31-03-2025
Some offenders were victims first; it's time to pass the Second Look Act
Women convicted of crimes related to their gender-based victimization — intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, and trafficking — are oftened sentenced as if they were not victims long before they became criminal defendants.(Photo by)
This week, the Maryland Senate is scheduled to vote on HB 853, the Maryland Second Look Act. The Second Look Act would enable people who have served at least 20 years in prison to ask the court to reconsider sentences that may have seemed appropriate when first handed down but are no longer necessary to safeguard the public. People like our clients.
The Gender, Prison, and Trauma Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law represents incarcerated women convicted of crimes related to their own gender-based victimization—intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, and trafficking. Despite their histories of victimization, the criminal justice system labels our clients offenders, often ignoring that they were victims long before they became criminal defendants.
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Our clients frequently receive very long sentences — for defending themselves against abusive partners, acting under coercion or duress from abusive partners, or because they were unable to prevent their abusive partners from hurting their children. In cases involving felony murder and imputed liability, our clients are sentenced as though they were the people who carried out violent crimes, despite never having harmed anyone. Many of our clients are serving life in prison.
Sentenced to long prison terms, our clients use their time in prison as productively as they can — to seek education, engage in programming, and learn skills that make them employment ready. They do so much programming, in fact, that within a few years, there is nothing left for them to take.
Left to age in prison, our clients develop serious (and expensive to treat) medical issues. They grow old in a place that is not designed to meet the needs of the elderly. They are not dangerous. They are not violent.
Our clients use the limited legal options that are available to them to seek review of their sentences. But most of those processes are focused on legal errors, and so don't take into account a person's programming, growth, or positive institutional record.
The only pure review option, sentence modification, is severely time limited. Under current law, judges can only modify sentences if asked to do so within 90 days of the original sentence and within five years of the sentencing date. Judges are often disinclined to reconsider sentences that close in time to the original ruling and our clients may not have had time to amass the kind of record that might make a judge reconsider a sentence within that short period.
Opponents of the Second Look Act argue that individuals who have been convicted of crimes of violence — the kinds of crimes that generate long sentences — are the 'worst of the worst.' Our clients are far from the worst. They have been convicted of crimes of violence, but they are not violent people. They are mothers and grandmothers, sisters and aunts. They are eager to show their sentencing courts the hard work they have done while incarcerated.
They could be productive members of society if given the opportunity. All they ask is for the chance to make that case in court.
