Please Read Kim’s Story and More About The Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act
She killed her abuser before he could kill her: After 17 years locked up, she’s taking on justice system
After 17 years behind bars, one woman is lobbying for the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act
Topics: abuse, Domestic abuse, Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, incarcerated victims, Narratively, Sexual assault, U.S. prison system, Life News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

“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. Shira Stoll
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.