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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://theintercept.com/2021/10/08/maddesyn-george-self-defense-rape/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=theintercept">theintercept.com</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Maddesyn George Killed Her Alleged Rapist. Prosecutors Blocked Her Self-Defense Claims.</h1>
<div class="gmail-PostByline-names"><a class="gmail-PostByline-link" rel="author" href="https://theintercept.com/staff/victoria-law/"><span>Victoria Law</span></a><span></span> - O<span class="gmail-PostByline-date"><span>ctober 8 2021</span></span>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>No one disputes</u>
that, on July 12, 2020, Maddesyn George shot and killed Kristopher
“Buddy” Graber as he reached through the window of the parked car where
George was seated. It’s the preceding 24 hours that are at issue in
court.</p>
<p>The arguments between George’s defense team and the U.S. attorney’s
office raise the question of whether, in 2021, a rape survivor has the
right to argue fear for her life and self-defense.</p>
<p>George says that, the previous afternoon when she was at his house,
Graber had threatened her with his gun and then raped her with a
vibrator. He only stopped his assault after she convinced him that she
was hungry and they should eat. Not feeling as if she could leave, she
stayed until he fell asleep. When she left, she took his gun; she also
took his stash of methamphetamine and several thousand dollars in cash.
She later told police that she had decided to take the gun to ensure
that he would not be able to threaten her with it again.</p>
<p>George, a Colville tribal member, lives on Washington’s Colville
reservation. Graber, a white man, lived in Omak, Washington, about 45
miles northwest of the reservation.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“I was afraid he was going to rip me out of the car and start beating me up.”</p></blockquote><div><p>The
day after the alleged rape, according to witness accounts, Graber
searched for George on the Colville reservation with a shotgun, going to
three houses before someone told him where she was. When Graber found
her, George was sitting in a friend’s car. She still had his gun.</p>
<p>“I was afraid he was going to rip me out of the car and start beating
me up,” she told The Intercept. “I’d seen him do that to other
females.”</p>
<p>He tried to reach through the car window to grab her. According to
witness accounts, Graber hit her. She fired the gun through the window,
hitting him in the chest. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.</p>
<p>George was arrested. She told tribal and Okanogan County, Washington,
police that Graber had raped her the previous day. “I felt they didn’t
believe me,” she said. She was not offered nor given a rape exam.
Instead, she was brought to the Spokane County Jail, in Washington,
where she remains today.</p>
<p>The legal system works in binaries, said Leigh Goodmark, director of the <a href="https://www.law.umaryland.edu/Programs-and-Impact/Clinical-Law/Clinics/Gender-Violence/">Gender Violence Clinic</a>
at the University of Maryland law school and author of the forthcoming
“Imperfect Victims: How the Criminal Legal System Punishes Survivors of
Gender-Based Violence.” Goodmark said that instead of perceiving George
as a victim of a crime, several factors led the authorities to instead
view her as a criminal.</p>
<p>“Had Maddesyn not had a previous record,” Goodmark said, “and had she
not stolen the money and the drugs, police and prosecutors would have
likely approached this very differently.”</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“Had
Maddesyn not had a previous record and had she not stolen the money and
the drugs, police and prosecutors would have likely approached this
very differently.”</p></blockquote><div><p>Because
the shooting took place on Washington’s Colville reservation, George was
charged in federal court. Under the Federal Major Crimes Act, crimes,
such as murder and felony assault, that occur on Native territory fall
under federal, rather than tribal, jurisdiction. U.S. Attorney Joseph H.
Harrington charged George with a slew of crimes ranging from robbery to
murder. Stephen Graham, George’s attorney, argues that George’s case is
one revolving around sexual assault and self-defense. (The U.S.
