consequences: Rather than pursuing charges of assault or stalking — both felonies — authorities cited him for a misdemeanor weapons violation. When he failed to appear in court, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but Tulsa police never enforced it.

His incessant harassment left Wilkens in a fragile state of mind; Twice that spring she was involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals. es. Its disintegration was further accelerated by a growing drug addiction. She would later testify that Carlton first introduced her to cocaine, then methamphetamine, intravenously. As his erratic behavior intensified, so did his drug addiction. When she appeared at his door around 3 a.m. on April 28 – the day she killed him – she was a shadow of the vibrant young woman she was when they first met.

In less than three years, she had lost everything: her business, which was failing as her focus drifted; her family and friends, from whom Carlton kept her isolated; and her son, now under the sole custody of her ex-husband. She would later testify that she went to Carlton’s house in the middle of the night for a singular and desperate purpose: to beg him to leave her alone for good. Facing him directly, she later said, seemed to be the only way for her to regain some control. But the encounter quickly turns violent. She said that after she refused to have sex with him, he raped her and threatened to kill her. Eventually, she managed to grab his .22 handgun and when he approached her, enraged, she fired. She kept firing – eight shots in all.

After undergoing a sexual assault interrogation and examination documenting a vaginal tear, Wilkens was jailed and charged with first-degree murder.

“If anything goes wrong, cry rape,” prosecutor Tim Harris said in closing arguments in her 1999 trial, in which prosecutors portrayed her as a manipulative, mentally unstable, meth-crazed fabulist who went to Carlton’s home looking for drugs and revenge. Although Wilkens’ attorney argued that she acted in self-defense because she feared for her life, Harris suggested that she and Carlton had a mutually destructive relationship, in which Wilkens — who weighed 107 pounds at the time of the killing — met Carlton’s abuse with her own aggression.

“There is no doubt that he physically assaulted her,” Harris told the jury. “But is there no doubt that she abused him too? He abused her, she abused him, I file a protection order, I cry rape, now I’m back, let’s get high, I hate you, I love you, you owe me money. Man, what a dysfunctional life.” Harris criticized her for resorting to violence: “If April Wilkens had been truly serious about her fear of Terry Carlton, she could have allowed the system to come to her aid. » Wilkens was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Harris was replaced 16 years later, in 2015, by Kunzweiler, who had been one of his top lieutenants. As prosecutor, Kunzweiler took the same hard line in Wilkens’ case, repeatedly opposing his requests for parole. In 2022, the prosecutor’s office said in a letter to the parole board that her sentence reflected the seriousness of her crime and that she should remain in prison. “She poses a safety risk to the public,” the letter states.

Wilkens was again denied parole. McCarty emphasized this to lawmakers when she fought for passage of the Survivors Act; Without a new law, Wilkens faced being locked up for the rest of her life.

In June, after nearly a year of delays, a Tulsa judge scheduled Wilkens’ resentencing hearing for September. She and the three other women who were to be heard first were part of Mabel Bassett’s loosely knit group that Wilkens called the “sisterhood of survivors.”

Erica Harrison, the unofficial mother of the young women in her nit housing, was serving a 20-year prison sentence for shooting a family friend after raping her in 2013. Norma Jane Lumpkin, whose long hair hung down to her waist, was serving a four-decade life sentence for her role in the bludgeoning death of her husband in 1981. Tyesha Long, who is 27 — the youngest of the group and former rodeo barrel racing competitor — was sentenced to 27 years in prison for shooting her repeatedly abusive boyfriend in 2020. “Jane and I were both locked up longer than Tyesha was alive,” Wilkens told me.

Aside from minor driving infractions, none of the women had been in trouble with the law before their arrest, and Wilkens viewed their crimes, like hers, as aberrations, acts she believed were inseparable from the abuse each woman suffered. Before they were taken out of Mabel Bassett in handcuffs and leg irons, to face their sentencing hearings in the county courts where they were sentenced, Wilkens tried to prepare them. She cited her favorite passage from Ecclesiastes, reminding them that there is power in numbers. She urged them to listen carefully to each question while on the stand and to take a breath before answering it. And she advised them on how to prepare for processing their photos. Don’t grimace, she told them. Your passport photo will make the front page of the local newspapers.

