Tondalo Hall in 2015. (Oklahoma Department of Corrections) 
 
 In 2004, Tondalo Hall was 20 years old with three kids, no degree and an abusive boyfriend. 
 
 He regularly choked her, punched her, threw objects at her and barraged her with verbal abuse, according to testimony in court documents. He kept her from her family and friends, even tried to stop her from showing affection to her kids. Whenever it seemed like she might bolt, he threatened to take her children — a son from a previous relationship, and two kids with him — and never allow her to see them again. 
 
 When he seemed to turn his ire on their children, Hall worried inwardly, but outwardly did nothing. She questioned him about a bruise on her son’s head, the sound of her daughter screaming from another room, and he explained the concerns away. Finally, when her 20-month-old son’s leg started to swell suspiciously, she brought her kids to the hospital. The young boy had a fractured femur and 12 fractured ribs; her newborn daughter also had a fractured femur, seven fractured ribs and a fractured toe. 
 
 Not long after that hospital visit in late 2004, Hall and her boyfriend, Robert Braxton Jr., were arrested and charged in the abuse of their children. Braxton pleaded guilty to hurting the infant girl and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, eight of which were suspended. He was released in 2006, according to BuzzFeed News, which profiled Hall last fall. 
 
 Hall, who took a so-called “blind plea deal” — a deal without knowing what her sentence would be — in Oklahoma County District Court, is a third of the way through a 30-year sentence for permitting child abuse. 
 
 She appealed, and lost. She asked the judge for a modified sentence, and was denied. Her best chance of release was a request for commutation, which would have ended her sentence early without absolving her of a crime. 
 
 On Wednesday, that request was denied, too. 
 
 “The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board had the responsibility to make things right and they failed with today’s decision,” Shaunna Thomas, executive director of the group UltraViolet, which has advocated on Hall’s behalf, told BuzzFeed. UltraViolet is one of several activist groups to take up Hall’s cause. 
 
 But the board, which recommends applications for commutation to the governor, seemed “incredulous” that Hall hadn’t taken more action as it questioned her, BuzzFeed reported. 
 
 That sentiment echoed remarks from Hall’s sentencing 11 years ago, when prosecutor Angela Marsee remarked that Hall seemed to be “choosing herself and her co-defendant over her kids,” in Marsee’s words. 
 
 When investigators first came to Hall’s apartment, she told them that she didn’t know how her children had been hurt. Then Hall said it was her fault — she threw her son on the bed while playing, she said. 
 
 “I made up the story, I lied,” Hall acknowledged at Braxton’s trial. 
 
 “Why were you lying to this detective?” Marsee wanted to know. 
 
 “I didn’t know what to say,” Hall replied. “I had never been questioned before.” 
 
 Though Hall immediately pleaded guilty, Braxton’s case went to trial. There, Hall was a key witness in the case against her boyfriend, but she was unable to provide a firsthand account of his abuse of the children. The case against Braxton began to “fall part,” as Marsee, who was also the prosecutor in his case, put it at Hall’s sentencing, and Braxton was offered a plea deal that released him after two years. 
 
 “He definitely should have received a more significant sentence, but because of her minimizing and continuing to protect herself and protect him, that had a real impact on what we were able to do with him in the jury trial,” Marsee said, according to court records. 
 
 Ray Elliot, Hall’s sentencing judge, seemed to agree. 
 
 “There would be certain questions that would be asked of her where she would look over at the defendant and make direct eye contact with him prior to taking a moment or two to respond,” he said at the sentencing. “That tells me something, based on my years of experience. Was she scared of him? Probably. But again, even weighing that factor into the equation, I’m of the opinion she was less than candid.” 
 
 But Hall and her lawyers say she was ashamed, and scared. According to her commutation application, Braxton continued to intimidate Hall even as his case went to trial. 
 
 “He repeatedly threatened me during the court proceedings,” she wrote. “… He would tell me that I would spend the rest of my life in prison and he would be out with our children.” 
 
 In a way, he was right. Though her children aren’t living with Braxton, he was released while she remained imprisoned. 
 
 “Rather than being protected by the State I was prosecuted,” Hall wrote in her application for commutation. 
 
 Activist groups like UltraViolet and the Monument Quilt, a organization that tells the stories of abuse survivors, say that the reasoning used in Hall’s sentencing underscores the problems faced by victims: they are blamed for not confronting their abusers. According to the Domestic Abuse Project, battered women often suffer from depression, low self-esteem and feelings of paralysis. Fear of their partner — and fear of a future without him — can make them reluctant to leave their abuser or testify against him in court. 
 
 Lorraine M. Bittner, legal director of the Women’s Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a similar case that it’s unreasonable for prosecutors to base their cases on victims’ testimony. 
 
 “If you leave it up to the victim, then all the pressure is on her,” she said. “We don’t want to go back to that. You’re turning to the most vulnerable person to set policy for law enforcement.” 
 
