The first fight Anita Ford remembers having with her husband, Barry Ford, was over dishes. They’d been married only a few years. She turned 18 three weeks before their wedding; five months later, she gave birth to their first child, a boy named Robert. On this night, they’d ordered takeout; she’d put the few dishes they’d used in the dishwasher, but her husband didn’t like her to leave dirty dishes at night. She remembers him screaming at her, then punching her over and over on her right arm and shoulder, and the brutality was so shocking, she froze. If she could just learn to do it his way, he told her, then he wouldn’t be forced to hit her. He promised he wouldn’t do it again. He was so terribly sorry.

But it only escalated. He dragged her by the hair and arm through dog feces she’d failed to clean up. While she was holding a glass, he squeezed her hand until the glass broke. He timed her trips to the grocery store. She remembers calling the police but officers telling the couple to work it out and leaving. Twice, she said, Mr. Ford gave her a black eye. She said that sometimes he’d hit one of the kids, most often their son, Robert, and then she would attack her husband to turn his attention onto her and off their son. One time, when Robert was jumping on his bed, Mr. Ford pushed him, and he fell into the dresser and required stitches. Mr. Ford kept their daughter at home to ensure Ms. Ford wouldn’t tell anyone in the emergency room how Robert’s injury happened. Ms. Ford told me that they both did drugs. (Though the details of the abuse come from Ms. Ford, I corroborated the broader pattern with Ms. Ford’s daughter and one of her sisters and with a former babysitter who said that she remembers Ms. Ford with a black eye and that “those kids were scared of him.” Mr. Ford’s family has always maintained he was not abusive, and his sister, Debra Gomes, who also babysat the Fords, told me she never saw evidence of abuse.)

At one point, Ms. Ford fled to a friend’s house. Her husband begged her to return, promising he’d attend marriage counseling sessions. But after she returned, he told the therapist that she was the problem.

Eventually, things got so bad that she started saving money from her part-time job as a school bus driver. She did the things we tell abused women to do: She planned her escape, secretly got a new job with a messenger service and rented an apartment. One day she packed up the kids, who were 3 and 5, and left. She said she even got a new babysitter so her husband couldn’t track them.

But he was smart. He figured out where she’d fled, and he followed her to her new babysitter’s house. He returned later and knocked on the door. His wife had phoned, he told the sitter, and said she was running late and he was to pick up the kids. When Ms. Ford found out what happened and called him, he told her to get home or he’d kill the children. She raced home and stormed in. “It’s either going to be you, or it’s going to be me,” she recalls telling him. “One of us is going to die, because I’m not playing this game anymore.”

“Then it’s going to be you,” she remembers him saying. But he was wrong.

Anita Ford was charged
with first-degree murder
in
1984 for her role in planning
the death of
her husband,
Barry Ford. Last year she
filled
out a danger assessment — a questionnaire
used to
determine someone’s risk of
dying at the
hands of an abusive
partner — evaluating
her life
at the time.

Ms. Ford’s danger assessment
showed she was in
extreme
danger of being killed by her
husband in the
year before
his death.

Ms. Ford was convicted
and sentenced to life in
prison
without parole in 1987.

There are over 12,000 women incarcerated in the United States for homicide, a broad category that includes everything from manslaughter to first-degree murder. We do not know and have never known how many of these women killed someone who was abusing them. In the spring of 2020, I partnered with researchers at the Stanford Law School’s Criminal Justice Center for an ambitious study — the largest we know of to date — to find out. That number, we thought, would get to important questions at the heart of the legal principles of self-defense: Who is allowed to kill in the name of self-defense or protecting others and under what circumstances?

Ms. Ford, now 65, is serving a sentence of life without parole at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. She attends an emotional intelligence group, cross-stitches and fixes headphones, televisions and radios for her fellow inmates. She owns up entirely to her part in her husband’s death: She told her brother, George Wright, of Mr. Ford’s abuse, and she said the two of them discussed having her husband disappear and die in Mexico. She said there was never any kind of real plan, but they had talked about it. The way it seems to have played out was this: A few weeks later, Mr. Wright and two other friends — Lionel Cashman and John Aldridge — lured Mr. Ford, under the auspices of having a broken-down car, to an industrial park in Huntington Beach, Calif., not far from Lakewood, where the Fords lived. When he arrived, Mr. Wright shot him.

