Inside the fight to overturn Helen Naslund's 18-year prison sentence
"This is the first time in this whole interaction with the judicial system, that somebody said to Helen, 'we believe you'"
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Matthew Behrens first heard the name Helen Naslund in 2017.
From his home in Ottawa, Behrens remembers feeling uneasy as he read about the Alberta farm woman charged with murdering her husband. A member of an advocacy group for abused women, Behrens suspected there was more to the story, but the details remained murky while the case dragged through court.
A few years later, what Naslund had done — and what had been done to her — emerged all at once in an Edmonton courtroom.
On the day before Halloween 2020, the world learned that Helen had killed a man who viciously abused her for nearly 30 years. Despite that, the justice system believed she deserved 18 years in prison for the crime. When the hearing ended, the five-foot-one, hundred-pound former barrel racer was led away to begin what, for a woman in her 50s, could amount to a life sentence.
A longtime activist, Behrens thought the sentence was appalling, but he wasn’t sure what to do. So he tried the correctional system’s equivalent of a cold call.
“I wrote to the prison,” Behrens said in an interview. “I wrote Helen a letter. I just said, ‘Helen, I read about your case. This is my background. This is the kind of advocacy that I engage in, (and) I believe that you have been railroaded by this system.'”
Last Wednesday, Alberta’s highest court agreed, halving Naslund’s sentence to nine years.
For Naslund and her family, it is a bittersweet result — one that means the 57-year-old will have to spend at least another year in prison before being allowed to apply for parole. But observers say Naslund’s case is a hard-won victory for abused women who kill their partners — a class of people advocates believe are badly misunderstood within the criminal justice system.
‘Reacted poorly’
Helen Naslund shot her husband Miles on Sept. 5, 2011, after a weekend that, in the context of the Naslund family farm, was far from unusual.
September was a tense month for the grain and cattle operation near Holden, Alta., serving as the year’s financial measuring stick.
The violence began Saturday, after Helen returned from her job at an equipment rental shop. Miles was drunk, and spent the day giving orders to her and their son Neil while carrying a .357 Magnum. When the tractor used to pull the haybine machine broke down, Miles flew into a rage, hurling wrenches at Helen. Helen used the lull caused by the tractor breakdown to prepare Sunday dinner. This too upset Miles, who cleared the fully set dinner table onto the floor, declaring the meal unfit for a dog.
Early the next morning, as Miles slept in their bed, Helen went to the gun cabinet, retrieved a .22-calibre revolver and fired two rounds into the back of his head.
Helen and Neil dragged the body to a metal truck box, which they drilled full of holes and welded shut. They sank the box in a pond, buried Miles’ car with a backhoe, and invented a cover story, telling police Miles had either been a victim of foul play or taken his own life.
Miles’ death remained a family secret for almost six years. Then, in August 2017, Camrose RCMP learned that middle son Darrell had been telling people his father had been killed. The following month, police set to work scouring the farm. Dive teams found the body and the two guns, while a digging crew located Miles’ car. Helen and Neil surrendered to RCMP on Sept. 7, 2017, and were each charged with first-degree murder.
Helen faced a series of bad options. She could take the charge to trial and hope a sympathetic jury might acquit her. But that ran the risk of a life sentence with no parole for 25 years, raising the very real possibility that she might die in prison. There was also the issue of Neil — just 19 at the time of his father’s killing — who also faced life behind bars.
On Oct. 30, 2020, Helen took what she thought was the best deal available to her: 18 years in prison on a plea to manslaughter. Neil’s murder charge was dropped following a guilty plea to indignity to human remains, for which he received three years.
For a time, it seemed that was that. Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Sterling Sanderman praised the deal Crown prosecutor Dallas Sopko and defence lawyer Darin Sprake reached, saying it was an example of “prosecutorial maturity.” The facts Helen admitted acknowledged she was abused, but stopped short of formally recognizing her as a battered woman.
“When counsel tell me that they feel that this is fair, I agree with them,” Sanderman said. He mused about good and evil, describing Helen as an otherwise good person who “(reacted) poorly when other options (were) open to them.”
Petitions and pen pals
Public reaction was less sanguine.
It started with Wesley Naslund, the eldest of the three Naslund sons, who spoke to this newspaper about growing up under his father. He described bar-brawl style fights, his father’s obsessive, controlling behaviour, and an atmosphere of never-ending dread. He spoke of how often Helen tried to leave, and how each time, Miles said he would track her down. In the early 2000s, she made the first of several suicide attempts.
The case also began to attract attention in academic circles.
Days after Helen’s sentencing, University of Ottawa professor emerita of law Elizabeth Sheehy said Naslund’s sentence was the longest a Canadian court had imposed in a manslaughter case involving an abused woman who killed her husband. As part of her 2014 book Defending Battered Women on Trial, Sheehy analyzed 91 homicide cases involving abused women such as Helen. Of those who pleaded guilty, 18 had received house arrest or suspended sentences, while those sentenced to jail time received an average of two years less a day. Prior to Naslund, the longest sentence following a manslaughter guilty plea was 10 years.
Behrens was among the first people to reach Helen in prison, making contact in December 2020.
“She had a lot of questions,” he recalled.
