For International Women's Day, director of the Centre for Women's Justice Harriet Wistrich (first photo) writes about their work on the 'unjust criminalisation of victims of abuse'.
"Last week I visited Fri Martin, a young Black woman from Toxteth in Liverpool, who had recently been reunited with her delightful young daughters from whom she had been separated for the previous seven years. Fri (second photo) was torn away from them when they were aged only one and two years old after she was arrested for having stabbed their father, Kyle Farrell, who had tried to strangle her. Fri and Kyle had met at school and started dating from the age of 15. The relationship, while good at the beginning, became soured by Kyle’s violence and coercive and controlling behaviour which saw Fri change from a bubbly teenager to a depressed mother of two toddlers. In one violent confrontation, the two children were deprived of both mother and father. Luckily, Fri’s best friend offered to take them in and cared for them during the seven years that Fri was away from them.
Fri was tried and pleaded not guilty by reason of self defence, but the jury convicted her of murder. Her legal team badly failed to build up a relationship of trust with Fri that would have enabled her to disclose the full extent of the violence she was subjected to. They failed to obtain psychiatric evidence which would have shown the trauma she had experienced that influenced her response to the violence she faced on the day of the offence. And they failed to obtain the evidence, captured by the police when Fri was photographed in custody, which showed marks supporting her account that she had been strangled.
As a solicitor with thirty years’ experience representing women who have killed their abusive partners and are appealing murder convictions, from Emma Humphreys to Sally Challen, I was approached by Fri’s family to see if I could help find grounds of appeal. It took me and my counsel a number of years to find grounds and obtain evidence that would eventually pass the extremely high threshold required to appeal a conviction. In December 2020, the Court of Appeal quashed Fri’s murder conviction and ordered a re-trial. In May 2021, on the eve of the retrial, following the dramatic emergence of photographic evidence revealing strangle marks, the Crown offered to accept a plea to manslaughter and Fri jumped at the chance rather than risk another unpredictable jury verdict. The judge sentenced her to a very harsh ten years imprisonment and she had to return to prison until eventually she was eligible for release in December 2021.
Fri will be joining myself, David Challen and Louise Bullivant at a fundraising event on March 14th (register here). As many of you will recall, David campaigned courageously to help raise awareness of coercive control in support of the appeal by his mother, Sally. Louise is the solicitor for Emma-Jayne Magson, convicted of the murder of her violent partner and also separated from her young child.
I am the founder and director of Centre for Women’s Justice which is aimed at holding the state to account around violence against women and girls and challenging discrimination in the criminal justice system. In February 2021 we launched a detailed report, entitled ‘Women who Kill: How the state criminalises women we might otherwise be burying’. As the title suggests, many of the women who end up killing their partners are victims of male violence who could easily have been the one who ended up dead. As Fri’s brother, Ishmail, said: “When I received news that police and ambulance were attending Fri’s home after a fatal incident, my first thought was that it was Fri who was dead”.
We have also been working on a project looking at the wider issue of the unjust criminalisation of victims of abuse. We know that the vast majority of women in prison are themselves victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse and exploitation, many there as a direct result of that abuse. We have developed a series of recommendations for change across the criminal justice system to tackle the fact that women are so often criminalised when they should have been protected. Whether they have retaliated against violence inflicted upon them or been coerced into offending because of an abusive partner, it is a shameful indictment of a failing criminal justice system that resources are put into their prosecution rather than improving systems to prevent violence and abuse in the first place.
As a result of the work we do, many women have approached us seeking assistance to appeal convictions arising in circumstances where they were victims. It is very hard to find solicitors to help take forward these cases and part of the reason is the decimation of criminal legal aid which makes it hard for cash strapped firms to invest in the work required to help build up grounds of appeal.
If any of you can help, please donate and share our fundraiser open from 12pm on International Women’s Day 8th March – 15th March. Donations received during this week will be doubled by The Big Give. See our #GiveHerJustice campaign here."
Harriet Wistrich is the director of Centre for Women’s Justice and co-founder of the campaign group Justice for Women. (Find here on twitter here).