Maria Henson
Maria Henson won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for an editorial campaign in the Lexington Herald-Leader titled “To Have and to Harm: Kentucky’s Failure to Protect Women from the Men Who Beat Them.”
This editorial, which ran on Feb. 2, 1991, is typical of the series, which ran for more than a year. It tells a human story. It is well reported and compelling. The case it recounts is not a model for addressing the judicial system’s apathy toward prosecution of wife-beaters, but it does point the way to commonsense solutions.
When Henson won the prize, she said she had no illusions that her work would solve the problem “because what we’re dealing with is attitudes.”
A victim no more
Lynn Milam has five metal plates in her head to remind her of the night her former boyfriend nearly beat her to death.
The assault left her unconscious in a Frankfort street. Her face was fractured in several places. Three of her teeth lay on the pavement. Her assailant’s footprint was stomped onto her chest.
Lynn survived that beating. She went on to see that the man who beat her was punished for his actions. But before justice was done, she learned a hard lesson: To avoid becoming a victim again, a beaten woman often must fight for justice.
Had two things been different in Kentucky, Lynn might never have had to learn that lesson.
- Kentucky’s law against wife-beating should apply to all unmarried couples, but it now applies only to those who have a child in common. So when the man with whom she lived for six years first began to beat her, Lynn could not turn to the courts for a protective order.
- Every Kentucky prosecutor’s office should employ victims’ advocates to follow the cases of beaten women through the courts. Such advocates help remind prosecutors and judges that the public is watching how they handle the cases of beaten women. But prosecutors in Franklin and most other Kentucky counties don’t have the money to hire advocates.
So Lynn, unprotected and on her own, had no choice. To see justice done, she had to become her own advocate.
Lynn began to realize that in September of 1989, about three weeks after she was assaulted.
She was at a Frankfort shopping center one evening when she saw something that shocked and terrified her. David Brantley, the man who had beaten her, was in a store renting movies and a VCR. David was supposed to be in jail awaiting trial.
Up until then, Lynn thought that she could concentrate on recovering physically and emotionally while civilization held David responsible for his actions.
But when she saw her assailant renting movies when he was supposed to be in jail, Lynn realized that civilization might turn its back on her.
Determined not to become a victim again, she set to work on her own behalf.
Lynn began by calling the Franklin County jail and complaining that David was abusing his work-release privileges. When she saw him out again at unusual hours, she called and complained again.
She learned that since the night of the assault, the State Police had not interviewed witnesses, including the two men who were the first to see her after she was beaten. Lynn went to the State Police to demand more attention to her case.
She wanted to make sure that David received a fitting punishment for his crime. So she went to the law library in the state Capitol and began studying what had happened in other assault cases. She copied the cases and showed them to prosecutors.
But what really sent Lynn into action was the news that prosecutors were considering a plea bargain in David’s case. He was charged with second-degree assault, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. Lynn recalls that prosecutors were considering letting him off with the minimum sentence, five years.
That was unacceptable to Lynn. With the assistance of Allie Hendricks, a therapist on contract with the Lexington spouse abuse shelter, she contacted Travis Fritsch, a victim’s advocate in the state attorney general’s office, and Sherry Currens, head of the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association.
The four women got together and paid a visit to Franklin County Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Larry Cleveland. They wanted to make sure the prosecutor understood how serious Lynn’s case was.
Cleveland got the message.
“I will say this about this case — because (they) were so interested in it, it probably got a little more of my attention than it would have otherwise,” he says. “I mean, otherwise I would have said ‘Look, OK.’ I would have cut a deal ... . The guy probably wouldn’t have gotten as much time.”
Eventually, in Cleveland’s words, “The guy got his butt kicked.” David agreed to a plea bargain calling for seven years in prison.
In the end, Lynn felt that of all of the officials who handled her case, only Cleveland had understood its importance. “Larry Cleveland was the only one who gave me any support at all,” she says.
The experience taught Cleveland something. “You don’t mess with a whole roomful of women that looked as serious about this as they did,” he says.
Two simple changes can help keep other women from going through what Lynn experienced.
First, the legislature should extend the state’s wife-beating law to protect unmarried women from violent men with whom they live or have lived. Unmarried women are as much in danger as married women and just as deserving of the law’s protection.
Second, there should be victims’ advocates in all prosecutors’ offices throughout the state. Making that a reality won’t be easy, but it can be done.
There’s no reason, after all, that the victims of violent men should have to act as their own advocates. And beaten women surely should not have to assemble a roomful of angry women to remind prosecutors of their responsibility as protectors of those who live in a civilized society.
Source: Pulitzer Prize Editorials: America’s Best Writing, 1917-2003 (Third Edition), William David Sloan, Laird B. Anderson (eds.), Iowa State Press, 2003, pp. 257-59.