Can a Rape Victim Who Killed Attacker Claim Self Defense?
Maddesyn George, an Indigenous woman in Washington State, said police used her prior criminal record to cast doubt on her claim that she acted in self-defense when she killed her attacker.
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The case of Maddesyn George, a Colville tribal member and resident of Washington’s Colville reservation who is charged with killing the man who raped her, raises the question of whether a rape victim has the right to argue that she feared for her life and committed the murder in self-defense, reports The Intercept. Instead, George was arrested and charged in federal court with a slew of crimes ranging from robbery to murder.
George claims that police officers neither believed her nor offered a rape test after she told them she had been raped the previous day by Kristopher “Buddy” Graber, the man she allegedly killed. Instead, police treated her like a criminal, based on her previous felony convictions. Earth-Feather Sovereign, founder of the nonprofit Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Washington said police often do not take Indigenous women’s reports of sexual assault or victimization seriously. George’s ethnicity, as well as her substance use and past record, make her a less credible victim in the eyes of law enforcement, Sovereign said. Prosecutors filed a motion to prevent George and her attorney, Stephen Graham, from including the sexual assault or a theory of self-defense in his opening statement.
