She was sentenced to life in prison. A new law set her free after 23 years.

Nicole Boynton has endured some tough days throughout her life.

September 30, 1999, was one of them.

An argument with her then-boyfriend, Ronnie Moss II, escalated from a verbal altercation to a physical one, and she was on the receiving end of punches from the man who claimed to love her.

They shared a 9-month-old son, Romello, a townhome, and a life.

Boynton had endured trauma and sexual abuse from others throughout her childhood, and then Moss came along. That September day, she made the split-second decision to protect herself in a way that she hadn’t before.

The fight escalated to the point where a neighboring group of middle-school-aged girls overheard the commotion and knocked on the door.

Moss answered and told them everything was fine, but it wasn’t. 

After they left, he returned to confront Boynton who, at this point, had retrieved a steak knife from the kitchen.

He stepped toward her and grabbed her arm. During the struggle, she drove the knife into Moss’s chest.

It would be the last time she ever suffered physical abuse from him. The knife pierced Moss’ heart. He died.

“September 30, 1999, was one of the worst days of my life,” Boynton said. “It was one of the days that I lost somebody that I really loved and I cared about and I felt like I didn’t know how to save him anymore.”

Domestic violence cases that end in victim retaliation against their abusers, resulting in death, aren’t always as black and white as they may seem. For instance, it took more than two years before prosecutors indicted Boynton on charges of felony murder and aggravated assault.

Her case sits inside a national pattern advocates have documented for years: Women say they were trying to protect themselves or a loved one when they retaliated, while prosecutors frame them as violent aggressors and seek long sentences anyway. In courtrooms, the question often becomes narrow — did she kill him? — while the context that shaped that moment gets treated like background noise.

That narrowing lands hardest on Black women.

Ellie Williams, legal director at the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said she has watched that pattern play out in case after case through her work representing incarcerated survivors. Her office leads the coalition’s Justice for Incarcerated Survivors program, providing them with post-conviction representation and pushing courts to look again at convictions tied to abuse. 

“It is really rare that my Black female clients are given any sort of leniency in sentencing,” Williams said. “If they can be maxed out, they’re being maxed out.”

That same story is one reason Michigan advocates are pressing for their own survivor justice legislation.

Natalie Holbrook-Combs, program director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Michigan Criminal Justice Program, said the organization has advocated alongside imprisoned people in her state for decades, with a newer “hyper focus” on women serving long and life sentences. 

“In Michigan, we have about 33,000 people in prison right now and 1,750 of them are women,” she said, explaining that women’s needs get ignored because the system was built “for and by men.”

Holbrook-Combs said the numbers inside Michigan’s women’s prisons show racial concentration at the extreme end of punishment. According to reports she has read she said 191 women are serving life with parole in Michigan, including 172 serving life without parole, and “83 are Black.” She said more than 500 women are serving 15 years or more and “of those women, 250 of them are Black.”.

She also described watching five domestic-violence-related clemency cases move through Michigan’s judicial appeals process, only to be denied after public hearings that required women to relive their trauma. 

“Three of those five women were Black women,” said Holbrook-Combs. 

Marta Nelson of the Vera Institute of Justice said the organization’s sentencing work exists because “you really aren’t going to be able to end mass incarceration without addressing how we sentence people in this country. Michigan’s long sentences make it a critical place to push reform.” 

Erin M. Ross, also with Vera’s sentencing initiative, said nationwide research consistently shows incarcerated women have extraordinarily high rates of victimization. “Some reports say at least 86 percent of incarcerated women have reported sexual violence,” Ross said. “Seventy-seven percent? report partner violence and around 60 percent report caregiver abuse.” 

“At its core, my research shows that Black women who survive violence often enter the criminal legal system already socially, systemically and legally disappeared,” said Breea Willingham, Ph.D, associate professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. “A pattern I identify through my framework, Black Feminist Disappearance Theory, which explains how harm against Black women is routinely minimized, dismissed or reframed in ways that erase their victimization. That disappearance shapes what happens at every stage, from police response to charges, trial and sentencing. In simple terms, the system often treats Black women’s survival as criminal behavior.”

In Georgia, Williams said, murder historically carried a mandatory minimum life sentence — leaving almost no room for a court to account for domestic violence as a driving force in how a survivor responded. Under Georgia’s Survivor Justice Act, signed into law last year, that doorway opened wider: the law created routes for abuse evidence to matter at trial, at sentencing and after conviction through resentencing. 

Boynton’s story shows why that matters.