 In the years since her sentencing, Hall says she has done her best to become a better mother. She writes letters to her children, learned of bike rides and birthday parties. After dropping out of school in 10th grade, she’s finally earned her GED. She’s held a steady job at Mabel Basset Correctional Facility, where she is serving out her sentence. And she’s taken class after class on pain management and better parenting: “Certificate in Positive Outlook,” “Faith and Character Community Program,” “Anger Control,” a course in “Purpose Driven Life.” 
 
 “I had a duty to protect my children and I failed,” she wrote in her application. But now, she says, she’s equipped to deal with the problems that overwhelmed her a decade ago. 
 
 “I now recognize the warning signs of domestic violence as well as the avenues available to those involved in abusive relationships. If I could go back in time, I would have contacted the Oklahoma City YWCA for help in creating a safety plan to securely remove my family from Robert’s violence,” she wrote in her application. “… Despite my failures, I did not physically abuse my children. I was an active parent and a proud mother. I loved and cared for my children and I would appreciate the opportunity to watch them grow up.” 
 
 Hall’s sentence ends in 2034, when she will be 50 and her children fully grown adults, according to the Oklahoman. She isn’t eligible for parole until she serves 85 percent of her sentence — not for another 15 years. 
 
 H/T BuzzFeed ||||| Tondalo Hall was sentenced to 30 years in prison for allowing child abuse — while the actual abuser got only two years . Now she seeks clemency, and a women’s rights group is backing her with an online petition. 
 
 Some prosecutors defend the long sentences given to battered women who don't intervene to stop their children from being harmed as sending a message that mothers have a duty to protect their children, even if they must risk their own safety. But many domestic violence advocates women counter that such punishments blame the victim and demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of what it means for women to be trapped in abusive relationships. Such women often fear alerting authorities because doing so can provoke their partners to extreme violence and because the authorities often fail to protect battered women and their children. Hall, who dropped out of high school in 10th grade, told BuzzFeed News that she met Braxton in either 2000 or 2001, when she would have been between 15 and 17. They soon began dating, and Braxton, who is two years older than Hall, seemed ambitious and nice — in the beginning. She can’t quite remember what it was that set him off the first time: “I didn’t tell him where I went, or something,” she recalled. They got into an argument, she said, and he punched her in the face. He apologized, she recalled, and said it wouldn’t happen again, and it didn’t, for a while at least. But then, during another argument, this time when she was pregnant, he put his hands around her throat. “He told me that my mouth was too smart,” she would later testify in court. With her head on the seat of the blue couch in her apartment, he choked her. The abuse, both physical and verbal, picked up once her third child (and second with Braxton) was born in August 2004, Hall told BuzzFeed News. He isolated her from her loved ones, driving “a wedge between me and my family,” she said. Hall summed up the alleged abuse in her commutation application: “Robert regularly choked me, blackened my eyes, threw objects at me and verbally assaulted me, while my children were in the home.” Somewhere along the way, Hall’s friend Gayla Watts-Sparger noticed changes in Hall and her children. Watts-Sparger has known Hall since kindergarten and said Hall was always goofy and outgoing. “You know how you meet somebody, and everything they say is funny?” Watts-Sparger said. But after Hall moved in with Braxton, Hall became “a lot quieter,” Watts-Sparger said, and Hall’s children acted strange too. Watts-Sparger recalled seeing Hall’s son, who was maybe a year old at the time, sitting upright and very still for a young child. When Braxton came by, Watts-Sparger said, the young boy would flinch. Reached through his Facebook account, Braxton at first said he would speak with BuzzFeed News but then did not respond to subsequent messages. After BuzzFeed News left repeated voicemails and sent a detailed letter to Braxton’s address given in court papers, a woman identifying herself as “Ms. Braxton” called and said that Robert Braxton does not live there and that she doesn’t know where he is. In the fall of 2004, Hall said, she noticed that her 20-month-old son’s leg was swollen. Braxton told her he didn’t know what might have happened. The problem persisted for several days, so she brought the boy to the hospital. Doctors determined he had a fractured femur and other broken bones. Suspecting child abuse, authorities checked on Hall and Braxton’s 3-month-old daughter, and found similar injuries. Both Hall and Braxton were arrested. Detectives at the Oklahoma City Police Department brought them both into the same interview room. Before the interrogation, Braxton was heard whispering to Hall, “Don’t say nothing.” Hall initially told the police that she had hurt their son by throwing him on the bed as they were playing — a version she later said was a lie. After Braxton admitted he had squeezed his baby daughter too tightly and cranked her leg, detectives concluded that he was the one who had injured both children, not her. Hall remained in jail, though. She pled guilty to enabling child abuse, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. She agreed to testify against Braxton — though she did not receive a deal from prosecutors for a reduced sentence. Braxton took his case to trial. Hall wrote in her commutation application that Braxton “repeatedly threatened me” during their initial court hearings. “For example, when Robert and I were being shuttled to and from court he would terrorize me. He would tell me that I would spend the rest of my life in prison and he would be out with our children.” Still, Hall agreed to testify against him. During Braxton’s trial, she was the main witness who could have seen Braxton actually harming the children. Yet Hall could not point to any specific abuse that she witnessed — because, she told BuzzFeed News, she didn’t actually see any abuse happen. In court, she also couldn’t recall the date her son began having trouble walking. Prosecutor Angela Marsee grew frustrated that Hall was not providing enough testimony to nail Braxton. “What do you know?” she asked. Hall replied that she had once woken up to hear that her daughter was screaming. Braxton had been changing the girl’s diaper. He told her nothing was wrong and that she should go back to sleep. The prosecutor asked for more. “Was there anything else that happened in your apartment that gave you reason to know that your children were in danger at the hands of this defendant?” “Yes, ma’am,” Hall replied. That’s when she began to describe the time that Braxton had choked her, when she was pregnant. Yet Braxton’s lawyer objected to this line of questioning, saying it was not relevant to the child abuse charge against him. The judge sided with Braxton. Prosecutors, who wanted life in prison for Braxton, sensed that their case against him was crumbling. With the trial in recess, the state and the defense worked out a deal. Braxton pled guilty but admitted to having harmed only one child. He said he grew frustrated while changing his daughter’s diaper and then broke her bones by “using too much force and pressure for a baby.” He was sentenced to 10 years in prison — but eight of those years were suspended, and he was released for time served. Hall was upset with the verdict. “I didn’t feel like there was any justice for my kids,” she told BuzzFeed News. Someone else was also upset with the trial’s outcome: Marsee, the prosecutor. And she would lay much of the blame on Hall. 
 
