Buck Thurman: The Case That Changed Domestic Violence Law

The Buck Thurman case is the 1983 Connecticut domestic violence attack and lawsuit that established, for the first time, that police who take domestic violence less seriously than other assaults violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Charles “Buck” Thurman nearly killed his estranged wife Tracey in Torrington after officers spent eight months ignoring her pleas for help. Her federal civil rights suit ended in a $2.3 million jury verdict against 29 officers and triggered Connecticut’s 1986 Family Violence Prevention and Response Act, still known as the Thurman Law, along with a wave of mandatory-arrest statutes across the country.

Eight Months of Ignored Warnings

The attack did not come out of nowhere. Between October 1982 and June 1983, Tracey Thurman and people around her contacted the Torrington police repeatedly about Buck’s threats and violence, and the department repeatedly did nothing.¹

In November 1982, Officer Neil Gemelli stood by while Buck screamed threats and smashed the windshield of the car Tracey was sitting in. Buck was arrested and convicted of breach of the peace, drew a six-month suspended sentence, and was placed on a two-year conditional discharge ordering him to stay away from Tracey. On December 31, police were told he had already violated it. They made no effort to find him.¹

From January through May 1983, Tracey and others called the department repeatedly asking for Buck’s arrest for violating probation. None of the calls produced any action.² In early May, after Buck threatened to shoot her, Officer Storrs took a written complaint but told Tracey to come back in three weeks. On May 6, the Litchfield Superior Court issued an ex parte restraining order forbidding Buck from assaulting, threatening, or harassing her, and the city was notified.¹

The court order changed nothing. Police told Tracey to wait until after Memorial Day. On May 31 they told her the officer who could help was on vacation. Her brother-in-law was promised Buck would be arrested on June 8. That arrest never happened. During this period Buck worked at a local diner called Skie’s, where Torrington officers were regular customers, and he openly told them he intended to “get” his wife and kill her.²

The June 10, 1983 Attack

On June 10, 1983, Buck showed up at the Torrington residence where Tracey was staying and demanded to speak with her. Tracey called the police roughly 15 minutes before going outside to try to keep him from taking or hurting their son, Charles Jr., who was not yet two.¹

Buck stabbed her 13 times in the chest, neck, and throat. He stomped on her head in heavy work boots, breaking her neck and damaging her spinal cord. He went inside, brought their son out, dropped the boy onto his bleeding mother, and told the child he had killed her.³

A single officer, Frederick Petrovits, arrived roughly 25 minutes after Tracey’s call. He initially stayed in his car across the street. He eventually approached and took a bloody knife from Buck but did not arrest him. Petrovits later testified he did not see a body and thought the man might have “stabbed a dog or a chicken.”³ After the knife was taken, Buck kicked Tracey in the head again and wandered through the growing crowd, still threatening her.¹ More officers arrived. Still no arrest. Only when Buck tried to reach Tracey again as she was being lifted onto a stretcher did officers finally wrestle him down and take him into custody, roughly 27 minutes after police first got to the scene.

Tracey was 21. She survived, but barely. She was hospitalized for eight months.⁴ The attack left her partially paralyzed on her right side, with limited movement in her right arm and hand, weakness in her right leg, loss of feeling in parts of her left hand and leg, and permanent scarring on her face, back, and throat from an emergency tracheotomy.³ After the hospital, she used a wheelchair for a year.

Buck’s Conviction and Sentence

A jury convicted Buck of assault in the first degree under Connecticut General Statutes § 53a-59(a)(1). He was originally sentenced to 20 years, suspended after 14; reporting from the time of his release indicates the sentence was ultimately set at 14 years.⁵ He earned six years of credit for good behavior and served nearly eight years in maximum-security prison.⁶

The Federal Civil Rights Lawsuit

While the criminal case was moving, Tracey filed a separate federal lawsuit against the City of Torrington and 29 of its current and former officers. The case, Thurman v. City of Torrington, Civ. No. H-84-120, was brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. Tracey and her son sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, alleging that Torrington police had a practice of giving less protection to domestic violence victims than to victims of other assaults.¹

The Equal Protection Ruling

In October 1984, ruling on the city’s motion to dismiss, the court held that police have an “affirmative duty to preserve law and order, and to protect the personal safety of persons in the community,” and that this duty applies just as fully to domestic violence victims. Systematically failing to protect women abused by their spouses while readily protecting other assault victims, the court found, created a discriminatory “administrative classification” barred by the Equal Protection Clause.¹

Torrington argued its officers were simply trying to promote domestic harmony. Citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Reed v. Reed, the court rejected that as an “increasingly outdated misconception” and held that police “may not automatically decline to make an arrest simply because the assaulter and his victim are married to each other.”¹ It was the first time a federal judge had allowed a domestic violence case to go to trial on the theory that police response policies violated equal protection.⁷

The $2.3 Million Verdict

On June 25, 1985, a federal jury found that 29 current and former Torrington police officers had violated Tracey Thurman’s right to equal protection. It awarded her $2.3 million and her son an additional $300,000.⁸ Individual officers, not just the city, could now be held personally liable for treating domestic violence as a private matter.