attorney’s office declined to comment for this story.)</p>
<p>No national or even statewide data is kept on how many women are
imprisoned or facing charges for defending themselves against sexual or
domestic violence, though studies indicate that experiences of abuse are
pervasive among incarcerated women. A <a href="https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/Publications/Women_Pathways_to_Jail.pdf">2012 report </a>by
the Department of Justice found that 86 percent of women in jails had
experienced sexual violence before incarceration. According to the
Justice Department, Native people (of all genders) <a href="https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/otj/docs/american_indians_and_crime.pdf">experience sexual assault</a>
at a higher rate than people of other races, including at 2.5 times the
rate of white people. Nearly four of five Native victims of rape or
sexual assault described their assailant as white.</p>
<p>Lack of <a href="https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/04/22/native/">uniform data and reporting</a>
make it difficult to know how many Native people are imprisoned, but
studies indicate that they are disproportionately incarcerated. In
Washington state, for instance, Native Americans make up less than <a href="https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/2010percent/WA_American_Indian_2010.html">2 percent of state residents, </a>but <a href="https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/otj/docs/american_indians_and_crime.pdf">over 5 percent of its prison population</a>.<br></p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/GettyImages-1320002558.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=683" alt="In a 2021 memorial to missing and murdered Indigenous women, thousands of cardboard red dresses were set out on the State Capitol lawn in St. Paul, Minnesota, to represent the history of abuse, neglect, and killings of Native women across the nation." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="452" height="301"></p><p class="gmail-caption">In
a 2021 memorial to missing and murdered Indigenous women, thousands of
cardboard red dresses were set out on the state Capitol lawn in St.
Paul, Minn., to represent the history of abuse, neglect, and killings of
Native women across the nation.</p>
<u>After George said </u>Graber raped her, she did not go to the
police. That’s not unusual. The majority of sexual assaults are not
reported to the police. Only <a href="https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv19.pdf">33.9 percent of sexual assaults</a> were reported to police in 2019, according to the Department of Justice.
<p>At the time of her arrest, George was a 26-year-old single mother
with a 4-month-old daughter. She was using methamphetamine, which Graber
had been supplying for the past three years. Her previous felony
convictions were for drugs and burglary, though the statute for those
convictions was later found unconstitutional. Though she knew of
Graber’s reputation for violence, George had never expected him to rape
her. “We never had a sexual relationship,” she told The Intercept. “He
was my drug dealer and that was it.”</p>
<p>What she did know was that she could not expect help from the police.
When she was a child, her uncle was fatally shot by police while trying
to seek help, she recalled.</p></div><div><p>In more
recent years, George said she was sexually harassed by a deputy at the
Okanogan sheriff’s office, who sent her unwanted messages and pictures
of his genitals. She included these allegations in court exhibits to
drive home why she decided not to report Graber’s assault: She thought
that the police would be unresponsive — the same as before — had she
turned to them.</p>
<p>There was also her own criminal record and continuing substance use.
“I didn’t feel they would listen because of the life I was living,”
George said.</p>
<p>Her fear is not unfounded, said Earth-Feather Sovereign, founder of
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Washington, a nonprofit connected
to the awareness-raising grassroots movement. Sovereign said police
often do not take Indigenous women’s reports of sexual assault or
victimization seriously.</p>
<p>“It has to do with systematic racism,” she said. “A lot of our cases
are being ignored — whether domestic violence, sexual assault or someone
is reported missing or murdered.”</p>
<p>For victims who appear to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol,
she added, police often assume that the person was a willing
participant rather than a victim of sexual assault.</p>
<p>Goodmark, the law professor, agrees. “We have spent literally
billions of dollars training police and prosecutors on various forms of
gender-based violence since the passage of the Violence Against Women
Act and they still can’t see or won’t see victimization claims unless
they come from people they deem to be credible and true victims,” she
said.</p>
<p>George’s race, as well as her substance use and past record, make her
a less credible victim in the eyes of law enforcement — a dynamic
reinforced by the imbalances of justice on tribal lands and off for
members and nonmembers.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“The police aren’t taking our cases seriously.”</p></blockquote><p>Sovereign
pointed to the 1978 Supreme Court decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish
ruling that tribes cannot prosecute nontribal members who commit crimes
on reservations. While the alleged rape occurred outside tribal lands,
George was on the Colville reservation when Graber confronted and struck
her. Had he assaulted her further, Sovereign pointed out, tribal
authorities would have had no ability to arrest or prosecute him and,
based on their history of <a href="https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-feds-fail-to-prosecute-crimes-in-indian-country">declining to prosecute cases on Native lands</a>, federal authorities would likely have done nothing.</p><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/AP21127763886049.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=738" alt="Yvonne Wanrow Swan stands with Colville Confederated Tribe members and others in Kettle Falls, Washignton, during a 2020 gathering in support of a fellow tribal member’s case before the Canadian Supreme Court. Wanrow was the defendant in a case stemming from a 1972 killing that had wide-reaching effects on Washington state jurisprudence in cases involving victims of sexual abuse." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="452" height="326"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Yvonne
Wanrow Swan stands with Colville Confederated Tribe members and others
in Kettle Falls, Wash., during a 2020 gathering in support of a fellow
tribal member’s case before the Canadian Supreme Court. Wanrow was the
defendant in a case stemming from a 1972 killing that had wide-reaching
effects on Washington state jurisprudence involving victims of sexual
abuse.</p><br>
<u>When she first </u>heard about Maddesyn George, Earth-Feather Sovereign said she was reminded of a <a href="https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/state-washington-v-wanrow">landmark case</a> involving her aunt, Yvonne Wanrow Swan.
