Reporting Highlights
- Second Chance at Freedom: The Oklahoma Survivors’ Act allows imprisoned victims of domestic violence to ask for a reduced sentence if they can show the abuse was a driving factor in their crime.
- Prosecutorial Resistance: Local DAs have raised concerns that the law encourages exaggerated or bad-faith claims and could allow anyone who has suffered abuse to seek a lesser punishment.
- Reform Meets Roadblocks: One domestic violence survivor — serving a life sentence for her involvement in her husband’s murder — walked free, but others face pushback from prosecutors.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Lisa Rae Moss — serving a life sentence for her involvement in the 1990 murder of her husband, Mike Moss — sat in the witness box in a courtroom in Seminole, Oklahoma, on a frigid January morning in 2025, her hands knotted in her lap. Moss, who is 60, was asked to recount what she endured in her 20s, during her marriage to a volatile man a dozen years her senior. Her long silver hair and prison-issued glasses accentuated the years between her and the younger self she was describing.
“Did Mike ever use a gun on you in the bedroom?” her lawyer, Colleen McCarty, asked.
“He had a gun that usually lay on top of the chest of drawers at night,” Moss said quietly. She explained that her husband would place it there before they went to bed.
“There were a number of occasions where he took the gun — and I wasn’t in the mood to have sex and I didn’t want to have sex — and he would move the gun up and down my inner thigh and then lay it on the pillow next to the bed.” She stopped to correct herself: “Next to my head, I’m sorry.”
Under her lawyer’s questioning, Moss described a pattern of abuse that began six months after their wedding, when her husband grabbed her by the throat and threw her against the fireplace. She recalled how, during an argument, he tried to shove a tennis ball into her mouth. How she was knocked unconscious when he once slammed her head against their refrigerator so hard that it left a dent. How he repeatedly punched her in the stomach when she was pregnant with their son. How he raped her multiple times, once with a curling iron — an assault that caused lasting injuries. “I bled every day for five years until I finally had a hysterectomy,” she said. When her 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage complained that Mike had done something to make her bottom hurt, Moss feared he was sexually abusing her little girl, too.
“Were you afraid for your life?” McCarty said.
Moss nodded. “Absolutely.”
Her testimony put her at the center of an extraordinary legal experiment unfolding in Oklahoma,