Moss, the only woman released under the Survivors Act, attended the hearings that summer. She deliberately positioned herself where she could be seen by Mabel Bassett’s wife at the defense table, and she met the defendant’s gaze, assuring him that she was there and that she remembered exactly what that moment had felt like. She made it a point to be at her best, knowing that she embodied the promise of the freedom that could await her. Dressed in bright colors and simple but elegant jewelry, she looked well-groomed, hair done, nails painted, lipstick fresh. After 35 years behind bars, she wasn’t going to give up. “Freedom suits him,” Wilkens later told me.

But it soon became clear that not everyone’s sentencing hearing would go like Moss’s in Seminole, under a different prosecutor. Harrison, the first from the fraternity to stand before a judge that summer, testified in a Tulsa court in July. “I was going through a terrible divorce,” Harrison said, recalling a time when she was alone with three children and a broken-down car. “I had just left the domestic violence shelter and moved into a tiny apartment with no name.” Harrison had a drink with family friend Calvin Anderson and passed out. She woke up to find him on top of her, and after sodomizing her, she managed to push him off. In the hours that followed, he loitered around her apartment complex and, when her eventual calls to 911 did not bring a quick response, she shot him in the parking lot.

Prosecutors disputed his account, pointing out that elements of his story had changed since he was first questioned by police in 2013; They took advantage of the fact that she had not called 911 immediately after the attack, suggesting that the danger she claimed to feel afterward had been fabricated. “At what point did he magically become a threat?” » asked Assistant Prosecutor Meghan Hilborn. The judge in Harrison’s case said she will make her decision later this summer.

The eldest of the group, Lumpkin, appeared in court the following week. His crime – committed with a neighbor also accused of the murder – had been particularly horrific. Her husband was beaten to death and his body was later found in the trunk of his car. Still, it didn’t seem inconceivable that she might receive some leniency, since she was 75 years old and had been incarcerated for 44 years. But as Lumpkin sat at the defense table, the victim’s family made searing statements that undermined her long-standing allegations of abuse, portraying her instead as a calculating, cold-blooded killer. Lumpkin’s daughter, Alisha Keeney, who was 12 when her father was bludgeoned to death, told the court her mother did not serve enough time for the brutal murder. “That’s the only sentence she deserves, is prison forever,” Keeney said.

Again, no immediate decision was made by the court. Eleven days later, Tyesha Long took the witness stand in an Oklahoma City courtroom and recounted how a local businessman named Ray Brown began pursuing her when she was 17 years old. Brown, who was in his 50s, had been the subject of protective orders obtained by several women. The first time he was violent with her, she testified, he punched her in the mouth. He continued to stalk her, choke her, threaten her life and push her down a flight of stairs, causing a miscarriage, she said. After he chased her in his car and crashed into her vehicle, she received an order of protection against him. But their relationship never completely ended. During a heated argument, she said, he grabbed her throat — and Long, who said Brown had already strangled her, thought she was going to die. “I took out my gun and shot him,” she testified.

The issue Long faced at her trial, when she argued she acted in self-defense, was that she shot Brown in the back. It was at odds with how she remembered it, with Brown walking towards her. Domestic violence experts say cases in which survivors kill their abusers are often different from typical self-defense cases, which rely on obvious and imminent danger, such as a drawn weapon. For a survivor who has been repeatedly and continuously terrorized, the perception of being in mortal danger does not manifest itself in a single dramatic moment. She may be required to fight back not when she is attacked, but during the lull between violent episodes, when the aggressor is momentarily disengaged. For a jury, it can be difficult to see the imminent threat in such a scenario – like when Brown turned and walked away from Long.

This gap, between how the law traditionally understands self-defense and how victims of domestic violence experience danger, is one of the gaps that the Survivors Act has sought to fill. Violence within intimate relationships is part of what researchers call “coercive control.” tif”: a pattern of sustained dominance reinforced by intimidation, threats, surveillance, and social isolation. Research has shown that living in such conditions can alter threat perception and decision-making, thereby reducing the survivor’s perceived options when danger appears imminent. For a victim who has learned that such a moment of calm could be the prelude to the next wave of violence, this may seem like their last opportunity to act before being attacked again.

