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.

Reviewing claims of innocence

Conviction integrity units have popped up in prosecutors’ offices across the Front Range in recent years. The teams, housed within district attorneys’ offices, universally review claims of factual innocence, Bluestine said. But only about two-thirds consider cases of “legal innocence” — where there is no question who committed the act but there is a valid legal defense for it — or cases with unjust outcomes, like a disproportionate charge or sentence.

Boulder’s Conviction Integrity Unit has since 2018 vacated three convictions, including Housman’s. The agency received applications in 24 other cases that did not qualify for a review, and has several other pending cases, a spokeswoman for the office said.

In Denver, the district attorney’s conviction review unit has reduced five sentences since the team was established in 2022 and has not exonerated anyone, spokesman Matt Jablow said.

In Jefferson and Gilpin counties, the district attorney’s office has received about 220 applications since launching its conviction review unit in 2021, of which half were denied because they did not qualify for a review. Just over 50 applications involved claims of innocence, spokeswoman Brionna Boatright said.

The team reduced sentences in 10 cases — a total of 207 years in prison wiped away — and has handled two factual innocence cases. In one case, a defendant pleaded guilty to a lesser charge than the one he originally was convicted of and, as a result, was immediately released from custody. In the second investigation, DNA testing showed the defendant did commit the decades-old assault and murder he claimed to be innocent of.

In the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, the volunteer conviction review unit considered at least 27 claims in 2021 and the first three quarters of 2022, spokesman Eric Ross said, with at least 10 of those cases denied further review. More recent numbers were not available, he said. The unit considers only claims of actual innocence.

Considering only the number of exonerations is a poor way to measure how effective a conviction review unit is, Bluestine said. Rather, experts look at how many cases the teams have reviewed and what other steps have been taken, like reducing sentences or charges. In Housman’s case, the fact that Heidel, the lead detective, started the review process shows that the unit is considered credible, she said.

“What makes this one particularly extraordinary is this was driven by a detective,” she said. “And that’s exactly what a conviction integrity unit is meant to do… If you are getting those internal referrals from police and prosecutors, that’s a good sign. It shows there is some significant institutional buy-in into the process. And that’s a very healthy thing.”

“I saved my life that night”

Heidel brought the case to Dougherty for a conviction integrity review after Traci Housman came to him several years ago asking for his support in a clemency application to the governor’s office, he said.

Housman and her attorney did not comment for this story. But Housman said in court that she pleaded guilty because she was facing decades in prison, didn’t want to sully her husband’s name, didn’t want to publicly go into all the details of the domestic violence in the relationship, and didn’t want his family to be forced to re-live the incident during a jury trial.

Heidel initially thought the plea agreement she accepted was fair, he said in an interview with The Post, even though he always thought she had a strong self-defense claim. But he realizes now that her decision was unduly influenced by the ongoing domestic violence in her marriage.

“At the time, not knowing all the facts, I thought, yeah, that’s a pretty good deal that she got,” he said. “…In talking with Traci over the years, she has slowly come to that realization that she was still trying to protect (her husband) even after he died. She was trying to protect his reputation, his family… and she finally realized that she was still caught up in that domestic violence-type of cycle.”

Margaret Abrams, executive director of the Rose Andom Center, which supports survivors of domestic violence, said it is common for victims to hold back the details or scope of the violence from investigators and others.

“For one thing, sharing that you’ve been a victim of abuse can be really embarrassing, and, really, you feel like you are putting yourself on public display to be judged, that you’re exposing things about your relationship that you probably don’t want to,” she said. “…There can be lots of layers on why a victim may not be completely forthcoming with all the details.”

Stan Garnett, who was the Boulder County district attorney who charged Traci Housman and offered the original plea to probation, said the office was aware of the domestic violence aspect of the case, and tailored the plea offer with that in mind.

“I felt very comfortable with how we prosecuted the case originally and with the original disposition,” he said, noting that the exoneration was not a case of factual innocence. “But if you run across information that makes the disposition seem unjust, it’s the appropriate thing to do something about that.”

Dougherty said Housman initially did not tell investigators everything about the violence in her marriage, and that she provided critical new information about ongoing abuse in an interview with investigators during the conviction review process.

Traci Housman said in court that she didn’t offer up the full details initially because she wanted to give her husband’s family a chance to heal.

“It wasn’t until I shared the details with the (conviction review) committee that I realized the weight I had carried from that decision, the impact of being punished for having saved my life,” she said. “I saved my life that night.”

A better understanding

There’s been growing recognition in the judicial system that the longer-term context of domestic violence relationships is critical to consider in court, Abrams said.

“There is a much better understanding today than previously about that domestic violence is about the context in which something has happened,” she said. “Often the legal system wants to isolate things into discreet acts and incidents, and that is very difficult to do with domestic violence.”

Scalcini, John Housman’s daughter, questioned how much of the information Traci Housman provided during the conviction review was actually new.

“Traci had 14 years to refine her story,” she said in an email. “…No one cares about the truth, just about sweeping it under the rug.”

About a quarter of the people in the National Registry of Exonerations pleaded guilty before they were later exonerated, said Maurice Possley, senior researcher. Defendants pleaded guilty in 825 of the registry’s about 3,400 exonerations, he said.

He highlighted four cases nationally since 1993 in which women killed their partners and were initially convicted, but later exonerated because of ongoing domestic violence in the relationship.

“If everybody went to trial, the system would collapse,” Possley said. “More than 90% of cases are resolved by plea. So it’s not surprising people plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit, because they want to get away, they want to get out of it, they want to get it over with. In this case, she was willing to do that even though she had what hindsight tells us is a legitimate defense, which she chose not to exercise.”

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