Behrens’ history of activism goes back to the 1970s. In the 1980s, he participated in the Canadian campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime. In 1989, after a misogynist murdered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, he helped organize a group called Men Walking Against Male Violence, which crisscrossed the province speaking at schools and community organizations. He also co-founded a group called Women Who Choose to Live to advocate for women in Helen’s position.
“I just said, ‘this is what I think I can do to help,'” he said. “And she was willing to consider it.”
One of the first things Behrens did was start an online petition called “This Grandmother of 8 Should Not Be in Jail.” Addressed to provincial politicians, the petition called Helen’s punishment a “grave miscarriage of justice” that was well above manslaughter sentences imposed on men who killed their spouses. At publication time, it had over 26,000 signatures.
Those angered by Helen’s sentence also began to write to officials, both elected and unelected.
One whose support proved crucial was Sen. Kim Pate, one of Canada’s best-known advocates for prison reform. When Pate became aware of the case, the biggest hurdle facing Helen’s appeal was time. By the time the senator reached Naslund in prison, the 30-day window to appeal her sentence had closed. Pate later swore an affidavit supporting her application to extend the appeal period. She also connected her with Mona Duckett, the Edmonton lawyer who argued the appeal.
Meanwhile, academics including Sheehy began to speak out.
That December, Sheehy co-authored an op-ed with Lynn Ratushny, a retired Ontario judge who in 1997 conducted a review of 98 cases in which women were convicted of killing their abusive partners. The review took place seven years after the Supreme Court of Canada’s famous Lavallee decision, which permitted the use of expert evidence in establishing a “battered woman” defence.
Ratushny’s review, among other things, recommended police and prosecutors lay manslaughter charges in battered woman cases. They argued Helen was another example of a woman who, under the “crushing weight” of murder charges, gave up her right to air a self-defence claim at trial.
Naslund’s appeal was filed Feb. 25, 2021. It made three main arguments: that the sentence brought the administration of justice “into disrepute,” that it was contrary to the public interest, and that it was a result of “coercive” plea-bargaining. The Alberta Court of Appeal set a hearing for June.
In the months that followed, Helen continued to gather supporters. She collected dozens of pen pals, including Paola Di Paolo, an Ontario woman who raises horses and wrote her thesis on violence against farm women. “She looks at the letters and keeps them and she says they’re really helpful for her,” Di Paolo said. “If she’s having a bad day she goes back to her letters and reads them again.”
Naslund also began to write blog posts, which Behrens posted on the Women Who Choose to Live website. “I have always been a very private person,” she wrote in May. “All this public attention is a huge overload for me. Yet at the same time it does help to give me strength. I need to power through this hellish situation I am in.”
Meantime, Behrens solicited letters of support from women’s groups across Canada and around the world. One day, a letter arrived out of the blue from a women’s equality group in Afghanistan. The group’s members were forced to flee last summer after the Taliban captured Kabul.
“Some of them went to one country, some of them went to another,” Behrens said. “But even amidst that, they’re like, ‘how’s Helen doing?'”
Despite all the support, Naslund’s appeal faced a difficult road — in large part because she agreed to the 18-year sentence. Plea bargaining is the bread and butter of most western justice systems, allowing prosecutors to obtain a conviction in exchange for a potentially lighter sentence. Judges are not required to accept such joint submissions, but they very rarely choose not to. Appeal courts are wary to overturn joint submission sentences because few people would plead guilty without a strong chance the judge will honour the agreement.
Naslund’s hearing took place on June 22 before Court of Appeal Justices Thomas Wakeling, Kevin Feehan and Sheila Greckol. While Duckett’s arguments focused on inadequacies in the joint submission process, she said the case was ultimately about the “gendered lens” through which the justice system views women who “kill to survive.”
When the Court of Appeal finally reached its decision last week, the majority opinion was written by the lone woman on the panel.
“Allowing such a joint submission to stand would, Ms. Naslund argues, cause the reasonable observer to lose confidence in the justice system and be contrary to the public interest,” Greckol wrote. “I agree.”
‘We believe you’
For Helen’s supporters, the court’s decision is a mixed bag. For one, despite all the fault she found with the joint submission, Greckol still believed Naslund’s conduct after she killed Miles still merited a lengthy jail term.
“She’s not leaving prison anytime soon, unfortunately,” Sheehy summarized. Nevertheless, Sheehy credited the team behind Naslund with reversing what seemed like a hopeless situation. “Mona Duckett had quite a hill to climb to overcome a joint submission on sentencing, and she did it.”
There is also the question of the Crown, which has 60 days to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Justice Wakeling provided a lengthy dissent, raising concerns about the applicability of the battered woman defence, which was not pursued by Naslund’s original lawyer.
Wesley Naslund, for his part, remains deeply angry at the system that imprisoned his mother in the first place. Reached by phone the evening after the court’s decision, he said the shorter sentence means there’s at least a chance his mother might get to have a relationship with her grandchildren, and see her own elderly father before he dies.
“It’s better than 18 years, but it’s not what anybody had hoped for,” he said.
For Behrens, the most significant part of the decision was that, for the first time, the justice system formally recognized Helen as a battered woman.
“This is the first time in this whole interaction with the judicial system, that somebody said to Helen, ‘we believe you,'” he said. “(When) another battered woman comes before the courts, (the decision) is almost a textbook on how you should approach someone in Helen’s shoes.”
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