Through the wringer.

When state's attorney S. Ann Brobst of Baltimore County, Maryland, brought before a grand jury the case of Karen Foxx, a woman who had shot and killed her estranged husband, to determine whether she should go to trial for his death, Foxx's attorney did something unusual: she let her client testify before the grand jury.

The Baltimore Sun, which covered Foxx's story, said that it is unusual to have a client testify before a grand jury because "defense attorneys are not permitted in the room, ... prosecutors and jurors can ask anything they want, hearsay and speculative evidence are admissible and anything the suspect says can be used against him at trial if he is charged." Yet Foxx's defense attorney had her testify because she was a sympathetic suspect: her estranged husband, Herman Bullock, had beaten her frequently and caused her to seek restraining orders against him, file criminal charges against him, and change her phone number.

On April 1 just before 4:30 p.m., Bullock went to Foxx's house and evidently threatened her with an axe handle that "she had been using in the tracks of a sliding glass door to secure it." Foxx shot him with a gun that she had purchased specifically to protect herself from him, killing him.

After the hearing, the prosecutor indicated that she had recognized prior to the hearing that Foxx's self-defense claim was reasonable: "Because there were genuine issues and potential defenses and because charging itself carries a punishment, we were not seeking an indictment," she told the Sun. "We were presenting the case for [the grand jury's] consideration."

If the prosecutor knew Foxx was innocent, why force her to hire and pay for a lawyer, explain and relive the horror of the abuse visited on her by her husband, make her visualize and relive the day of the shooting, and cause her to live with the dread of a possible murder charge looming over her head for months? This seems less a case of exercising due diligence than a case of judicial sadism.