A Manhattan judge gave a Long Island woman convicted of killing her rapist a new chance at freedom when he ruled that the parole board focused too heavily on her crime and not enough on her redemption.
Former Suffolk County resident Keila Pulinario, 39, was denied parole in June 2012 even though the head of her Westchester prison said she “would be an asset to our society if she were released.”
In 1995, Pulinario, then 21, lured an ex-boyfriend named Imagio Santana into the woods and shot him twice with a .38 caliber revolver. She says she’d recently discovered he bragged to friends after raping her in a car.
Pulinario, who had been sexually abused as a child, told police the killing was to avenge her honor.
Her 25-years-to-life sentence was tossed in 2003. A federal judge found that a lower court improperly barred testimony from a psychiatric expert who said Pulinario was suffering from rape trauma when she pulled the trigger.
Pulinario was re-sentenced to 15 years to life in 2005.
She sued the state Department of Correctional Services in 2013 after she was denied parole. Pulinario’s suit says she never intended to kill Santana but panicked when she confronted him and he “started laughing in her face and saying that he would do it again.”
Still, Pulinario has “expressed true remorse for her crime,” she says in court papers.
The board didn’t buy her apology, instead saying the incident proved Pulinario was a “deviated and dangerous person who could impose a threat to the community.”
However, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Peter Moulton found, “The parole board gave great weight to the seriousness of her crime without any explanation of why the 17-year-old crime outweighed the voluminous evidence that indicates that she would be able to live a quiet and crime-free life,” in his decision released Friday.
“I think it was the right decision, and I hope she will be granted parole the next time around,” said Pulinario’s attorney, Jodi Peikin.
Correction officials are reviewing the judge’s decision, a spokesman said.
Moulton’s ruling accused the board of ignoring reports in the inmate’s release application, including a statement from a nun about Pulinario’s “positive changes in her 15 years behind bars.”
He took the board to task for quashing her application almost immediately after her hearing.
“There was no substantive discussion by the parole board at the hearing,” Moulton wrote in his eight-page decision, in reference to Pulinario’s “acceptance of responsibility for her crime, her vocational work in prison and her employment plans once released.”