“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.

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)

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.

Kim Dadou and her wife Annie-Bell Brown in Seneca Park, Rochester, NY. Shira Stoll

“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.”