Long had another challenge, which was that his descriptions of Brown’s abuse had varied during his police interview, his trial and now the hearing. Trauma “impacts the way our brain stores memory,” defense expert witness Angela Beatty, a social worker and vice president of the YWCA Oklahoma City whose work focuses on survivors of domestic violence, told the hearing. Such experiences, Beatty said, can fracture memory, leaving memories fragmented rather than organized and chronological.

But assistant prosecutor Madeline Coffey took advantage of these inconsistencies to argue that Long was not credible. Long seemed to shrink into herself, her shoulders tense and her voice barely audible, as Coffey dissected each statement: How many times, exactly, was Long strangled to the point of unconsciousness? Wasn’t sex sometimes consensual? What was the precise number of punches that Brown inflicted on him? “Is this testimony at trial – that he only hit you once – different from your testimony today that he probably hit you twice? Coffey insisted. Again, no decision was made by the court, but the mood among Long’s supporters was grim. She had been on the stand for almost five hours.

News of the grueling cross-examinations quickly reached Wilkens, who was busy preparing for her upcoming hearing. Prosecutors had warned that these hearings risked retraumatizing the victims’ families, but she saw that these hearings had also traumatized the defendants themselves. Testifying at his own trial had been an excruciating exercise, Wilkens told me, not just because describing the abuse meant reliving it. His cross-examination – with its rapid accusations, caustic tone and presumption of dishonesty – had seemed strangely familiar after years of verbal abuse. This had also proven to be an impossible test. “I would challenge anyone to sit on the stand and just be berated and asked the same question 20 different times in 20 different ways,” she said. “On top of that, you have an audience. It’s very public. Your entire life is on display for everyone to see.”

Every seat in the courtroom was filled when Wilkens’ resentencing hearing began in Tulsa on a September morning. His family members sat side by side with the women Wilkens had previously served time with. Alongside a group of law students who had come to watch the proceedings was Wilkens’ niece, Amanda Ross, who years earlier had first brought her aunt’s case to McCarty’s attention.

Ross, who was 7 when Wilkens was arrested, had corresponded with his aunt since elementary school. Growing up, she knew only the vague outlines of Wilkens’ case; crime had never been a match for the woman she knew. After college, Ross became a librarian and put her skills to use, trying to understand, as she traced her aunt’s odyssey through the courts, how Wilkens ended up with a life sentence. By the time of the hearing, Ross had spent nearly a decade trying to locate all relevant documents and public records. Having long run out of space to store her growing archives, she hid boxes of legal papers in the trunk of her Toyota Corolla.

Wilkens sat at the defense table, observing the room; she wore no makeup and her hair, streaked with gray, hung down to her shoulders. A sheriff’s deputy had advised her not to talk to anyone, but when she spotted Lisa Rae Moss sitting in the gallery, she caught Moss’s eye and smiled.

Kunzweiler represented the state that day alongside Meghan Hilborn, the assistant prosecutor who led the deadly cross-examination of Erica Harrison in July. The judge in this case had announced five days earlier that she was denying Harrison relief. Although Lumpkin and Long were still awaiting decisions, there was little reason to believe they would fare any differently.

In his brief opening statement, Kunzweiler made clear that he saw no reason to reignite the debate over Wilkens’ punishment. “Twelve men and women sat in a courtroom very similar to this one,” Kunzweiler said. “They’ve seen all the evidence.” It was a stark reminder that a jury had already weighed much of what the court was now being asked to reconsider. Citing her “extreme meth use,” he pointed out that Wilkens had searched for Terry Carlton the morning she shot him, arriving at his house unannounced. Kunzweiler gestured toward the defense table, where Wilkens sat in an orange striped prison jumpsuit, her handcuffs padlocked to a heavy chain at her waist, her ankles chained together by leg irons. “She sits here as a convicted murderer,” Kunzweiler said.

Despite Kunzweiler’s initial comments in court, there was one piece of evidence that jurors at her 1999 trial were not asked to consider: a tape recording Wilkens made of a phone call between her and Carlton, in which he became angry. He admitted to having raped, beaten and strangled her, while accusing her of having provoked him. At today’s hearing, that was put into the record when the defense called a federal judge, Judge Claire Eagan of the Northern District of Oklahoma, to the stand.