She was 18, exhausted from trying to keep peace inside a home where her body and safety never belonged to her. She told it straight, the way you do when the details have never left you.

She described a relationship where the rules changed constantly andwhere violence was the predictable ending of ordinary moments. 

“If I didn’t pay him enough attention or if I didn’t do something a certain way, I already knew I was going to get smacked or punched,” she said.

That day, she was nursing her son when Moss walked in and erupted.

“Before I knew it, he snatched Romello off my breast and threw him against the wall,” she said. “And we immediately started fighting.”

Her townhome windows were open — she liked them open while she cleaned — and the noise carried. When Moss got distracted by the three neighborhood girls  who knocked on the door.

“When they knocked on the door, it was like he instantly stopped,” Boynton said. “It’s like it took him out of his trance.”

She ran upstairs to her son.

“He was still breathing, but he was unconscious,” she said.

In the seconds that followed, Boynton said, her mind went to escape. 

“In the kitchen, he chased me around the island and I got to the nearest drawer that I could and I hurried up and I grabbed a knife,” she said. “And so I’m thinking in my mind, if he see the knife, he’ll stop, but he didn’t care that I had a knife.”

Boynton said she pleaded.

“Please,” she recalled telling him. “Somebody’s gonna get hurt. Please, just stop.”

She said Moss grabbed her arm, overpowering her, twisting the knife toward her body.

“When he grabbed my arm, I knew I was gonna lose my life,” she said. “The knife was pointing at me, and all I was trying to do now is not get hit with the knife.”

Then: a swing, an attempt to break free, Moss falling back.

Boynton called 911.

On the tape, she said, she told the operator they’d had an altercation. She said she stabbed him — then corrected herself, trying to explain the force of his grip, her loss of control over her own arm. She said the wound looked small beside his heart, but blood pumped fast. She pressed a baby blanket to his chest. 

She says Moss grabbed her arm and apologized as he died.

When police arrived, Boynton said, they pushed her aside.

“I’m yelling at the police,” she said, “because I was applying pressure to him versus them just looking at him.”

Boynton said officers placed her in handcuffs with only a T-shirt on, then questioned her at the Marietta police station. She said she didn’t ask for a lawyer because her grandmother raised her to believe the truth would protect her.

“They waited to get all of the questions out of me,” she said. “And as soon as I finished, then they tell me that he died and I fell out.”

What followed, she said, was an outcome that felt decided from the beginning.

“They had already had it in their minds who to charge,” she said.

Prosecutors indicted her in 2001. The next year, her case went to trial and a jury convicted her of felony murder and aggravated assault. She says she later learned there had been a plea offer for 15 years — information she says she didn’t have when it mattered.

Her sentence: life. 

The legal framing of cases like Boynton’s often ignores a truth that advocates say is central: survivors do not enter the criminal legal system as blank slates. Large shares of incarcerated women report past victimization, including intimate partner violence and sexual violence — trauma that can shape pathways into criminalized survival. 

Williams said Georgia’s law was built to force the system to confront that context without treating it like an excuse or a footnote. She described “criminalized survival” as acts undertaken to stay safe, but that lead to incarceration: fighting back against an abusive partner, being coerced into crimes under threat, or being charged with “failure to protect” when an abusive partner harms a child and the mother is punished for what she could not stop.

That last category hits hard in public conversation because it cuts against the cultural script — the myth that a mother can always control an abusive man, that danger is something you can simply choose to avoid. 

Williams calls it what it is: another way the system criminalizes survival.

Black women are incarcerated at markedly higher rates than White women, a disparity that shapes who gets punished hardest when courts and prosecutors decide whose survival “counts.” The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., reports that Black women are imprisoned at about 1.7 times the rate of White women (rates per 100,000), even though women remain a smaller share of the total prison population than men.

The harm shows up inside women’s prisons in a way that’s hard to ignore: incarcerated women are overwhelmingly survivors of violence. 

Because the system does not reliably track “criminalized survival” in official sentencing data, some of the clearest numbers come from large-scale survey work that asked incarcerated women directly what happened. In a 2020 analysis for The Appeal, reporter Justine van der Leun coded 608 survey responses from women imprisoned on murder and manslaughter charges across 22 states and found that at least 30% said they were incarcerated for trying to protect themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence. 

If those findings reflect the broader population, the analysis estimates — conservatively — that more than 4,400 women and girls could be serving lengthy sentences for acts of survival tied to violence and abuse. 

