Summary
The number of Rosemary Dyers still behind bars is unknown. About 12,000 women are currently incarcerated for homicide offenses nationally, said Debbie Mukamal, the executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School and the director of the Regilla Project, a three-year effort to study the frequency with which women in the United States are imprisoned for killing their abusers. Small studies, including one in Canada, suggest that 65% of women serving a life sentence for murdering their intimate partners had been abused by them before the offense. The link between abuse and violent crime was underscored by grim statistics in a 1999 U.S. Department of Justice report showing that a quarter to a third of incarcerated women had been abused as juveniles and a quarter to almost half as adults.
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