The Decibel - How the Canadian justice system treats abused women

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Two years ago, Helen Naslund was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for killing her husband, Miles, in 2011. They married young, in the early 1980s – he was twenty, and she was seventeen. He abused her and their three children for decades.Today on the Decibel, Globe feature writer Jana Pruden shares Helen’s story and unpacks how the justice system treats women who have been abused.For help with controlling behaviour or intimate partner violence, call the Assaulted Women’s Helpline at 1-866-863-0511. In Quebec, call SOS violence conjugale at 1-800-363-9010.Watch for The Globe’s podcast series about Helen Naslund’s story, coming in 2023. Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Two years ago, Helen Naslund was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the death of her abusive husband. She and her three sons had been living under his constant abuse for decades. Helen's case and the lengthy sentence she got sparked outrage across the country. Globe feature writer Jana Pruden has spent time speaking with Helen in prison and learned things that Helen had never shared before. Today, Jana tells us about Helen's story and why it gives us an inside look at how the justice system treats abused women. I'm Maina Karaman-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Jenna, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast again.

Thanks so much for having me on. I just want to start by asking you, can you just walk me through meeting Helen for the first time, you know, where she's living and what she's like? Yeah, I tried to get in touch with her lawyer and with Helen, who is serving at the Edmonton Institution for Women, which is a women's prison. And, you know, one of the first things that struck me when I met her is how small of a person she is. Just a physical impression, I guess. She's a very small, slight person. And that she really, really did not want to talk to me. She was not in any way interested in talking to me. But yet, she had decided to because she just truly believed that maybe her story could help someone and she wanted to share it for that reason. And what was Helen's life like? Like, where did she live? And what was her family like?

She met Miles when she was 17 years old, barely a year out of the house. And they became involved very, very quickly, suddenly dating, living together, married. And they had three kids, Wes, Daryl, and Neil. And they were living on a farm outside of Camrose in Alberta. Okay, so let's jump forward to 2011 then. By this point, Helen and Miles had been together for 30 years and he'd been abusive to her and their three sons for decades. What do we know then, Jana, about what happened on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend in 2011? We know that things were very bad and they were getting worse there. Miles Naslund had a lot of health problems. He'd suffered a head injury in an assault outside the bar. And all of these, his erratic behavior, his rage-filled behavior appeared to be getting worse and worse and worse.

And Helen was worse too. She had attempted suicide multiple times. Her son Wes told me it was like she didn't even, she wasn't even there anymore. She wasn't even herself. That weekend is a very stressful time on the farm, harvest. Everything that you've been doing needs to come to fruition at that time.

And their finances were extremely poor. So they needed to have a good harvest, or they could lose everything. They were down to just really the home quarter and a little bit of land, and they could have lost that. So very high pressure. She gets home from the work she'd taken to make some money in a nearby town, and Miles is drunk. He's ordering them around at gunpoint, extremely abusive. Things are very bad. He's throwing w around at gunpoint, extremely abusive. Things are very bad. He's throwing wrenches at Helen at one point, threatening her. When she makes dinner, he throws the whole thing onto the floor and finally passes out in bed. And that's the only

reason it stops. And then we know that in the middle of the night, there's two gunshots and Miles is dead in his bed, lying face down in a pool of blood. Do we know if, did Helen, did Helen shoot that gun? Helen has pleaded guilty to manslaughter. There are people in her life that don't believe that, but she has legally taken responsibility and has told me that, yes, she did. And she tells me she has a hard time believing that herself. Okay. So, so Miles is shot in the house that night. Then what happens? So Helen and two of her sons are home, Neil and Daryl. And although she would later say that she thinks she should have called the police. At the time, that wasn't actually an obvious choice. Miles really disliked and distrusted the police and was very anti-police

and he'd instilled that in his boys to some extent. And Helen really didn't think that anyone would believe them. Nobody outside the house really knew what was going on. People had suspicions, but she had never really told. She had never gone to the police. So they come up with a plan to dispose of his body and report him missing. And they pack his body into a metal pickup truck toolbox. They dispose of it in a dugout or slew on their adjoining property. They dispose of the guns and they report him missing in a way that sounds like suicide, that he disappeared with one of his guns and he left his wallet. Wow. So Helen is eventually charged with first degree murder here.

