When she was 19 years old, Tondalao Hall said she was plagued by shame and a profound sense of helplessness.
“I was ashamed to tell my family that I was getting abused. I was ashamed to tell my best friends and my friends that I was getting abused because you, you don't know,” Hall said. “I just really didn't know.”
She said she suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, Robert Braxton. Hall said Braxton told her if she tried to get help, he would make sure she lost custody of their three kids, who were all under the age of four.
She said Braxton lied and told her he had a family member at the Department of Human Services who would make his threats a reality.
Hall and Braxton were arrested on child abuse charges shortly after she brought one of her kids to the hospital with injuries in 2004. Hall’s child abuse charges were dropped, but she pleaded guilty to enabling child abuse.
During the trial, prosecutors acknowledged Hall didn’t abuse her children but said she didn’t report the abuse in a timely manner and had allowed Braxton to watch them.
Braxton was given a 10-year suspended sentence and was released on probation after serving two years in jail. Meanwhile, Hall started a 30-year sentence.
“I couldn't believe it,” she said. “I honestly couldn't believe that I was… that they had put me in jail.”
Oklahoma’s child abuse laws
In the early 2000s, a new set of laws began to emerge in multiple states across the U.S. aimed at furthering protection for children at risk of domestic abuse. In Oklahoma, state statute 843.5(B) was born.
Under the law, guardians or parents who allow abuse to happen or “fail to protect” children from the abuse can be prosecuted as harshly, or more harshly, than the abusers themselves. One of the lawmakers behind the statue said she had hoped it would prompt caregivers to report abuse because they could also be charged with a crime.
According to Assistant Executive Coordinator for the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council Ryan Stephenson, characterizing actions the statute prosecutes as only a “failure to protect" is a misnomer. He said enabling child abuse is always “willful and malicious.”
“Enabling abuse is not a failure to protect. The failure to protect is a negative action. Someone is not taking an action they should,” Stephenson said.
“Enabling is the person who is actively taking measures to help that abuser, and that is not the scenario of someone who is scared of their abuser and is failing to take action that otherwise they should. That is someone who is on the side of their abuser.”
The ACLU of Oklahoma, an organization that has advocated for cases like Hall’s, argues the statute unfairly penalizes domestic abuse survivors. Policy Director Cindy Nguyen said one out of four women receive a longer sentence than their abuser, and women make up 93% of convictions.
“This law is exclusively used to incarcerate mothers, and it assumes that mothers are supposed to be all-knowing, even when they are facing abuse themselves,” Nguyen said.
Stephenson said Oklahoma law includes a defense for domestic abuse, but it’s connected to child endangerment statutes – not enabling abuse statutes, under which some of the state’s “monsters” are prosecuted.
Bill requesting change
This year, Sen. Dave Rader, R-Tulsa, authored a bill that would have amended existing law to lighten the punishment imposed by the statute.
According to a summary of his Senate Bill 594, "a person found guilty of such crimes shall be subject to a maximum fine of $5,000 and/or a maximum term of imprisonment of seven years in the custody of the Department of Corrections or one year in the county jail.”
It also would have made it possible for a defendant to claim reasonable fear of great bodily injury or death, show that they experienced domestic abuse or voluntarily took steps to end the abuse or neglect.
But Rader’s bill missed a key deadline to be heard in committee, preventing it from advancing forward.
Nguyen said the OK Survivor Justice Coalition, a group including the ACLU that advocates for the rights of domestic abuse survivors, was “heartbroken” SB 594 didn’t move forward, but they weren’t surprised. Over the years, similar legislation has repeatedly failed to garner support from Oklahoma lawmakers.
“The District Attorneys Council told us that they actually stopped fighting all of their other bills to make sure that this bill gets killed,” Nguyen said.
Stephenson from the DA’s Council said other vested parties, like child advocates and law enforcement, also had serious concerns about the bill.
“This bill moved far beyond what it was being advocated as attempting to fix,” he said.
Stephenson, who has served as a prosecutor and said he has seen the horrors of child abuse, said the bill would remove their ability to effectively prosecute individuals who were willfully allowing abuse to take place.
He said he has seen cases that “occur all across the state, every year,” where, while one person may not ever lay a hand on a child, they offer up other kinds of support for the abuser’s acts.
Stephenson said the council also had questions about the bill’s retroactive nature, which could allow those rightfully incarcerated under the law to have reduced sentences or be set free.
“I believe the way forward on this, if there really is a problem that people believe needs to be addressed, it's in the child endangerment statute,” he said. “It’s widening that statue so… the language encompasses more scenarios.”
Six years after being released, Hall navigates relationships with her children
In 2019, Hall was released from Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud, where she had been serving time for the last 15 years. The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board unanimously voted to commute her sentence, and Gov. Kevin Stitt granted the request.
Since then, Hall said she has been working to repair her relationship with her kids, who have grown up since she was last with them.
“It's six years later, and I'm out [of] the penitentiary, but still, those things don't go away. It just doesn't,” she said.
Thinking about all the milestones and little moments she missed brought Hall to tears. She said the pain hits her all the time.
“Sometimes I sit at the light when I [am] driving, I sit at the light and, like, my heart is just so hurt because I didn't get that time with my kids,” Hall said.
Last week, Hall turned 41 years old. She has changed a lot since she was 19. The world has, too. Still, she plans to keep fighting for people in her position. There are other mothers she met during her time in prison, she said, who deserve to be reunited with their kids.
“They want to see [their] little girls, but they can't because of this,” Hall said. “It needs to be done away with.”
She said lawmakers are “missing the story” about what it's like to experience domestic abuse and asked them to consider what they would have done in her shoes.
“They'll come back and say, ‘well, you're the one that should've took care of the kids,’” she said. “Well, how can you when somebody is beating the crap out of you? Or how can you when somebody's talking crazy inside your head?”
Oklahoma’s Attorney General’s Office reports an estimated that 51.5% of Oklahoma women experience sexual violence, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime. According to the ACLU of Oklahoma, 130 women are turned away from domestic violence shelters every day in Oklahoma.
“These women are going to the hospitals and reporting suspected child abuse, and then they are the ones that get that have to face a lifetime sentence versus the man that actually hit the child himself,” Nguyen said.
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
