ABSTRACT
In 1992, Debra Reid, an African-American woman incarcerated for killing her lesbian partner, petitioned the Massachusetts Advisory Board of Pardons to have her prison sentence commuted. She was a member of the “Framingham Eight,” a group of incarcerated women who were convicted of killing their husbands or lovers, and who felt that their experiences of battering had not been given a fair hearing in the courts that convicted them. Debra’s petition argued that she did not receive a fair trial in part because she was not allowed to introduce evidence of a prior relationship of battering with the woman she was convicted of killing. Debra was the only lesbian in the group and she pursued the petition process, despite the many obstacles she faced. She had first to convince the other incarcerated women that the battering she suffered from her lover was as serious as theirs, even though the batterer was a woman. Many advocates in the domestic violence and gay and lesbian legal communities did not want to get involved in her case-it made things more complicated both because she was a woman who had killed another woman and because she was a lesbian. With the support of the Network for Battered Lesbians in Boston, she secured the services of Sandra Lundy, a lawyer in the Boston area who is a lesbian and who has done pro-bono domestic violence advocacy. At the request of Lundy and the Network, I wrote the following essay for Sojourner in order to publicize Debra Reid’s case and to bring attention to the issues of lesbian battering. It is based on an interview with her while she was in Framingham Prison in Massachusetts.