 Now Hall awaits the result of her commutation request. The author of the law under which Hall was convicted serves as the interim executive director of the parole board. Jari Askins was an Oklahoma state representative in 2000 when she wrote a bill that created the crime of “enabling child abuse,” with the word “enabling” meant to drive home that a failure to act was enough to warrant prosecution. Her law makes Oklahoma one of at least 29 states that explicitly criminalize parents’ failure to protect their children from abuse. Prosecutors in at least 19 states can use other, more general laws, such as ones against placing a child in a dangerous situation. Askins, whose long career in public service includes stints as a judge and lieutenant governor, told BuzzFeed News that she is sensitive to the plight of battered women. When her law was being considered, she said, she and her fellow legislators didn’t contemplate that it might help imprison women who themselves had been victimized by their partners. As executive director, she does not vote on clemency requests. Speaking generally, not of Hall’s case, she said that being battered is a mitigating circumstance that defendants could raise at trial. In her application for clemency, Hall wrote that the opposite happened. “I believe that my testimony detailing the violence in our home was used against me,” she stated. “Rather than being protected by the State, I was prosecuted.” Hall expressed remorse for not getting her children out of the home sooner: “I had a duty to protect my children and I failed.” But, she wrote, “I was trapped in an abusive relationship and I feared that alerting authorities would provoke Robert to increase his violence.” She said she also feared that Braxton would gain custody of her children. “My decisions, although detrimental to my family, were made out of fear rather than rationality.” Since she got to prison, Hall has completed her GED and taken parenting classes. She holds down a job in the laundry department. And she writes letters to her children, the youngest of whom is now 10. They write her back maybe once a month or so, she said, telling her how they’re doing and what they’re up to. The letters update Hall on how grades are going, when spring break is approaching, what the word perimeter means. The children talk about riding bikes and what presents Santa might bring. Some feature drawings. One has two stick figures, with the person on the left labeled “me” and the person on the right labeled “you.” One letter tells Hall that about some new shoes and a favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys. It also asks her a question: “Why did my Father break my leg, and ribs? I love you.” 
 
 Email the reporter at alex.campbell@buzzfeed.com 
 
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 Alex Campbell is the deputy UK investigations editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in London. His secure PGP fingerprint is C99D 2577 74B1 8DF0 6E90 3CD7 DFF4 C0F2 2492 Contact Alex Campbell at alex.campbell@buzzfeed.com. Got a confidential tip? Submit it here. 
 
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– Tondalo Hall was allegedly being abused by her boyfriend, Robert Braxton Jr. Yet when Braxton broke the ribs and femur of their 3-month-old daughter, he served just two years in prison, while Hall was sentenced to 30 years for allowing the abuse to happen. She was one of 28 mothers in similar situations uncovered in a recent BuzzFeed investigation, one of just three such cases in which the mom got a longer sentence than the man who abused the child. Now, BuzzFeed reports, she is applying for her sentence to be commuted. Clemency seems to be the only option left: She lost her appeal; the judge denied a request to modify the sentence, of which 20 years remain; and she's not eligible for parole until 2030. In court during her trial, as well as in statements outside of court, Hall described the abuse she says she suffered; the judge who sentenced her acknowledged that she seemed to fear Braxton. She tells BuzzFeed things got especially bad when their second child was born in 2004. She says she never saw Braxton hurt their kids. But that fall, she brought their 20-month-old son to the hospital when she noticed his leg was swollen; he had a fractured femur and broken bones, leading suspicious authorities to check on his 3-month-old sister and find her injuries. Both parents were arrested. Hall ended up pleading guilty and testifying against Braxton, though she did not get a reduced sentence in return and he did get a deal when prosecutors realized their case against him was going south. An activist group has started a petition on Hall's behalf.