Her mother, Lyly Maughan, is sitting next to her best friend, Heather Savage, who is the foster mother to her daughters. The girls were aged one and two when Fri killed their father with a single stab wound. Fri’s three brothers and other family members are sitting together looking nervous in the public gallery. Their hope is that Fri will walk free today and be reunited with her children. She has not seen them since March 2020, when Covid prevented prison visits.

Fri was convicted of murder six and a half years ago and jailed for life. But she is back in court because that ruling was quashed after new evidence came to light, and a retrial ordered. Her lawyers are convinced that Fri has served her time and doesn’t pose a danger to anyone.

Her case is the perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with the criminal justice system when it comes to domestic violence: a misunderstanding of coercive relationships, a misreading of abuse, victim blaming, excusing the perpetrator. And as recent research shows, failures by criminal justice agencies to provide protection to women almost always precedes domestic homicide, with women overwhelmingly the victims. So, this case comes back to trial at the perfect time to assess whether the domestic abuse bill has made a blind bit of difference to what happens in the courts and in women’s homes.

In a separate part of the public gallery sit the cousins and family members of the deceased, throwing hostile glances at Fri and her family. The police are also there, in case of any trouble between the two families from Toxteth.

Fri killed her partner, Kyle Farrell, during a violent row in which he had attempted to strangle her. She had been out visiting a friend and when she got back Kyle complained that she was later than he expected. A neighbour heard Fri screaming for help and, when they entered the house, saw “a lot of blood” and Kyle on the floor. In a panic, Fri told the neighbour a stranger must have come in and attacked him

The young couple, both 21 at the time, had known each other since school and had been in a relationship for five years. This fateful night was the climax of those five years of abuse. Kyle raped and attacked Fri on numerous occasions during their years together. Lyly often heard arguments between the couple, including one that ended with Kyle shouting that Fri should “go and get raped”.

Fri’s two daughters were born just ten months apart, the first when she was 19, the second 20. She had terminated several other pregnancies, telling Heather that they were a result of force and “not made of love”.  I knew something was going on,” says Lyly. “One time, she came over and her face was a terrible state, it was covered in bruises, but she gave excuse after excuse, saying one of the kids threw a bottle at her.”

However, she didn’t tell anyone in authority about the violence, in keeping with a largely unwritten code in the black community of Liverpool that you don’t “grass”.

She maintained that pretence when the police arrested her, assuming that Kyle would survive, and her children be removed if she made allegations of domestic abuse — something she had seen happen to many young women in her working-class community. It was only when she was told that Kyle had died, and the police said they believed she was a victim of domestic violence, that Fri eventually provided an accurate account of events.

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Despite that evidence, in May 2015, a jury in that same Liverpool court, and before that same judge, convicted Fri of Kyle’s murder. Her family was deeply unhappy. They felt the legal representation had failed to show the impact of the abuse Fri had suffered. So shortly after the conviction, Fri’s uncle contacted Justice for Women, which arranged a new legal team to explore grounds of appeal. Harriet Wistrich, the solicitor who had represented Sally Challen, took up the case. She was shocked to see that Fri’s previous legal team had failed to obtain any evidence exploring the impact of the history of domestic abuse on her mental health.

It takes a long time for victims of abuse to feel safe enough to talk about it to a psychiatrist. In particular, Fri was terrified of disclosing that she had been raped when she was 15 by a family friend. It was only after spending many months working with a counsellor specialising in domestic violence that Fri was able to open up.

The resulting psychiatric and psychological report set out the extent and nature of the sexual, physical and psychological abuse that Fri had suffered, concluding that Fri was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which made her hypervigilant in the face of further violence and may have caused her to lose control when threated with violence. The experts also noted that PTSD can cause “dissociation”, which may have explained why Fri could not remember stabbing Kyle, only the blood and panic afterwards.

