A Minnesota appeals court has reversed the conviction of a woman who emptied a handgun into her alleged abusive boyfriend, picked up another and emptied that one too.
32-year-old Stephanie Clark was convicted of the murder of Don Juan Butler last year and sentenced to 25 years in prison with 124 days of credit for time served for the March 2020 shooting. She has been in custody ever since, even after the court’s reversal, according to her trial lawyer, Eric Doolittle of the Appelman Law Firm.
The case made national headlines when Hennepin County prosecutors alleged she shot Butler to death because she wanted him to “stop talking,” but her defense argued there was much more to the shooting than that.
Clark was covered in bruises at the time of her arrest, some of which hadn’t fully formed by the time she found herself in a county jail cell, according to her lawyers.
While she told detectives she wanted Butler to stop talking, she told a neighbor before police arrived, “I shot him because he hit me,” according to the criminal complaint. Police found Butler with “numerous bullet holes on his back, side and back of his head.”
“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,” Doolittle said. “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.”
Despite evidence of extensive and ongoing domestic violence, the court rejected her defense’s argument that Clark suffered from “battered woman syndrome,” and jurors convicted her of second-degree murder Oct. 14, 2021, after just four hours of deliberations.
The two met on the Plenty of Fish dating app, and Butler, a felon, moved into her apartment and “almost immediately” began a pattern of abusive and controlling behavior, her attorney wrote in court filings.
Butler wouldn’t let her leave her own apartment without permission, beat her, cut her off from her friends and family and 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. He held a gun to her head at least once there.
On the night of Butler’s death, he ordered her to the kneeling spot and punched her in the face, according to court filings.
“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.”
And he 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.”
It was a matter of her life or his, he argued.
“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.”
Clark testified that she was scared for her life and for her son, but 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.”
The judge’s instructions, therefore, imbalanced the proceedings unfairly toward conviction, according to Clark’s attorneys. 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.”
The law requires more nuance, the appellate court ruled, finding that, under the proper definition of “imminent,” Clark’s actions could have been considered reasonable and self-defense.
“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.”
Clark’s future remains uncertain. She is still in custody, and county prosecutors will have a chance to appeal the reversal.
Her legal team plans to file a motion seeking her release next week.
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