How a new Georgia bill could change the fate of domestic abuse survivors in prison

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How a new Georgia bill could change the fate of domestic abuse survivors in prison

2025-03-31 09:52 Last Updated At：10:00

ATLANTA (AP) — Mary Favors is still plagued by nightmares from the days her husband beat her, choked her and verbally and sexually abused her. Now, she is in prison for killing him.

Their disagreements often turned physical, and five times he was convicted of abusing her. Then one night in April 2011, court records show, Troy Favors began shouting and hitting her before chasing her to their bedroom.

She quickly closed the door, alone inside, tying the bedroom door with a string because he had kicked it down before. She grabbed a knife in case he did that again, just before he burst in. When she told him to back off, he refused and, according to Favors, he jumped on the knife. Prosecutors accused her of stabbing him.

“It happened so fast,” Favors, 58, told The Associated Press from prison in Georgia, later adding, “I felt my life was at risk.”

Between 74% and 95% of incarcerated women have survived domestic abuse or sexual violence, according to the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Many were tried without fair opportunities to prove the scope of the abuse and how it led them to act in self-defense, while others were coerced into crimes, according to advocates, who add that certain laws disproportionately criminalize abused women.

At other times, they say, people simply don’t believe women’s stories, with women of color like Favors who survive abuse especially likely to end up in prison.

But under the Georgia Survivor Justice Act, which passed the state House overwhelmingly with bipartisan support and still awaits Senate consideration ahead of the session’s end this week, abuse survivors could secure early release from prison.

The bill calls for judges to resentence those who are incarcerated and impose shorter sentences on those who are convicted if they can tie their crimes to domestic abuse. It also would expand what can be presented as supporting evidence.

It's all part of a broader move toward reform that has gained momentum nationwide. New York, California, Illinois and Oklahoma have already passed laws intended to reduce sentences for victims of abuse who face charges or were convicted. Missouri, Connecticut and Massachusetts are considering similar legislation.

Facing possible life in prison for charges including murder, Favors pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and three other offenses. She received the maximum of 20 years in prison for the killing and five years of probation for having the knife. Many incarcerated survivors are serving life sentences.

“There’s this blurring of the lines between victim and suspect when girls and women are criminalized for the sexual violence that they experience,” said Rebecca Epstein, executive director of the Center on Gender Justice and Opportunity at Georgetown Law.

After her husband's death, Favors transported the body and left it elsewhere. Research shows similar snap decisions by victims in response to trauma can taint how jurors, judges and prosecutors see defendants, said Leigh Goodmark, a University of Maryland law professor who studies the criminalization of domestic violence.

Goodmark hopes efforts like Georgia’s will help judges and prosecutors “see that victimization is much more complicated than they want it to be."

Current Georgia law is strict about how lawyers can bring in evidence of domestic abuse, said Ellie Williams, legal director with the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She is spearheading the legislation, which would loosen some restrictions, and said the strict guidelines reflect outdated understandings of abuse.

“Things that we don’t always take seriously matter, and we explicitly and implicitly require things that don't adequately allow for the actual dynamics of abuse to be considered,” Williams said.

Under Georgia's bill, if a judge determines family violence, dating violence or child abuse contributed to a crime with a minimum sentence of life in prison, the judge, in most cases, would have to impose a sentence of 10 to 30 years in prison.

For other felonies, judges would not be able to sentence the defendant to more than half of the maximum sentence they could have otherwise gotten. People in prison could also request resentencing under the rules if the act ultimately becomes law.

Georgia’s bill would also make it easier for courts to consider domestic violence in cases involving self-defense or victims being coerced into committing a crime, which is common.

The bill is “not a get out of jail free card,” said bill sponsor Rep. Stan Gunter, a Republican.

The day the House voted on it, several district attorneys contacted their representatives to oppose it.

Randy McGinley, district attorney for the Alcovy Judicial Circuit, said during a committee hearing that families may become upset if the person who killed their loved one walks free from prison early. The Prosecuting Attorneys' Council, which McGinley was representing, is taking a neutral stance after persuading lawmakers to make some changes.

Under New York's 2019 bill, The Survivors Justice Project said at least 71 people have received a reduction and 85 applications were denied.

A few have gone home under The Oklahoma Survivors' Act, passed last year. But a bill failed this year that could have provided some sentencing relief for women who were convicted under Oklahoma's “failure to protect” law for not protecting children from their abusers. They often receive sentences equal to or more than their abusers.

Born in New Jersey, Favors liked to ice skate and go to school when she was young. She spoke of feeling unloved as an adopted child and found it hard to leave men even when they treated her badly.

Favors tears up when she talks about her husband, whom she still loves. She drove him to work every day and wishes they had had resources to overcome mental health battles and their drug addictions.

