Governor Kevin Stitt
Episode 1 of Panic Button: The April Wilkens Case podcast is out now!
Have you signed the petition yet?
A new podcast about April Wilkens is launching called “Panic Button: The April Wilkens Case”
Have you seen the latest posts about April from the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice?
Issues with April’s 2022 Parole Investigative Report
Linked here is the 2022 Parole Investigative Report by Brittany King and April Wilkens’s responses to the PAROLE INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE used to make the report. Below is April’s list of issues she found with the DA’s version included in the 2022 report (copied and pasted from an emessage to us, with light editing). The PDFs have OCR.
The main issues she focuses on are:
- Blatant falsehoods from the DA
- The substance abuse history is wrong and does not match her questionnaire answers she submitted (surely a mistake by the PI Investigator)
- She had never been diagnosed with bipolar, borderline personality disorder, or substance abuse disorder before Terry. And the bipolar and borderline personality diagnoses are ill-informed and wrong. Lynda Driskell diagnosed April with PTSD instead, which is spot-on because she is actually an expert. April has not taken psych medication since just after the turn of the century, when she was only taking an antidepressant for depression. The prison has had her classified (as shown in the report) as having NO mental health issues for many years now.
- You cannot “escape” from 12&12, it is out-patient only and you are free to leave whenever you like.
Continue reading “Issues with April’s 2022 Parole Investigative Report”
Parole Investigator response letter to April Wilkens about why the Pardon and Parole Board denied her a 2022 parole hearing:
The response from the Parole Investigator (who recommended she move forward with parole to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board) for why April was denied a parole hearing in 2022 this year reads thus:
“The Board is not obligated to provide a reason for denial as they did not provide a reason for years 2013, 2016, and 2019. A reason for denial was provided for 2022 as ‘A’: ‘The aggravating factors associated with the original crime, INCLUDING ANY DA OR VICTIM PROTEST, currently outweigh any mitigating factors in support of parole at this time.'” (emphasis added) Response dated 4/7/2022. I asked in writing instead of in person so that I have documentation.”
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board chose from a form list of responses.
To read the protest letter Tulsa DA Steve Kunzweiler’s office sent to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board see this link.
To learn about past cases like April’s, and where April’s falls within them, see this link.
If you would like a brief update on the current status of April’s case, see this link which contains a link to a petition currently at over 500+ signatures.Â
If you’re new here, welcome!
If you are new to our Free April Wilkens social media and blog, welcome! Here’s some info to get you oriented.Â
April Wilkens is an Oklahoma woman currently incarcerated for killing her wealthy rapist and kidnapper to defend herself. It happened in Tulsa over 20 years ago. Since then, she has not found justice in our state. As you might know, Oklahoma was just rated the worst state for women in a new WalletHub study, but it said nothing about our female incarceration rate and how harshly we sentence women. Susan Sharp, faculty at the University of Oklahoma, wrote a book about how terribly we punish women called Mean Lives, Mean Laws and she was interviewed in recent coverage of April’s case.Â
April suffered from battered woman syndrome and was not believed by Tulsa Police when she would report Terry Carlton’s abuse. They did not enforce a warrant for Terry Carlton’s arrest and Terry Carlton would even brag about paying them off. She later shot and killed him in self-defense after going to his house to confront him about terrorizing her, breaking into her home, and stealing her things. The Carltons agreed to a 20 year plea deal that April did not take, but it shows that the Carlton family did not fear her, as they have protested in the past. She could be out by now if she had, but just this month she was denied parole again. This comes days after the only woman on the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, Kelly Doyle, resigned under the political pressure of Governor Kevin Stitt. Doyle was harassed by the Attorney General and a DA. In the span of a year, every single member of the board has changed, except for Larry Morris – April’s only YES vote this time around. He’s one member not appointed by the Governor.
In the past, she has at least gotten a hearing. But not this time. Her parole jacket was denied by a 1-3 vote. In 2019 she was just one vote shy of getting a full parole recommendation. What is more, a few years after April’s trial, another woman argued the same Battered Woman Syndrome defense after killing her husband in his sleep and only got four years, only to have her conviction overturned.
During her trial, then-DA Tim Harris claimed she “cried rape” and a tape where Terry Carlton admitted to abusing and raping her was never played in court. We are sure that how her trial was handled then would not be allowed to happen today. What is more, the appeals court judge, Charles Johnson, was a family friend of the Carltons, officiating the wedding of two family members, one before the trial that April even attended. After her trial, Tim Harris also took money from the Carltons for his campaign and they hosted a reception for him. After this, Harris was still allowed to argue against April when she appealed, despite her attempts to disqualify him.
An attorney, Lynn Worley, who attended April’s trial in consideration for working in the Tulsa DA’s office later wrote in support of April and said that she was so angry about how Harris sucked up to the Carltons that she left the state for a time. What’s more, we cannot get a lot of local Tulsa news coverage of this story because Carlton’s family owns car dealerships in Tulsa and they threaten to pull funding/ads from them if they cover her story (most recently she was interviewed this month and a radio station dropped her story when the Carltons objected). Beyond this, these local news stations are what paid for the trip for the Carltons where Terry abused April in Europe! In the timeline are linked documents backing all of this up.
During the same March meeting dates this month, the parole board voted to fully recommend parole for the Crossbow Killer, but April couldn’t even get a hearing. What is the point of being sentenced to life with the possibility of parole if there is nothing she can do to ever attain it? It might as well be a life sentence, even though she is doing everything right while incarcerated.
We have started a petition to get the attention of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board AND Governor Kevin Stitt. Please consider signing and sharing it.
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