Fri’s new lawyers also instructed a pathologist to closely examine mug-shot photographs of Fri taken by police shortly after her arrest for murder. The pathologist concluded that the visible bruise marks to her neck were probably caused by strangulation, consistent with Fri’s account of having been throttled prior to her grabbing a knife and stabbing Kyle. Had this evidence been disclosed by the police at the time of her original trial, Fri may not have ever been convicted of murder.

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Fri’s lawyers were convinced they had a solid case to appeal. But an application for permission to appeal was dismissed in February 2018. The application was then renewed before three judges, who noted that this was a “paradigm case of coercive control” and ordered the appeal to go ahead. The Crown Prosecution Service commissioned its own psychiatric and psychological evidence which agreed with the diagnosis of PTSD. However, the Crown opposed the appeal. The case eventually went to a full Court of Appeal hearing in December 2020, at which point the court quashed her murder conviction and ordered a retrial.

Fri’s lawyers wrote immediately to the CPS, indicating that Fri was willing to plead guilty to manslaughter, a lesser offence than murder. This was despite evidence supporting self-defence which, if successful at trial, would lead to a full acquittal. But the CPS rejected repeated requests to drop the murder charge. Eventually, the case was prepared for a retrial on murder to begin on 17 May.

On 18 May, the CPS agreed to accept a change of plea from guilty to manslaughter without intent. Fri readily agreed, fearing a hostile jury could reconvict her of murder despite the additional evidence. The case was adjourned for sentencing until 21 May.

I was there last week in Liverpool Crown Court last week to witness Mr Justice Dove sentence Fri for manslaughter, following a six-year battle for justice. There was, also, a separate offence to consider. Last year, when prisoners had been confined to their cells for 23-and-a-half hours a day during lockdown, Fri illicitly obtained a mobile phone to keep in touch with her children. She also removed a blade from her Bic razor, which she used to make picture frames for her girls.

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When sentencing, the judge told Fri to stand and addressed her sternly, more so than in other cases I have observed where the female defendant has been cleared of murder. Looking over at the row of family members of the deceased I wondered if the judge’s harsh tone was for their benefit.

He gave her 10 years for manslaughter, with an additional nine months for the possession of the illicit items and ordered the security staff standing either side of Fri to ‘take her down’. Instead of walking free, Fri had to go back inside for another six months. The maths is insanely complicated. But the point is, he could — he should, in Wistrich’s opinion­ —have chosen to let her go back to her family then.

The legal team was distraught, and everyone visibly upset that Fri was to have to go back to prison. Lyly was shocked that daughter had been “painted as the monster some of the media wrongly made her out to be. The judge didn’t say she had been strangled or mention that’s why she picked up the knife,” says Lyly, “so it sounded like she did it out of badness.”

Fri’s best friend was devastated. “He didn’t mention the strangling when he sentenced her.  The judge praised Kyle as a brilliant father, but he kicked her in the stomach when she was pregnant. Why not let her come home to her kids?”

Fri, though, was grateful: “I’m no longer a murderer. It’s now accepted that I never intended to kill Kyle and that means the world to me.”

Wistrich was appalled by the harshness of the sentence. A just result, she says, would have been a sentence of six to eight years which would have better reflected the nature of the crime and would have meant immediate release from custody. Ten years is excessively punitive. Especially when you compare that with the lenient five-year sentence given to Anthony Williams who fatally strangled his wife in 2020 claiming depression. Fri was found guilty of an even lesser type of manslaughter. Sure, we’ve got a new Domestic Abuse bill, but “this result makes me feel like we have gone backwards for women victims”, says Wistrich.

While Fri sits alone in her prison cell for twenty-three and a half hours a day, having not seen or held her children for over a year, her legal team, her friends, and her family console themselves with the fact that she is not dead, and that she was able to defend herself against the violence inflicted upon her unlike so many others.

But no one should die — not women nor men — because of domestic abuse. It should be stopped before it gets anywhere near that stage, or, better still, stopped from ever happening in the first place. As Jane Monckton Smith outlines in her brilliant book In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder, domestic violence can be stopped in the early stages if police and prosecutors do their jobs effectively.

