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“When men defend themselves or others, they are lauded as heroes. When women do so, they are sent to prison. This is a nonpartisan issue that everyone should be concerned about,” said Executive Director of Free Battered Texas Women (FBTW) Dr.
Cathy Marston. Dr. Marston founded Free Battered Texas Women from prison where she was incarcerated for nine years for acting under duress from abuse.
She and FBTW helped spearhead a clemency process for survivors of abuse and/or sex trafficking who acted under duress. As a result, at least 28 survivors have been granted pardons by Governor Greg Abbott as of December 2023. Lynn Silver is a New Braunfels resident and writer for the Democratic Women of Comal County.
This column appears each month in the Herald-Zeitung. House Bill 372 would amend our state’s duress statute and help survivors explain in court the context of their actions under duress. This bill has just been filed for the third legislative session in a row.
It unanimously passed the Texas House the last two sessions, but was not put up for vote in the Senate. Dr. Marston’s father holds a master’s degree and was a physicist for the Air Force.
Her mother was a doctoral educated, Ivy League chemist. Dr. Marston was valedictorian of her senior class at Randolph High School and able to attend Trinity University on scholarship.
She worked for two major news organizations in the state, the San Antonio Light and the Austin-American Statesman. She earned a master’s degree from the University of Texas and her PhD from the University of Iowa. Even so, her childhood was not the happiest, as she was a victim of child abuse.
As an adult, she spent almost a decade of her life incarcerated for acting under duress after an ex-boyfriend and his friend brutally attacked her in 2004. The Texas Council on Family Violence reports that in 2023 there were 205 Texas victims of intimate partner or stalking homicide. This number includes 179 women and 26 men.
Homicide perpetrators killed 16 family members, friends, or bystanders and injured an additional 12 victims. FBTW statistics indicate women who claim they defended themselves and/or their children from domestic violence comprise the majority of incarcerated survivors. The Texas Center for Justice and Equity in 2014 reported that 83% of incarcerated women reported being abused or assaulted by a partner or family member, compared to 32% reporting abuse by a stranger.
In 2001, Dr. Marston ended a relationship with her ex-boyfriend because of physical, sexual and mental abuse. On two separate occasions in 2004, he and/or his friend attacked her.
They inflicted severe injuries, including ripping her face open from her temple to her chin, and breaking her foot. In both cases, when the Austin police arrived to find the attackers on top of her, they told her to stand up and put her hands behind her back to be handcuffed. In the first incident, Dr.
Marston had to limp on her broken foot. Despite her visible head trauma in both instances, EMS did not take her to the hospital. When she went to prison from Travis County in 2005, the staff repeatedly assaulted her, starved her, denied her medical care and blocked her outgoing mail.
There were occasions when Dr. Marston was placed in isolation and had to kneel on a concrete floor to get her meals. They would pass her up if she was not kneeling — and sometimes pass her up anyway.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice paroled her in 2014. She has spent her time since then connecting with others and healing by writing in the mainstream and academic press, teaching yoga and educating the public via her nonprofit, FBTW. The Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation (UUWF) gave her a Margaret Fuller Grant to transcribe interviews she had done with formerly incarcerated survivors and the victim advocates who tried to get them clemency in the 1990s.
The 1990s effort yielded 102 recommendations for clemency by the Texas Council on Family Violence. Only one survivor was recommended by the Board of Pardons and Paroles for a pardon. Both Governors George W.
Bush and Ann Richards refused to sign that pardon. Dr. Marston also published the Worthy Women Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry guide as the 2020 Equity and Justice Scholar for UUWF.
On Jan. 11, I had the opportunity to see her exhibit, Acting Under Duress, Surviving with Resilience that was funded by the Resist Foundation, Alice Kleburg Reynolds Foundation, and the social justice committee and Community Responsibility Endowment Fund at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Antonio. This exhibit is comprised of four panels that feature four formerly incarcerated survivors with photos and prose explanations: Margaret Crayton and Geraldine Swaim, who were recommended for clemency in the 1990s; Griselda Moreno who got a pardon recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles that the governor denied in 2021; and Dr.
Marston herself, whose pardon application was just submitted in December by the Lone Star Justice Alliance. In her exhibit guide, she explains that her goal is to humanize criminalized abuse survivors so the audience can see themselves through the eyes of the victims. As a trained journalist and feminist ethnographer, she tells the incredible stories of these women who were victims of mental and physical abuse and how systemic abuse continued while they were in prison.
As I immersed myself in reading each of the women’s poignant stories, I was blown away by their spirit, tenacity, camaraderie, and vowing to never, ever give up. It brought back memories of women who I have known who had been battered by spouses or partners and how in most of those cases, the abuser was either not charged or served a light sentence — only to get out of jail and repeat the pattern of abuse. Dr.
Marston will be speaking at the New Braunfels Public Library, on Thursday, Feb. 27 at 6 p.m.
with social time beginning at 5:30 p.m. The NB Public Library is located at 700 E Common Street, New Braunfels.
The public is invited to come and hear about Dr. Marston’s incredible journey — from the world of academia to a place of abuse, trauma, isolation and exploitation — after which she dedicated her life to advocacy, healing, social justice and educating to end oppression..
