DEAR SISTER

A scarifying story of domestic abuse, murder, and justice gone awry.

The sister of the title is Horton’s own, Nikki, a young woman whose difficult life got incalculably worse when her boyfriend forced her to participate in pornography that involved rape and battery—and who then beat and tortured her himself. Although a police officer tracked these videos on porn sites and recommended prosecution, “Nikki…was embarrassed and scared of the repercussions,” as Horton writes of her sister. She was also afraid for her safety. The consequences became far more severe when, at the breaking point, Nikki shot her boyfriend dead and was immediately charged with homicide. Brought to trial, Nikki had perfect-storm misfortunes: Her defense was unprepared and, by Horton’s account, barely competent, while for reasons of her own, the prosecutor was determined to paint a portrait of Nikki as a conniver who had engineered a murder, “a manipulative liar who faked abuse allegations and murdered [him] in his sleep, when he was defenseless.” In fact, they learned that the boyfriend was planning to murder Nikki and then kill himself. The prosecutor was successful, and in the course of the cascading results that followed—and that beggar belief in their patent injustice—Nikki was sentenced to a term that, even when procedural errors were unveiled under appeal, was reduced from possible life imprisonment to just a few years—“a monumental victory,” if one that still presumed Nikki as the guilty party. Horton is hardly dispassionate in her presentation, but she is admirably evenhanded in showing the devastation that the events wrought on the children and extended families involved on all sides—all of whom, Horton affectingly writes, have shared in the trauma of crime and punishment.

A troubling narrative that calls for judicial reform—and more judicial accountability—to protect those who suffer abuse.