A small black plastic box is tightly clasped around Stephanie Clark’s left ankle at the dining table as she plays Uno with her son. The court-ordered GPS monitor is tracking her every move, and so is the 9-year-old boy.
He’s clinging to his mom after two years apart, only getting a few hours to play their favorite card game during visits at the Shakopee women’s prison. But now, Brandon Carlisle-Maynard Jr. gets to play at home with his mom. He can watch the list of movies he’s been waiting to see with her. He sits on her lap and crawls on her back like a human jungle gym. He doesn’t let mom leave his sight, he says, “except for when she’s going to the bathroom.”
Granted a new murder trial — and a rare second chance at life together with her son — Clark walked out of prison this week hoping that this time a jury will believe that she was justified in what she did.
The 33-year-old, sentenced to 25 years for the 2020 killing of her abusive, live-in boyfriend, won an appeal after judges found that an erroneous jury instruction may have swayed the verdict. Her case has since gained the support of some of the nation’s leading scholars on domestic violence, as well as local advocacy groups. Clark maintains that she acted in self-defense, fearing Don‘Juan “Duke” Butler was going to kill her and her son, who was 5 at the time and in the other room.
Prosecutors say self-defense may well be true — had Clark not fired a second gun to kill a wounded Butler.
She said her son, who the family calls “Twoey,” is what triggered her to act, and since then it’s been a continued fight.
“What I had to do to keep my life and now what I have to do to try to keep it going,” she said.

Imminent harm
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office charged Clark with second-degree intentional murder on March 6, 2020, the day after she shot Butler more than a dozen times in her Maple Grove home.