Why didn't she defend herself at that point? Helen has told me very frankly that she didn't really care about her own life. She felt like her life was over, but she was very, very protective of her sons. And her son, Neil, was also charged with first degree murder. And she told me she absolutely would never have gambled with Neil's life. If we could take Neil out of the equation, it still is a very difficult choice for Helen. To go to trial for first-degree murder, first-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence

with no chance for parole for 25 years. For someone like Helen, that essentially means the rest of your life in prison. So before you can even apply for parole. Going to trial on manslaughter or even getting acquitted in a self-defense argument is really a gamble with your life. So when a deal was presented, that's a fixed sentence, 18 years, you can apply for parole before that. Neil is not going to be impacted. He's not going to go on trial for murder. And so she ultimately decided to take a plea for manslaughter. I guess I wonder, couldn't she have said, though, that she was defending herself against her husband's abuse? Isn't that something that

you can argue? Yeah, you can. And it's a gamble with your life. First degree murder. If a jury believes you, they may acquit you, they may convict you of manslaughter, and you could get a short sentence. I covered a self-defense manslaughter involving a gun where the man who killed his father got four years, the lowest that was possible under the law. But it's a big gamble. And keeping in mind, Helen had never opened up to anyone about all the things that happened at the farm. She's just starting really to open up about a lot of it with me. Some things she told me she hasn't told other people before. So to be able to say it all in front of a jury to not know whether they'll believe you or not or what they'll think about it and some of it is not so clear-cut I mean Helen herself wondered for

instance she tells the police officer in her interrogation at one point that a lot of the abuse was you know emotional not necessarily physical she told me that she wasn't even sure that something like having a loaded gun held to your temple and having someone pull the trigger, she didn't necessarily know if that was abuse because it doesn't leave a bruise. I know there is something termed the battered woman's defense. Was she a good candidate for that kind of self-defense argument there? Well, she was and she wasn't. One issue with the battered woman defense that's been identified in Dr. Sheehy's very excellent book Defending Battered Women on Trial is that you need this diagnosis of battered woman syndrome. And a psychologist, despite the fact that Helen had lived with very extreme violence for nearly 30 years,

did not diagnose her with battered woman syndrome. And Helen, of course, pleads guilty to manslaughter in this plea deal. And she's sentenced to 18 years. That seems like a really long sentence, Jana. Is that normal? That is one of the longest sentences a woman had ever received for manslaughter in Canada. We'll be right back. So Helen is sentenced to 18 years. What happens at that point then?

Well, she's sentenced, goes into the Edmonton Institution for Women. And then the case gets written about in local coverage. And it really does pick up steam. And there's some key people that get involved in trying to do something about it. So while there's a groundswell happening outside, there's also people who are reaching out to Helen, urging her to think about appealing. How does Helen actually appeal her sentence then? At some point, she agrees to speak to another lawyer. And so defense lawyer Mona Duckett, who's a highly respected and senior defense lawyer here, gets involved in the case. And Mona has defended a number of battered women in the past and is very familiar with

the law around this area and I think the importance of pushing the law in this area. And the appeal was based on the grounds that Helen's sentence was contrary to the public interest and brought the administration of justice into disrepute. And also that some of the parts of the agreement were based on outdated ideas about women who live in domestic violence situations and the effect of domestic violence. Can you talk a little bit about that?

What did they say on that front? Yeah, well, one of the things that stood out to a lot of people and that did end up being mentioned in the appeal were the judge's comments in sentencing Helen, where he described her as a good person, but someone who had other options available to her and really is predicated on this notion that a woman can just leave. If it was really that bad, a woman would just leave. And I think that's clearly not the case. It's a massive oversimplification. And, you know, I've been a reporter for almost 25 years. I've been covering court and crime for a lot of that. I actually intended at some point to go back and see if I could count how many murders of women I personally have covered. Certainly dozens, maybe over a hundred. I'm not sure. But we know how this story usually ends, and it ends with the woman in a box. And so I think it's easy to say, why didn't she leave? There's no clear answer of how she possibly could have left with her life. And that's one of the things that I personally found disturbing about this case.

And I think that is why it touches a lot of people so deeply is that, you know, if it doesn't end with this, it ends with her death. I was struck that at Helen's sentencing hearing, the Crown prosecutor said something about to the effect of Miles, her husband, being a vulnerable victim who was, quote, entitled to feel safe in his own home, end quote. And that just seems kind of ironic and in a very dark way there. Can you comment on that a little bit there? Yeah, that line really struck a lot of people, including me. I remember viscerally how I felt to read that line. I saw people's responses to it at the time when that came out. There also, the judge had made some comments similarly. This was a callous, cowardly act on a vulnerable victim in his own home by a partner.

