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Traci Housman picked glass from her hair as she told a Boulder police
detective that she’d just stabbed her husband, sticking him once with a
knife in their kitchen after he’d slammed her head into the wall, into a picture frame that shattered and showered glass.
Officers took her to the hospital before they transported her to jail on
that August night 14 years ago, said Chuck Heidel, then the Boulder police detective on the case and now a senior investigator at the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office.
She was charged with the second-degree murder of her husband, John
Housman, a count that carried between 16 and 48 years in prison. But prosecutors, recognizing her self-defense claim, went on to offer her a
deal: She could plead guilty to criminally negligent homicide, a low-level felony, and serve only probation.
“It still felt like an impossible choice,” Traci Housman said during a
court hearing in Boulder last week. “If I went to trial, my lawyers were
clear, we would have to bring out every negative thing about John, and I
didn’t want to make a monster out of him. But I was also looking at
decades of prison… I struggled with actually taking it. Because it wasn’t
the truth. I wasn’t wrong. I saved my life that night.”
Traci Housman spent eight months in jail after the Aug. 2, 2009, killing,
then pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years probation, of which
she served three before she was granted an early release. But the
conviction followed her everywhere after that: blocking her from job opportunities, from her chosen career.
Until Tuesday.
In a 35-minute hearing, Boulder County District Court Judge Patrick Butler vacated the conviction and exonerated Traci Housman, ruling that she had a valid self-defense claim in her husband’s killing. He did so at the
request of the Boulder County district attorney’s Conviction Integrity
Unit, which reviews cases of wrongful conviction.
“We’re not here today because we believe the wrong person was arrested,” District Attorney Michael Dougherty said in court. “Ms. Housman will
readily admit she was ultimately responsible for the death of Mr. Housman,
but that it was in an act of self-defense. That claim is true. That claim
is accurate. That claim is valid.”
John Housman’s family opposed the exoneration. The violence in John and
Traci’s relationship was mutual, said his daughter, Hope Scalcini, who was
11 when her father was killed.
“Frankly, I am fairly horrified that Traci’s conviction has been vacated,”
she said in an email. “I do not feel that justice has been served; but
that in fact a further injustice has occurred… No one but my dad and Traci
will ever know what really and fully happened that night, and it feels
really unfair that she is the only one around to tell their side of the
story. It’s easy to fight against a dead man when you get to create the scenario and story.”
The exoneration is unusual in several ways, experts told The Denver Post.
The case deals with a claim of legal innocence, not factual innocence, and
the process was driven by the Boulder DA’s internal Conviction Integrity
Unit, rather than by an outside entity or Housman’s defense attorneys.
“It’s not unprecedented, but it is somewhat unusual,” said Marissa
Bluestine, assistant director at the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law
School.
https://www.denverpost.com/2023/11/06/traci-housman-exoneration-boulder- conviction-review-unit/?itm_source=parsely-api
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