Eagan had an unexpected personal connection to the case; as an attorney in private practice in 1996, she helped Wilkens obtain an emergency protective order. She testified that when Wilkens showed up at her office, she had injuries including black eyes and bruising on her face and arms. A few days later, Wilkens brought the recording with her and played it for Eagan. Wilkens subsequently failed to appear in court to extend the protection order, too afraid to see Carlton in person. Because she didn’t show up, the order was rejected — a moment Eagan said she still remembers. “Mr. Carlton was there with his lawyer,” she said. “He looked at me when he was fired and smiled.”

The recording was turned over to the court — along with police reports, protective orders and medical records — to show that Wilkens was abused by the man she killed. Wilkens, however, would not speak. After painful cross-examinations of the other women this summer, Wilkens’ lawyers – Colleen McCarty and a veteran of the public defender’s office, Abby Gore – had made the difficult decision, along with Wilkens, not to testify. Their assessment highlighted the challenges the Survivors Act faced in the courtroom. Its most visible and articulate champion, Mabel Bassett, would not be heard. The strategic calculation was made to ensure that aggressive cross-examination would not overshadow the well-documented evidence of abuse at the heart of Wilkens’ case.

The remaining question was whether Carlton’s abuse was a substantial contributing factor, under the law, when Wilkens killed him — a point the defense sought to establish through Angela Beatty, the social worker who previously testified at Tyesha Long’s hearing. Beatty, who interviewed Wilkens and reviewed his medical records, said the “coercive control” exerted by abusers like Carlton can harm survivors’ ability to weigh options and make reasoned decisions, thereby focusing on survival. “Ms. Wilkens shared that Mr. Carlton had threatened her life that night,” Beatty said, adding that Wilkens thought she was going to die. “He told her he would kill her.”

During cross-examination, Deputy Prosecutor Hilborn pressed Beatty. “Can you ever know if you are being cheated by a victim? » she asked. “Would you agree that April Wilkens has a good reason to tell you certain things for the sake of a sentence change? After questioning Beatty’s objectivity, Hilborn then argued that Wilkens’ fear could have stemmed from something other than abuse. She returned again and again to Wilkens’ substance use, noting that Wilkens had used methamphetamine intravenously. “When you say she’s paranoid that someone is stalking her, are you able to tell the court that this is definitely due to domestic violence?” » asked Hilborn. “Or can this also be caused by meth use?”

On the second day of the hearing, the State called its own witness, Jarrod Steffan, a forensic psychologist it had hired. Steffan had evaluated Wilkens and found her psychologically well adjusted. But her decades-old medical records, he said, showed “she suffered from serious mental health problems, such as hallucinations and delusions, which led to Mr. Carlton’s death.” He downplayed the impact that ongoing physical and sexual abuse may have had on his mental state: “His actions in Mr. Carlton’s death were not due to domestic violence,” he said. “It was his mental illness and heavy methamphetamine use that led to Mr. Carlton’s death.”

A rebuttal witness called by Wilkens’ attorneys, Dr. Reagan Gill, a forensic psychiatrist, questioned Steffan’s methodology, saying his characterization of Wilkens’ past behavior — which Steffan described in a written report as “harmful” and “irrational” — had no place in a clinical evaluation. “Those are not words we use,” Gill said.

Judge David Guten did not wait to rule. “There was more than sufficient evidence that there was violence in this relationship,” he said from the bench that afternoon. But he concluded that the defense failed to meet the second requirement of the Oklahoma Survivors Act: demonstrating, “by clear and convincing evidence,” that the abuse contributed substantially to the crime itself. Guten pointed at the witness of the he defense, Beatty, as being too biased to give an impartial assessment, characterizing the social worker’s testimony as advocacy and not expert opinion. “I couldn’t give any weight to his testimony,” he said. A few moments later, Guten declared the end of the procedure: “I will reject the request for modification of sentence. »

The morning after the hearing, I met Lisa Rae Moss at a coffee shop in downtown Tulsa. Eight months had passed since she left the Seminole County Courthouse. During this time, she met her grandchildren and learned to drive again. She had found joy in walking barefoot, picking out items at the grocery store, and sitting alone in silence. She had legally changed her name to her maiden name, Wright.