The Thurman Law and Mandatory Arrest

Connecticut passed the Family Violence Prevention and Response Act in 1986, known ever since as the Thurman Law. It rewrote the rules for how officers must handle domestic violence calls:

Officers responding to a domestic violence call must make an arrest when probable cause exists, and are prohibited from considering the victim’s relationship to the suspect or the victim’s own preference about arrest.⁹
Officers must help victims get medical treatment and inform them of their legal rights. If probable cause is lacking, the officer must explain why and stay at the scene until the threat of violence has passed.⁹
Family violence intervention units were established in every geographic area to take referrals, prepare court reports, and coordinate services for victims and offenders.⁹
The Municipal Police Training Council was required to develop training on family violence, and officers must file a report on every domestic incident whether or not an arrest is made.⁹

Domestic violence prosecutions in Connecticut climbed from roughly 24,000 in 1986 to more than 30,000 by 1992.⁹

The reach went well past Connecticut. Fear of Thurman-style lawsuits pushed municipalities across the country to adopt mandatory or pro-arrest policies. By 2007, 14 states and the District of Columbia had enacted mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence, and eight more had adopted recommended arrest laws.¹⁰ More recent counts put the number of mandatory arrest states at 22.¹¹ The federal Violence Against Women Act of 1994 built on the same premise, funding grants that encouraged pro-arrest policies.

Buck Thurman After Prison

Buck was released from maximum-security prison at 12:30 a.m. on April 12, 1991. His release conditions included five years of probation, no contact with Tracey or their son, a requirement to live outside Connecticut, no drugs or weapons, and a mandatory psychiatric evaluation. Any violation would have sent him back to serve the remaining six years.⁵

As probation neared its 1996 expiration, Tracey, by then remarried and using the name Tracey Thurman Motuzick, sought a permanent restraining order. She said Buck had threatened to “finish the job” of killing her and her son “when his probationary period expires and when everybody least expects it.”⁶

Buck relocated to western Massachusetts and was arrested again on November 24, 1999, for violating a restraining order taken out by an Easthampton woman, the mother of his six-year-old son from a post-prison relationship. She had alleged that he choked her, threatened her life, and forced her to have sex with him. Police said he pulled up beside her at a stoplight and honked. He pleaded innocent, and Northampton District Court Judge W. Michael Ryan, while calling him “dangerous,” released him on his own recognizance.¹² In January 2000, Buck pleaded guilty. Prosecutors asked for the two-and-a-half-year maximum. Judge Ryan gave him one year of probation, treating the stoplight encounter as apparently a chance meeting. Tracey Motuzick responded publicly: “He stalked me for eight months and look what happened. I’d hate to see the same thing happen to her.”¹³

Tracey Thurman’s Advocacy

Tracey became a national advocate for domestic violence victims, speaking around the country and pushing for changes to domestic violence laws in multiple states. Her story was dramatized in the 1989 television movie A Cry for Help: The Tracey Thurman Story.³

In November 2018, the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence honored her with its Coalition Crusader Award in Hartford. She had been married to Michael Motuzick for more than three decades by then and was still meeting with survivors, using a wheeled walker because of her injuries. “I’ll talk to survivors anytime they ask me,” she said. “I’ll talk to someone in the grocery store if they ask me.”⁴

1
Justia. Thurman v. City of Torrington, 595 F. Supp. 1521
2
Harvard Berkman Klein Center. Thurman v. City of Torrington Excerpt
3
The Washington Post. A Cry for Help
4
SF Gate. Torrington’s Tracey Thurman Motuzick Honored
5
UPI. Wife Beater Released From Prison
6
Hartford Courant. Thurman’s Ex-Wife Seeks Court Order to Keep Him Away
7
The Washington Post. Battered Wives and the 14th Amendment
8
The New York Times. Officers Must Pay $2.3 Million to Wife Maimed by Husband
9
Connecticut General Assembly. Connecticut Family Violence Act Summary
10
National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER Working Paper 13186
11
FindLaw. Domestic Violence Background
12
Cape Cod Times. Landmark Court Case Batterer Back
13
Hartford Courant. Judge Spares Thurman Prison Time