And those lines are, I find it pretty outrageous. I mean, to be honest, and not taking into account the situation that she was in and what she was coming from. But throughout the proceedings, in the preliminary hearing, in the sentencing, we see Helen compared to other people who have killed their spouses. But she's always compared to men, abusive men, who killed their wives. And that is a completely different thing. Yeah, yeah. So we've talked about the arguments around the appeal here.

What did the appeal court judges, what did they actually decide? So it was a split decision, two to one, and two judges decided that the decision was unfit and that the sentence was the product of outdated thinking and stereotypes about battered women. And the court cut her sentence in half to nine years. She's still in prison, though. Has prison helped Helen at all kind of get what she needs to heal from all of this? No, I don't think so. You know, I think there's something that's very ironic about someone who's lived in incredible coercive control their entire life, going into an environment that is

highly, highly, highly controlled, and in fact has an element of coercive control to it by its nature, being in prison. I think there have been some good things that have happened since she was sentenced, including that there's a lot of women who write to her from around the country who came out of domestic violence situations. And that has been very meaningful for her to know that she wasn't the only one and to make those connections. They've been very powerful for her. And I just visited her yesterday. And, you know, I know that that's helped a lot. She has done some counseling and has some institutional supports that way, programming, that I think has helped, too, to start to understand things. But it's very, very hard for her to be in there. You know, she's a country woman. She misses the land.

And she was out on a brief visit several weeks ago and was able to go to her sisters. And, you know, she just told me like seeing the dirt and seeing the sloughs and seeing, you know, a cow in a field is so meaningful to her. So even though it is only, I'll put that in quotations, nine years, a significant reduction, and she can apply for passes and for day parole in the not too distant future. But really, I think she needs to get home and be with her family. And she will be free for the first time in her life. And maybe they can really start to heal. I'm struck here again. So you're talking about how women are writing to Helen, she's hearing from other people who are in similar situations.

This outpouring really from a lot of people across the country. When she was sentenced to 18 years, there was kind of this uproar, this outrage around that. That stands in really stark contrast to her being abused for over 20 years and nobody stepping in and no one standing up for her. Does Helen, I guess, I don't know, does she blame her community for not doing anything? Does she wish people would have stepped up and supported her at that stage when she actually really needed it? Not at all. She really thinks if someone had done something that probably she'd be dead

and maybe the kids would be dead. She thinks it would have been extremely, extremely dangerous. And I know that many people in her life, they feel extremely, extremely guilty that they didn't step in, but they didn't know how to or if they could. And also animals. I'm just going to add that. The role of animals in domestic violence situations and for farm women is huge. You know, she told me last time we spoke or maybe in a letter recently that there was always something she loved at the farm. So even if she and the boys maybe were away, she has her horses there. She has, you know, cows there, chickens there.

There's never anything that you can leave without feeling guilty. And so in a lot of ways, I think she sacrificed herself for a long time. Yeah. So Jana, you mentioned that Helen was able to leave for a visit to see her sister. When is she actually up for full parole, though? Yeah. So she's been able to have two absences where she was escorted by a person from the institution. And then she will have a parole hearing later in December about whether she could leave temporarily by herself. That's sort of the next step. It's very, very difficult to get parole. And we'll obviously be following the case closely to see how the parole board

handles her case moving forward. But often a key element of parole is accepting responsibility for what you did and feeling remorse for it. This is one of the reasons why wrongfully convicted people often spend really long in prison because they will not accept responsibility for a crime they didn't commit. In this case, you know, Helen takes full responsibility for what she did, but, you know, she doesn't feel, I guess, remorseful per se. She does feel bad, but obviously it's very complicated. So it'll be very interesting to see what the parole board makes of that. She's very nervous. It's very hard for her to talk about things. So she's really nervous that when she goes before the parole board makes of that. She's very nervous. It's very hard for her to talk about things.

So she's really nervous that when she goes before the parole board, what about if she just freezes up and can't talk at all and she can't tell them about any of the abuse she suffered and then maybe they won't believe her. There's clearly a couple of really different ways of seeing this case and this action. Is it an attack on a vulnerable victim asleep in his bed? Is it a last-ditch, life-saving act of self-defense by a woman who otherwise would have been killed herself? Those are two vastly different ways of seeing it. And I guess we'll see who's on the parole board and how they view it. Jenna, thank you so much for your reporting here and for talking to me today. Thank you so much for having me on.

That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.