Who Gets to Kill in Self-Defense?
The first fight Anita Ford remembers having with her husband, Barry Ford, was over dishes. They’d been married only a few years. She turned 18 three weeks before their wedding; five months later, she gave birth to their first child, a boy named Robert. On this night, they’d ordered takeout; she’d put the few dishes they’d used in the dishwasher, but her husband didn’t like her to leave dirty dishes at night. She remembers him screaming at her, then punching her over and over on her right arm and shoulder, and the brutality was so shocking, she froze. If she could just learn to do it his way, he told her, then he wouldn’t be forced to hit her. He promised he wouldn’t do it again. He was so terribly sorry.
But it only escalated. He dragged her by the hair and arm through dog feces she’d failed to clean up. While she was holding a glass, he squeezed her hand until the glass broke. He timed her trips to the grocery store. She remembers calling the police but officers telling the couple to work it out and leaving. Twice, she said, Mr. Ford gave her a black eye. She said that sometimes he’d hit one of the kids, most often their son, Robert, and then she would attack her husband to turn his attention onto her and off their son. One time, when Robert was jumping on his bed, Mr. Ford pushed him, and he fell into the dresser and required stitches. Mr. Ford kept their daughter at home to ensure Ms. Ford wouldn’t tell anyone in the emergency room how Robert’s injury happened. Ms. Ford told me that they both did drugs. (Though the details of the abuse come from Ms. Ford, I corroborated the broader pattern with Ms. Ford’s daughter and one of her sisters and with a former babysitter who said that she remembers Ms. Ford with a black eye and that “those kids were scared of him.” Mr. Ford’s family has always maintained he was not abusive, and his sister, Debra Gomes, who also babysat the Fords, told me she never saw evidence of abuse.)
At one point, Ms. Ford fled to a friend’s house. Her husband begged her to return, promising he’d attend marriage counseling sessions. But after she returned, he told the therapist that she was the problem.
