Arlena Lindley's boyfriend Alonzo Turner beat her for months and murdered her child — so why was she sent to prison for 45 years? A BuzzFeed News Investigation. 
 
 Watson told BuzzFeed News that he thought about how Phanthtaranth had suffered from repeated physical and sexual abuse growing up in foster homes. And she had already been behind bars more than two years for Alexis’ death. “How much is one person expected to endure?” he said. What troubles Watson is something he acknowledged both in the sentencing hearing and in an interview. Had Mendez just pled guilty, instead of taking his case to trial, he probably never would have learned of the abuse Mendez meted out on Phanthtaranth. “They both would be in right now,” he said, “and nobody would have even had a second guess about it.” 
 
 Years later, White recalled that she was “shocked” when Judge Howard went far beyond the 10-year sentence she had offered. Still, White said she feels that 45 years is plenty fair. Lindley, she said, watched Turner “torture” her only son, “and then she got in her car with her friend to get hair products.” White said, “She deserved what she got.” White did not initially remember that her office had viewed Lindley as a victim, having charged Turner with assaulting her on the day he killed Titches. She acknowledged that many see child abuse and domestic violence as linked, and she said that in many of the cases she sees, the perpetrator has committed both. But, she said, she runs the child abuse division of the Dallas County Prosecutor’s Office, and a separate division handles domestic violence. “Why women stay, and that — I can’t speak to that; I have no expertise in that,” she said. Her division focuses on “only the children.” White also did not recall that someone else called 911 when Lindley hadn’t, but White said that fact didn’t mitigate her sense of Lindley’s guilt. (Judge Howard declined to be interviewed and did not respond to a written question about the 911 call.) A call from a mother would have carried more weight than one from a neighbor, White said, and the fact that someone else phoned didn’t relieve Lindley of her duty as a mother to take action. “In the end,” White said, “she walked out alive, and he didn’t.” Lindley stays in an all-women’s prison off a stretch of farmland halfway between Austin and Dallas. She has been behind bars eight years. Having lost her first attempt at parole, she will have to wait until 2016 to try again. The parole board cited its “nature of offense” rule, reserved for prisoners whose acts were too egregious for them to be granted clemency. Told that many people believe that in a situation like hers, they would do anything to protect their children from abuse, she said, “I was like that. ‘Oh, it couldn’t be me.’ But you really don’t know.” Titches would be 11 years old now. He’s been dead for twice as long as he was alive, so Lindley’s memories are frozen in his baby years — learning shapes and colors on the internet, playing with his Hokey Pokey Elmo. Titches' name is tattooed on the inside of her wrist. 
 
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 Anita Badejo, Jeremy Singer-Vine, Julia Furlan, Ellie Hall, and Nicolás Medina Mora contributed reporting to this story. ||||| 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.