There are two ways to interpret this story. In the first version — the story prosecutors told in court — Ms. Ford was the mastermind of a plan to murder her husband for financial gain: She was the beneficiary on a $25,000 life insurance policy, along with a policy shared with her son for $5,000 and a mortgage policy worth $50,000. She hired Mr. Aldridge and Mr. Cashman and helped plot the killing over the preceding weeks. (The trial transcripts have been lost, so this was related to me by Ms. Ford, the Fords’ family members and her lawyer, as well as through various appellate documents, police records and other court filings.) Very little about her abuse came up at trial; Mr. Ford’s family and Ms. Ford agreed on that. For his sister, this was evidence that he had not been violent. It could equally be seen as evidence that the legal system simply didn’t see his violence as relevant.

This version of the story convinced a jury: Ms. Ford was convicted in 1987 of first-degree murder for the September 1984 killing of her husband and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole. She has been incarcerated ever since. (Mr. Wright also received a sentence of life without parole; he died in prison in 2021.)

In the second version — the one Ms. Ford’s daughter told me she believes — Ms. Ford’s actions were those of a desperate young wife and mother who feared for her life and felt she had no other escape. “Mastermind” doesn’t capture the desperation of a young woman who believed she had no way out and, worse, that her children had no way out. If she hadn’t been there, who would have protected them from their father?

“I really feel like she saved our lives,” the Fords’ daughter, Theresa Jones, who is 44 now, told me, “not only from my father, but she saved me from seeing that” — the abuse — “and from being conditioned to that and possibly being a violence victim in the future. So I really don’t blame her at all.”

There has been meaningful progress on some fronts since Ms. Ford went to trial: Access to shelter and victims’ services is far more comprehensive than it was when she was a young mother, and there is less shame around domestic violence today, all of which might make someone in her position less inclined to resort to violence.

Still, remarkably little has changed when it comes to how the law handles her kind of case. For the most part, the law sees only that something terrible has happened: A person was killed. Children were left without a father. It has very little interest in learning about or acknowledging mitigating factors like abuse or asking questions about whether, in such cases, justice and accountability ought to look different.

The Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, where Anita Ford is incarcerated, is one of the largest facilities in the world for female prisoners. As of last year, it held about 780 women convicted of murder or manslaughter.

As far back as 1969, a landmark study by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence recognized that women were significantly more likely than men to have been defending themselves when committing homicide. But because criminologists for decades focused their research on men, who commit a majority of violent crimes, we still know very little about these women — what their circumstances were and what self-defense looked like for them.

In the United States, self-defense law originates in part from a 17th-century English common law principle called the castle doctrine, which established the right of a man to protect himself and the property in his home in the event of an attack; when this doctrine was created, such property included his wife and children. In other instances — in the public sphere, for example — a man generally had a duty to retreat.

The castle doctrine has expanded over the centuries, including through the “true man” doctrine. An Ohio Supreme Court case from 1876 declared not only that a man in the public sphere did not have to retreat from attack but also that a “true man” would stand and fight — a “true man” was “not obliged to fly from an assailant, who, by violence or surprise, maliciously seeks to take his life or to do him enormous bodily harm.” To require such retreat, a similar court decision determined, was essentially “legalized cowardice,” as one author put it. Numerous states created similar exceptions in the following decades, though a duty to retreat whenever possible was still the norm.

The “true man” doctrine helped pave the way for “stand your ground” laws, which have proliferated across the country since Florida became the first state to enact “stand your ground” in 2005. Such laws state that anywhere a person has a right to be, in public or private, one has the right to fight back against attack — except most of the laws are not written to apply to........

© The New York Times