The night Marva Wallace shot her husband, he had beaten her, threatened her life, and forced her to perform a sex act while their two-year-old daughter watched. During their year-long marriage, Wallace’s face was always bruised, her eye was perpetually black—“like it was part of my makeup,” she said. Wallace was convicted of murdering her husband in 1985 and sentenced to twenty- seven years to life in a California state prison. However, she was freed in 2002 under the provisions of a newly enacted state law. In January 2002 inmates convicted before the battered woman syndrome was allowed as testimony were permitted one last legal avenue to seek a new trial, have the severity of their offense reduced, or even be released with time served. California Superior Court judge David Wesley ordered a new trial for Marva Wallace. During this trial testimony of her battering...