<p>In 1972, Wanrow, a Colville tribal member, was living with her two
children in Spokane. One August afternoon, her children were at the home
of Shirley Hooper, a family friend. While riding his bicycle, Wanrow’s
11-year-old son encountered a man who tried to drag him into his house.
The boy escaped, but the man, William Wesler, followed the boy to
Hooper’s.</p></div><div><p>Earlier that year,
Hooper’s 7-year-old daughter had been raped, resulting in a sexually
transmitted infection. When Hooper’s daughter saw Wesler, she told her
mother, “He’s the man who did it to me.”</p>
<p>Hooper called the police. Though they had previously arrested Wesler
for molestation, this time, they refused to arrest him. Hooper then
asked Wanrow and other relatives to spend the night. Wanrow brought her
children and her gun for protection.</p>
<p>At 5 in the morning, Wesler, visibly intoxicated, showed up at
Hooper’s house to sort out the allegations. The women demanded that he
leave. In the commotion that ensued, Wanrow turned around at one point
to find Wesler’s imposing figure standing over her. She shot him, he
died, and Wanrow was arrested for murder.</p>
<p>At trial, the judge instructed jurors to consider only what had
happened “at or immediately before the killing.” This excluded both
Wesler’s previous record of sexually abusing children and the testimony
of Hooper’s daughter. Wanrow was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20
years in prison.</p>
<p>An appeal court, however, decided to vacate her conviction and grant
Wanrow a new trial. They found that the judge’s instructions about
self-defense had not allowed the jury to consider the fact that Wesler
was a known child molester, that Wanrow had heard he had previously
raped her friend’s daughter, and that, less than 24 hours earlier, he
had attempted to grab her son. In 1977, the Washington Supreme Court
upheld the vacature.</p></div><div><p>“The
justification for self-defense is to be evaluated in light of all the
facts and circumstances known to the defendant, including those known
substantially before the killing,” the <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/washington/supreme-court/1977/43949-1.html">court declared</a>.