That same survey work also matters for the focus on Black women because it shows who is sitting in these cages when “self-defense” gets treated like first-degree intent, according to experts. Among respondents, 32.7 percent identified as Black. The reporting also notes that race and socioeconomic circumstances repeatedly surfaced in how women described being charged, prosecuted and sentenced. Those numbers don’t claim a single national “Black women self-defense sentencing” rate — because the system rarely labels cases that way. But they do document, at scale, that Black women are a significant share of the women describing survival-driven convictions inside the most severe homicide categories. 

“The Black women’s prison narratives I’ve studied repeatedly show they suffered prolonged abuse that was ignored by the system and their failed attempts to seek help,” Willingham said. “And at trial, context surrounding the women’s actions are often misconstrued or deleted entirely. If states truly want to stop criminalizing survival, reforms must expand how self-defense is recognized, allow complete evidence of prior abuse and invest in trauma-informed training and defense resources. Also, limit unchecked prosecutorial power.”

The Georgia Survivor Justice Act attempts to change outcomes at three points: trial, sentencing and post-conviction. Williams said the law modifies legal defenses — including self-defense and coercion — so lawyers can present abuse evidence in a way jurors are permitted to meaningfully consider in their decisions. It creates a mitigation framework that can move sentencing out from under mandatory minimums. And it allows retroactive resentencing, giving people already behind bars a way to return to court and ask for a new sentence that accounts for abuse as a significant contributing factor. 

That retroactive piece is where Boynton’s case broke open.

On January 5, a judge in Cobb County vacated her life sentence and resentenced her to time served, making her the first person released under Georgia’s new law. 

Boynton said she never stopped pushing paper — letters, requests, documents. She said she wrote a judge so powerfully early on that it helped her secure bond while her case dragged on.

“I didn’t know I was a writer until I wrote something so deep to the judge,” she said.

Inside prison, she said, incarceration stripped her privacy and dignity — telling her when to eat, when to move, how to live — while her mind stayed fixed on a future she couldn’t yet see.

“My body was there physically,” she said, “my mind would never let me stay there.”

She described cycling through multiple prisons as facilities closed and reopened — each transfer another disruption, another reminder that women’s incarceration in America is treated as an afterthought inside systems built for men. 

She also described health harm she connects to confinement: “Every prison that I’ve been to has something wrong with the water,” she said, describing serious illness and surgery near the end of her sentence.

Then came court — and a judge who looked at the record and said what Boynton had been saying for decades.

“You should have never been in prison,” Boynton recalled Judge Angela Z. Brown telling her, as the life sentence was lifted.

Boynton’s son appeared on Zoom.

“My son always tell me, ‘Mom, I love you. You’re my queen,’” she said.

Boynton still speaks of Moss as someone who was not “always a bad person.” She still marks his birthday at times. She grieves and remembers and holds contradiction, because real life keeps contradiction.

The law does not ask survivors to become perfect victims. It asks courts to become more honest about what abuse does to decision-making, danger and time.

Advocates see what has happened in Georgia as part of a broader shift. States including New York and Oklahoma have some of the most robust survivor sentencing laws, and Georgia’s is among the most expansive in how early it can operate in a case, according to Williams. 

Other states are moving, too. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation on January 21 aimed at fairer sentencing and record relief for survivors, a pairing advocates say is essential for rebuilding life after incarceration. 

“For far too long, Black women survivors have been punished for surviving,” said Monifa Bandele, chief strategy officer at MomsRising. She pointed to survivor-centered reforms that treat coercive control and domestic violence as realities courts must weigh — and that recognize how a record can lock someone out of housing and employment long after a sentence ends.

The throughline across these reforms is not mercy. It is accuracy.

Because the current system has long demanded that women fit a narrow mold of innocence to be believed — and Black women rarely get the benefit of that mold. They are read as older than they are, tougher than they feel, more responsible for the violence done to them than the person who did it. They are expected to absorb harm quietly, then punished when they refuse.

Boynton named that imbalance in her own case.

“Back then, Cobb County was predominantly White,” she said. “You could have people do the same thing and they get involuntary manslaughter, versus I get a life sentence.”

She said she had no prior record. She spent three years out on bond without trouble. None of it moved the system.

“It was like they said, ‘She doesn’t know nothing about the law so we gonna get her,’” she said. “And that’s exactly what they did.”

Georgia’s Survivor Justice Act did not give her back 23 years.

It gave her back breath.

And it offered a blueprint that — if other states follow — could mean the next Black woman who survives does not have to spend decades proving she deserved to live.