She lived with Vicki Thorp, a lay minister who visited her throughout her prison years, and Thorp’s husband in their spacious home outside Oklahoma City, which afforded her the kind of privacy she never had in Mabel Bassett. Most days, she listened to the birds outside her bedroom window, sometimes studying them through binoculars. In the evening, she went out on the deck of the Thorps to contemplate the stars.

Moss now looked tired and unsure. These small freedoms were overshadowed by what had happened to Wilkens. “I feel such, such…guilt,” she said, almost choking as she said the word. “How can I stay here and April has to go back to prison?” »

Other losses followed. In October, Lumpkin and Long were each denied relief, and in early December a judge refused to reduce the life sentence of another Mabel Bassett woman, Kimberley Perigo, who fatally shot her ex-husband in 2001. Perigo, who took the stand to recount years of physical and sexual abuse and stalking, was the fifth applicant to be denied Moss’ release.

The series of denials raised questions within Mabel Bassett: Had Moss been the only one at large in Oklahoma because she wasn’t at the crime scene? Was it because his case came from a county where the prosecutor did not attempt to discredit his accounts of abuse? Or was it simply good fortune to have had the first hearing at a time when the law had rare bipartisan support? Among advocates for victims of domestic violence, much of their anger was directed at the prosecutor’s office, which had spent more than $16,000 on expert testimony in Wilkens’ case alone.

Kunzweiler, who is up for re-election this year, made it clear to me that he believes he has a duty to rigorously examine candidates’ allegations, including through cross-examination. “Aren’t we all trying to find out the truth? he said. “That’s our obligation: to find the truth and then seek justice.” When I asked him what he thought justice looked like in Wilkens’ case, he said the system worked as it should; she was given the right to a trial and the opportunity to challenge her conviction through appeal. The jury’s verdict was upheld each time, Kunzweiler noted, and when Guten later considered his request for resentencing, he saw no reason to change his punishment. “She has the right to appeal this judge’s decision,” Kunzweiler said. “But the process is there for a reason.”

McCarty asked Guten to reconsider his decision in the Wilkens case on the grounds that he had misinterpreted the Survivors Act by relying so heavily on expert testimony. The facts of the case alone should guide him, she argued, and those facts — which included police reports, medical records, protective orders and testimony — led to only one conclusion.

In late November, Guten denied the request for reconsideration. Wilkens and his attorneys, he said in a written order, “ask this court to accept the evidence of abuse while completely discounting all other factors surrounding the homicide.” Guten continued: “This court refuses to view the evidence with tunnel vision. » He praised the jury in Wilkens’ trial, which “appropriately evaluated the substance abuse and mental health evidence.” He dismissed the request “with prejudice,” preventing any further consideration of it by his court.

McCarty believed that institutional resistance had worked against Wilkens. As evidence, she cited text messages from Kunzweiler that she obtained through a public records request, including one he sent to several state employees after the Wilkens hearing. “Sorry to come back with you later,” it read. “I was busy keeping April Wilkens in jail.” Other text messages discovered by McCarty showed that Guten texted the prosecutor in September asking if he had seen a letter that The Tulsa World had just published, written by one of the jurors in Wilkens’ 1990 trial; The juror said Wilkens’ sentence had been fair and that his claims of self-defense were “a fabrication.”

For McCarty, the texts reflected how determined the guardians of the system were to preserve the status quo, despite the new law. On January 29, she announced that she would run for district attorney, challenging Kunzweiler in the Republican primary.

Wilkens is appealing his case to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, where the court’s review of Guten’s decision will help determine how judges apply the Survivors Act in the future. As more states — most recently Georgia — pass survivor justice laws, it remains to be seen whether the criminal justice system is capable of viewing someone like Wilkens not only as a perpetrator who must be punished, but also as a victim deserving of mercy.

The Oklahoma Court of Appeals will consider what the Survivors Act means when it asks judges to weigh whether domestic violence was a substantial contributing factor to a crime. That appeal will not be led by McCarty but by a lawyer she asked to take on the case: Garrard Beeney, of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, who won the first appeals court ruling under New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act in 2021.

The appeals courts move slowly, however, and it can take years before the court issues a decision. In the meantime, all Wilkens can do is wait. After visiting Mabel Bassett last summer, she wrote to me about a tree she had planted when she arrived there. “It was just a skinny little thing back then, barely waist-length,” Wilkens said. It now dominates it, its branches rising towards the sky.