After spending 16 years in prison, Hudie Joyce Walker walked out of a Pomona courtroom Tuesday a free woman -- a sign of how much the law has changed for battered women who strike back.
Walker was the beneficiary of the first appellate court decision to interpret a 2002 state law that allows inmates to reopen their cases if they can show that expert testimony on abuse probably would have changed the outcome.
Walker -- who never knew her father and was sexually abused by her mother's boyfriends -- was in a series of abusive relationships until her fourth husband was shot dead and she went to prison.
Now 65, Walker has plenty of plans for her future.
As she emerged from Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday, she ran into the daughter of an inmate she knew at the California Institution for Women in Corona. "Enjoy what you've got left," the daughter advised.
"Oh, I've got a lot left," Walker said. "Sixty-five is just a number."
She will visit great-grandchildren in St. Louis and Dallas whom she has never met, and she plans to be an activist on behalf of battered women.
"I see these television talk shows where they ask abused women, 'Why didn't you leave?' The hosts say, 'I never would have put up with that.' Well, ma'am, you have never walked in our shoes. I want those women to never feel ashamed."
USC law professor Carrie Hempel said the decision marks the right of a battered person to get a new trial if she was convicted of homicide before the law recognized the importance of expert testimony on the effects of battering. It could help 50 or 60 other cases.
Walker was charged with first-degree murder for allegedly shooting her husband, Thomas Walker, at their Hacienda Heights home on Mother's Day 1990. It was a day she had hoped to go to a Dodgers game with her daughters and grandchildren.
Her husband, who had beaten her for years, had other ideas. He insisted that she accompany him to the Moose Lodge in El Monte, one of his regular watering holes.
After they returned home, he pointed a shotgun at her and said, "Today will be your last goddamned day on this Earth," according to court records. She fled and called the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. A deputy tried without success to speak to Walker, and told Joyce Walker to stay away from the house until her husband had sobered up.