Now drug-free, Favors dreams of working at a battered women's shelter. In prison, she earned her high school diploma and took classes about abuse. To heal, she prays, fasts, reads her Bible and meets with others in a prison ministry, sharing what God did for them.

"I survived from my abuse," Favors answers. “I could have been the one that was dead.”

Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon.

Dow plunges 2,000 as sell-off for markets slams into a scarier gear following Trump's tariffs

2025-04-05 02:56 Last Updated At：03:00

NEW YORK (AP) — The sell-off for financial markets worldwide is slamming into an even higher, scarier gear on Friday.

The S&P 500 tumbled 5.7%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 2,054 points as Wall Street's worst crisis since the COVID crash deepens. The Nasdaq composite was down 5.5%, with a little more than an hour remaining in trading, after China matched President Donald Trump’s big raise in tariffs in an escalating trade war. Not even a better-than-expected report on the U.S. job market, which is usually the economic highlight of each month, was enough to stop the slide.

So far there are few, if any, winners in financial markets from the trade war. European stocks dropped roughly 5%. The price of crude oil tumbled to its lowest level since 2021. Other basic building blocks for economic growth, such as copper, also saw prices slide on worries the trade war will weaken the global economy.

China’s response to U.S. tariffs caused an immediate acceleration of losses in markets worldwide. The Commerce Ministry in Beijing said it would respond to the 34% tariffs imposed by the U.S. on imports from China with its own 34% tariff on imports of all U.S. products beginning April 10. The United States and China are the world’s two largest economies.

Markets briefly recovered some of their losses after the release of Friday morning’s U.S. jobs report, which said employers accelerated their hiring by more last month than economists expected. It’s the latest signal that the U.S. job market has remained relatively solid through the start of 2025, and it’s been a linchpin keeping the U.S. economy out of a recession.

But that jobs data was backward looking, and the fear hitting financial markets is about what’s to come.

“The world has changed, and the economic conditions have changed,” said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock.

The central question is: Will the trade war cause a global recession? If it does, stock prices will likely need to come down even more than they have already. The S&P 500 is down roughly 16% from its record set in February.

Trump seemed unfazed. From Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida, he headed to his golf course a few miles away after writing on social media that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH.”

Much will depend on how long Trump’s tariffs stick and what kind of retaliations other countries deliver. Some of Wall Street is holding onto hope that Trump will lower the tariffs after prying out some “wins” from other countries following negotiations. Otherwise, many say a recession looks likely.

Trump has said Americans may feel “some pain” because of tariffs, but he has also said the long-term goals, including getting more manufacturing jobs back to the United States, are worth it. On Thursday, he likened the situation to a medical operation, where the U.S. economy is the patient.

“For investors looking at their portfolios, it could have felt like an operation performed without anesthesia,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.

But Jacobsen also said the next surprise for investors could be how quickly tariffs get negotiated down. “The speed of recovery will depend on how, and how quickly, officials negotiate,” he said.

Vietnam said its deputy prime minister would visit the U.S. for talks on trade, while the head of the European Commission has vowed to fight back. Others have said they were hoping to negotiate with the Trump administration for relief.

Trump criticized China's retaliation on Friday, saying on his Truth Social platform that “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED - THE ONE THING THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO!”

On Wall Street, stocks of companies that do lots of business in China fell to some of the sharpest losses.

DuPont dropped 11.7% after China said its regulators are launching an anti-trust investigation into DuPont China group, a subsidiary of the chemical giant. It’s one of several measures targeting American companies and in retaliation for the U.S. tariffs.

GE Healthcare got 13.8% of its revenue last year from the China region, and it fell 12.7%.

In the bond market, Treasury yields continued their sharp drop as worries rise about the strength of the U.S. economy. The yield on the 10-year Treasury dropped to 3.99% from 4.06% late Thursday and from roughly 4.80% early this year. That’s a major move for the bond market.

The Federal Reserve could cut its main interest rate to relax the pressure on the economy, as it was doing late last year before pausing in 2025. But it may have less freedom to move than it would like.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in written remarks being delivered in Arlington, Virginia that tariffs could also drive up expectations for inflation. That could be even more damaging than high inflation itself, because it can drive behavior that begins a vicious cycle that only worsens inflation. U.S. households have already said they’re bracing for sharp increases to their bills.

“Our obligation is to keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored and to make certain that a one-time increase in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem,” Powell said.

That could indicate a hesitance to cut rates because lower rates can give inflation more fuel.

In stock markets abroad, Germany’s DAX lost 5%, France’s CAC 40 dropped 4.3% and Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 2.8%.

AP Writers Jiang Junzhe, Huizhong Wu and Matt Ott contributed.