Stephanie Clark: Murder conviction of Minnesota mom who gunned down abusive boyfriend overturned
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or chat at thehotline.org.
MAPLE GROVE, MINNESOTA: The murder conviction of a Maple Grove mother who unloaded a handgun into her abusive boyfriend and picked up another before emptying it too, has been overturned by a Minnesota appeals court. Stephanie Clark, 32, killed her partner Don Juan Butler in 2020 and has been in prison ever since.
Hennepin County prosecutors claimed Stephanie killed her boyfriend because she wanted him to "stop talking," but her defense argued that the incident was about much more than that.
READ MORE
What crime is Stephanie Clark accused of?
Stephanie Clark was found guilty of the murder of Don Juan Butler last year and sentenced to 25 years in prison, with credit for 124 days served in March 2020. According to her lawyers, Clark was covered in bruises, some of which were not fully formed, at the time of her arrest when she found herself in a county jail cell.
Although she told detectives that she wanted her boyfriend to "stop talking," Stephanie reportedly informed a neighbor before the shooting that "I shot him because he hit me," according to the criminal complaint, reports Fox News. Police found Butler with "numerous bullet holes on his back, side and back of his head."
What did Stephanie Clark's lawyer say?
"She's the victim of domestic abuse, and it's awful abuse, kneeling, taking beatings, putting a gun to her head, living in that kind of fear, but she loves him," Stephanie's trial lawyer, Eric Doolittle of the Appelman Law Firm told the outlet. "The idea that she just got up after all these sustained beatings — she just got up and shot him to shut him up — is ridiculous."
Court rejected defense's argument
The court turned down Stephanie's defense argument that she suffered from "battered woman syndrome," despite providing evidence of extensive and ongoing domestic violence. The jurors convicted her of second-degree murder on October 14, 2021, after just four hours of deliberations.
Stephanie Clark's abusive relationship
Stephanie met Butler, a felon, on the Plenty of Fish dating app. He moved into her apartment and "almost immediately" began a pattern of abusive and controlling behavior, her attorney wrote in court filings. The woman was not allowed to leave the apartment without his permission and was subjected to repeated beatings and was forced to stay away from her friends and family members. The deranged partner declared a "kneeling spot" in her apartment where he would order her to get on her knees and beat and abuse her, according to her attorneys. She was held at gunpoint at least once there.
What happened on the night of the murder?
According to court filings, on the night of Butler's death, Stephanie was punched in her face after he ordered her to the kneeling spot. "Wait for tonight," Butler told her, according to court filings. "Wait for [your son] to go to bed. I’m going to break your ribs." Butler was pacing in and out of the bedroom, where the couple kept five loaded handguns.
"He had been pacing with one of the guns that night," Doolittle said. "She grabs a gun, she shoots him, she grabs one of those other guns and quickly shoots him. The monster can still hurt her." Dolittle argued that it was a matter of her life or his.
"It’s a tragedy, don’t get me wrong, but what I'm saying is, if this was a cop, in close quarters, they would keep firing until there was no way that that person could kill them," he said. "And we would all say that that’s reasonable."
Why was Stephanie Clark's conviction overturned?
Stephanie testified that she was afraid for her life and that of her son. When the jury asked the court to clarify the legal definition of imminent danger, the court advised that "to fear imminent great bodily harm or death means that the person must fear that such harm will occur immediately."
"The legal question is whether you have an imminent fear, a fear of imminent harm, and whether harm is imminent in the domestic abuse context," explained Caitlinrose Fisher, a partner at Forsgren Fisher, the law firm that assisted in Clark's appeal. "The jury has to take account of the history and patterns of abuse and control and all of the unpredictability."
According to the Stephanie's attorneys, the judge's instructions, therefore, imbalanced the proceedings unfairly toward conviction and the appellate court agreed. "We are persuaded that the district court materially misstated the law because it incorrectly instructed the jury that ‘imminent’ means that ‘such harm will occur immediately,’" the reversal states. "There is no legal basis for this erroneous instruction."
"I hope it leads to some positive changes in how victims of severe domestic abuse are prosecuted," said Doolittle, whose objections to the jury instructions went nowhere in Clark's initial trial. "I think if she hadn’t done what she did that night, she'd be dead. And then she'd be another statistic, and the statistics aren’t good," he added.