In an effort to reduce Kentucky’s ranking as one of the worst states for domestic violence homicides, the attorney general’s office recently released guidelines intended to help victims separate from perpetrators who are most likely to kill.
Attorney General Russell Coleman released a comprehensive manual last week that lays out the steps that need to be taken by medical professionals treating strangulation victims, as well as how officers should investigate these cases and how district attorneys should prosecute them.
The manual was more than a year in the making and is the next step toward implementing Kentucky’s 2019 law that made domestic violence by strangulation a felony. The act was previously considered a misdemeanor, despite research showing strangulation is the highest indicator of a subsequent murder.
The thought used to be that all abusers are equal, but “they are not,” Coleman said while unveiling the manual at the University of Kentucky. “When a man puts his hands around a woman’s neck, he has just raised his hand and said ‘I am a killer.’”
In 2020, Kentucky ranked 10th nationally for the rate of women killed by men, with 82% of female victims killed by someone they knew.
In Louisville alone, at least 16 people were murdered by domestic partners in 2022.
If a woman is strangled by her partner, she is 750% more likely to later be killed by that partner, according to the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention.
Additionally, data shows people who strangle are the most likely to kill police officers. In 2017, 33 of 44 officers shot to death in the line of duty nationwide were killed by a perpetrator with a public record history of at least one nonfatal strangulation incident, the institute found.
“The people who strangle are some of the most dangerous criminals we face,” Coleman said.
Research showing the correlation between strangulation and murder dates back to the mid-1990s, but Kentucky was one of the last states to pass a domestic violence strangulation law in 2019 — with Ohio and South Carolina the only remaining states that had failed to do so at the time. Ohio later passed a version of the law in 2023, and South Carolina legislators have introduced a bill to do so this session.
Despite Kentucky’s slow approach to changing the law, it is the fourth state to establish a strangulation manual, which will be distributed to police departments, sheriff’s offices and prosecutor offices across the commonwealth.
The manual, created with help from the Training Institute, is geared toward helping every official who comes in contact with a strangulation victim, “all the way through to a conviction,” said Rewa Zakharia, criminal chief of the attorney general’s office.
“From the moment an officer meets a victim, (the manual) helps them figure out the right questions to ask, the right evidence to collect,” Zakharia said.
For example, she explained, officers should work to figure out if a victim’s voice is raspy as proof that she has been strangled and know which questions to ask to determine if she’d lost consciousness. Such evidence can help prosecutors successfully convict perpetrators.
Beyond helping law enforcement — who, research shows, are in danger when responding to strangulation cases — the manual provides guidance to emergency responders and medical professionals who treat strangulation victims.
It is important that they also know which questions to ask, Zakharia said, given most of these victims will not have any visible external injuries. Death from strangulation can also occur days or weeks after an attack, research shows, due to internal injuries to the neck that can later cause strokes.
“I think it’s really great for Kentucky to be on the forefront of this — a lot of times we’re known not to be on the forefront of things that impact Kentuckians every day,” Zakharia said of the manual. “To not just focus on a prosecution or an investigation, but to look at it from every aspect, is really something.”
Casey Gwinn, co-founder of the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, called the manual “a good start,” but work needs to be done to ensure it is used.
Creating it and releasing it “doesn’t mean anyone will read it,” Gwinn said. Moving forward, Kentucky leaders “need to start aggressively prosecuting strangulation cases as felonies.”
Original Source: Krista Johnson, Louisville Courier Journal. Click here to view original post!