Every three days, a woman dies at the hands of her violent former or current partner. Those deaths are preventable. And had Fri been properly protected, Kyle Farrell would be alive today.

Sadly, this attitude is still a common one in the justice system when it comes to understanding abused women. I’ve also lost count of the times I’ve heard: “She gave as good as she got.” Or even: “She was a jealous wife.”

As the new report Women who Kill highlights, very little has shifted in official and public attitudes towards those trapped in violent relationships and how they might react.

I’ve been campaigning for them for decades. It all started with the campaign by Southall Black Sisters to free Kiranjit Ahluwalia, which Justice for Women (JfW) supported. In 1978 Kiranjit entered an arranged marriage in India with Deepak, and then settled with him in London. The couple moved in with Deepak’s family and the cruelty began immediately. After a decade of violence, rape and sexual abuse, she set fire to his feet as he slept. He died ten days later

She was convicted of murder in December 1989. The trial judge said that the violence she had suffered was “not serious” and the prosecution claimed that she had merely been “knocked about”. Years later, Kiranjit told me that she could not bear to talk in court about the many times he had raped her, often in front of their sons, because “the shame would have killed me”.

This was 30 years ago, but as the report published by the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) and Justice for Women reveals, 93% of women convicted of murder are still being failed. The subtitle of the report says it all: How the State Criminalises Women Who We Might Otherwise be Burying. It is the first research of its kind in the UK to build a comprehensive picture of the criminal justice system’s response to women who kill their abusers — before they themselves are killed. It shows that there is very little understanding, and scant sympathy for those trapped in a situation which leaves them saying such chilling things as: “I strongly believe that if he hadn’t died, I would have.”

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Back in 1990, a year after Kiranjit’s conviction, another woman was given a life sentence for the murder of her violent husband. Sara Thornton had been married to Malcolm for 18 months, during which time his violence and alcohol-fuelled aggression escalated.

Having fruitlessly approached her church, her GP, Alcoholics Anonymous, social services and the police for help, Sara was desperate and scared. In June 1989, 10 days before Malcolm was about to stand trial for an assault on Sara, he told her and her 10-year-old daughter to “get out” or they would be “dead meat”.

Sara took a kitchen knife, stabbed him in the stomach and immediately called an ambulance. Malcolm died hours later, and Sara was arrested, convicted of his murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

After hearing about the violence Sara endured, the judge said she could have “walked out or gone upstairs”. The following year Sara appealed her conviction on the grounds that Malcolm’s violence and threats to kill had “provoked” her. She failed and was returned to prison.

As it happens, two days later, Joseph McGrail, on trial for the manslaughter of his wife Marion whom he had kicked to death, pleaded provocation as a defence, recounting tales of her “nagging”. Handing down a two-year suspended sentence, the judge expressed “every sympathy” for Joseph McGrail, adding “this lady would have tried the patience of a saint”.

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After noting several cases of men using similar defences to Joseph McGrail, I began to use the shorthand “the nagging and shagging clause”. I have been in court when men have claimed provocation on the grounds that he could not “shut her up” or that she had humiliated him by having an affair with his best friend. I have seen male judges nod with understanding and sympathy – sometimes the same judges who dismiss women’s testimony of extreme violence with, “If it was so bad why didn’t you leave?

Today, men are still able to plead diminished responsibility by convincing a psychiatrist that they were “depressed” at the time of the offense. Women, on the other hand, are prosecuted and convicted for murder not manslaughter; available partial defences are not advanced at trial; when manslaughter pleas are offered, these are sometimes not accepted by the CPS; and women are rarely acquitted on the basis of self-defence. The contrast between how violent men are treated in court and how women defending themselves against these men are treated is nothing short of scandalous.

It’s because of this unjust treatment of women by the courts that the indomitable Harriet Wistrich became a lawyer and now ensures that dangerous men, such as John Worboys are locked up and women who kill after years of abuse are given justice. We co-founded JfW together as a response to the Kiranjit and Sara cases and have campaigned hard ever since.