It further stated, “Care must be taken to assure that our self-defense
instructions afford women the right to have their conduct judged in
light of the individual physical handicaps which are the product of sex
discrimination.”</p>
<p>By then, Wanrow had attracted the attention of women’s and Native
American movements, who rallied around her case as one of a woman’s
right to defend herself and her family. They formed defense committees
across the country, raising public interest and legal funds. In 1978,
Wanrow pleaded guilty to manslaughter and assault; the court sentenced
her to five years’ probation.</p>
<p>“There was so much support for her,” said Sovereign, whose mother had
been part of Wanrow’s defense campaign. The court decision on
self-defense had been a huge step forward, Sovereign said: “She was not
only able to create awareness about her situation, but put in place
directions to help all women.”</p>
<p>Now, Sovereign and other grassroots groups have assembled the Campaign to Free Maddesyn George, <a href="https://www.change.org/p/freedom-for-incarcerated-survivor-maddesyn-george?utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=custom_url&recruited_by_id=ed1398d0-94b4-0130-42ea-3c764e044905">urging federal prosecutors</a> to drop the charges against George.<br></p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/10/IMG_4356-Maddesyn-George-e1633644222494.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=438" alt="Maddesyn visits with her family in their first video visit from prison, one year after her incarceration, in July 2021." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="452" height="193"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Maddesyn visits with her family in their first video visit from prison, one year after her incarceration, in July 2021.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Screenshot: Courtesy Jody George</p></div><div><br>
<u>Federal prosecutors aren’t</u><p> showing any signs of an inclination toward leniency, let alone dropping the charges — or even consider leniency.</p>
<p>On July 6, 2021, prosecutors filed a motion to prevent George and her
attorney, Stephen Graham, from including the sexual assault or a theory
of self-defense in his opening statement. Instead, prosecutors espoused
a different motive: that George had stolen Graber’s gun, drugs, and
money, and he was simply trying to retrieve his property when she shot
him. They argued that the passage of time negates a defense that she
shot him in the heat of the moment. They dismissed the link between
Graber’s act and the killing, writing that “an assault with a vibrator
does not justify the use of deadly force one to three days after the
alleged assault.”</p>
<p>“Forcing someone to submit to that at gunpoint is rape,” said Graham,
the attorney. “It’s not ‘an alleged assault with a vibrator.’”</p>
<p>Minimizing the extent of the sexual assault is not unusual, said
Goodmark, the law professor. “Police and prosecutors minimize the harms
that victims describe. They give other readings of the situation,” she
said. “What the prosecutor is telling is a story of robbery by a
drug-addicted Native woman, playing into stereotypes about substance use
and Native people to undermine her claim of self-defense.”</p>
<p>Graber had a known history of violence, including several
convictions, restraining orders, and violations of those restraining
orders for domestic violence. A man who witnessed Graber’s shooting told
police that Graber had been known for beating up women.</p>
<p>On the afternoon that Graber attacked George, he was awaiting trial
for drug and gun charges. He had already been ordered by the courts to
not possess firearms or controlled substances, orders that he had
clearly violated the night before.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“It reinforces the idea that investigators in this country look for perfect victims.”</p></blockquote><div><p>Prosecutors, however, submitted a motion to limit George and her lawyer’s ability to bring up Graber’s own history of violence.</p>
<p>“Because they can ascribe other motives to her, like robbery, the
fact that he had been abusive in the past is not important because they
don’t care about her story that she was sexually assaulted at gunpoint,”
said Goodmark.</p>
<p>By July 26, 2021, George had spent over a year in the Spokane County
Jail. Covid-19 has stopped in-person visits; she could only see her
family, including her now 1-and-a-half-year-old daughter, through the
jail’s video visiting system, which frequently malfunctioned.</p>
<p>Fearing the possibility of a total 43 years in prison convicted in
federal court, George pleaded guilty to possession with intent to
distribute 5 grams or more of methamphetamine and voluntary manslaughter
in Indian country.</p>
<p>Prosecutors filed a motion asking the court to sentence George to 17
years, more than federal sentencing guidelines calling for nine to 11
years. Adding to their initial theory of robbery, they argued that, by
taking Graber’s drugs, George was engaged in drug trafficking. The
allegation became central to their push for harsh sentencing: “She
discharged a firearm pursuant to that offense and caused a death so that
she could keep and even hide the drugs she stole from Graber.”</p>
<p>Graham, on the other hand, insists that this is about sexual assault
and self-defense. He noted that law enforcement — from the initial
investigators to the prosecutors — focused on the allegations of drug
theft rather than George’s report of rape.</p>
<p>“It reinforces the idea that investigators in this country look for
perfect victims,” he said. “If you’re on the margins of society — if you
struggle with drug abuse — you’re not able to avail yourself of
self-defense in the eyes of the law. Self-defense is only for the NRA
members who are in the rotary club with the police chief, not for a sex
worker or homeless person or drug addict. Everybody has the right to
self-defense.”</p>
<p>On October 20, a federal judge will decide George’s fate. George
plans to address the court directly about what happened last July. She
said, “My hope is that they’ll listen to me and understand that he did
this to me.”</p></div></div></div></div>
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