We managed, after three years of protest and lobbying, to get Kiranjit’s murder conviction overturned on the grounds of diminished responsibility because of the severe depression she suffered as a result of the violence. Sara’s second appeal was successful. Following a re-trial in 1995, she was cleared of murder and convicted of manslaughter.

Both these judgments set important precedents, which attempt to accommodate the different ways in which women may respond to provocation. In the years since, recommendations have been enacted in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, including the abolition of the defence of provocation and its replacement with the defence of loss of control, caused by a fear of violence. The offence of coercive and controlling behaviour (2015) has been introduced along with the Domestic Abuse Bill (2020). Sally Challen’s successful appeal in 2019 raised further awareness of the impact of coercive control.

But as our new research highlights, neither the criminal justice system nor juries have a detailed understanding of this. Regardless of these hard-won victories, there are still numerous examples in our report of the CPS pursuing inappropriate murder charges and refusing plea bargains from women. Those myths and stereotypes about female behaviour still abound.

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Part of the reason for this is the media. For the report, over 100 substantive media reports of women on trial for the murder of a current or former partner were analysed and found that, in almost all cases, the copy contained sexist tropes and vilification of the woman involved.

Often, the reports were top-heavy with comments from the prosecution or experts that presented her as being worthy of hatred and scorn. At the trial of Sally Challen in 2011, the prosecution case against her was that of a jealous wife, stalking her husband and driven to kill because she feared he would leave her.

Negative portrayals of women who kill are often in sharp contrast to the sympathetic manner in which some men who kill are portrayed. Luke and Ryan Hart’s father Lance murdered their mother Claire and sister Charlotte in 2016 before killing himself. Lance had subjected Claire to horrendous abuse throughout their marriage, in which he controlled her every move. A number of press reports described Lance as a “nice guy” who was “always caring” and “good at DIY”. One report even stated that the murders were “understandable”.

The research team for the report conducted in-depth interviews with 20 women who had killed violent male partners. The team also analysed 92 case files. Additionally, interviews with defence and prosecution lawyers as well as judges provided invaluable insights into the workings of the system regarding cases of abused women who kill.

They concluded that the lack of understanding extends to experts as well — psychiatrists, police and judges are often not trained in issues around violence against women and girls and therefore can fail to understand what leads abused women to kill. Take the case of Farieissia (Fri) Martin, a 22-year-old mother of two toddlers who was convicted of the murder of her violent partner in 2015. During the trial, the history of violence perpetrated by the deceased was not explored and a mental health assessment was not carried out.

In December 2020 Fri’s appeal was successful. Her new legal team sought new psychiatric evidence that would have assisted her at the original trial, and a retrial was ordered for May  this year.

One valuable lesson learned from the women is how the fear instilled in them by their abusers prevents them from engaging with the police and other agencies. And because few women have the language to describe the daily abuse they suffer that does not involve black eyes or broken bones, it can escalate to deadly violence before anyone intervenes to help.

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Over the past 30 years I have spent time with scores of women who sought advice and advocacy from JfW, and every one of them expressed a profound sense of remorse and deep regret at taking a life. All had suffered serious trauma as a result of the abuse and the homicide, and many could not even remember the fatal act. The women all spoke of the terror that dominated their lives with the abuser. More than one told me that being sent to prison, as distressing it was, meant that for the first time in years they felt safe.

Many found the experience of giving evidence in court highly distressing, and the presence of the family of the deceased was an inhibiting factor. One woman said: “During the trial, I didn’t want to talk about when the relationship was bad. His family were all there and I didn’t want to properly address what he was in front of his family.”

Every single one of the many women I have met who took such drastic action to escape abuse deeply regrets what happened. And yet, the criminal justice system doesn’t seem to hear them. Isn’t it time we tried harder to understand? In the words of one woman who is awaiting trial, “The police never stopped him, and I knew he would kill me one day. I did what I did because I wanted to live for my kids.”