Nearly two years after being freed by Ohio’s governor, child sex trafficking survivor Alexis “Kee” Martin has been sent back to prison. Martin’s commutation was revoked in February after she violated the conditions of her parole.
She will now serve the remainder of the 21 years-to-life sentence imposed on her for a crime that occurred when she was 15 years old.
The news came as a shock to advocates across the country, who have rallied around Martin as a symbol of what can happen when courts ignore the trauma trafficked children endure.
“To other survivors who support me and look to me for hope, I apologize for letting them down,” said Martin, 24, in an interview from the Ohio Reformatory for Women. "I won’t give up until every last person in the world tells me no and that I deserve to be behind bars.”
Martin was first incarcerated in 2014, after she was involved in a robbery that led to a homicide. She told police the man who died was her “pimp." Though Ohio had a law in place to assist trafficked children charged in crimes, and detectives knew the teenager did not pull the trigger, prosecutors argued Martin was the “mastermind" of the robbery and tried her as an adult.
She served nearly seven years in prison. In April 2020, after years of work by advocates and a Kim Kardashian documentary highlighting her story, Martin was released by Gov. Mike DeWine (R).
Alexis Martin is a sex traffic survivor and I was honored to be able to share her story on the Justice Project. Thank you Governor DeWine for commuting her sentence. 🙏🏼 @GovMikeDeWine
— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) April 17, 2020
Following a five-month transition program, Martin moved in with one of her mentors, started jobs in restaurants and pizza delivery and eventually saved up for her own apartment. She also began to work as an advocate for marginalized youth. She was invited to speak at conferences, received a high-profile anti-trafficking award, and told her story to The Washington Post. The resulting investigation revealed the multiple failures that led to her incarceration.
But while Martin was freed from prison, DeWine did not grant her full clemency. Instead, she was ordered to remain on parole for at least 14 years. She was required to wear an ankle monitor, not leave the state without permission and be subject to random checks from parole officers.
During one of those checks, on Dec. 3, 2021, Martin was at her apartment with two men. Parole officers, along with Middletown, Ohio, police, conducted a search of the apartment that turned up 26 grams of cocaine, 45 grams of marijuana and two firearms, according to police records. Martin and the two men were taken into custody.
Middletown police said the department is working to indict one of those men in the incident, after a grand jury chose not to take action against him on the initial charges. The Post is not naming him for that reason.
Because she was on parole, Martin did not have to be convicted of any crimes in order to face long-term consequences. A prosecutor did not have to prove that the items found in the apartment belonged to her. Under the terms of her release, Martin could not possess or “have under her control” firearms or illegal substances. Because the apartment belonged to her, the items found were deemed under her control.
She was returned to the Ohio Reformatory for Women to await a parole violation hearing in February.
Her attorney, Jennifer Kinsley, argued at the hearing that Martin did not know the drugs or guns were in her apartment. She said they belonged to one of the men who was arrested, a 41-year-old whom Martin had been dating. The day before, he had moved in with her.
“The contraband was found in moving boxes and furniture with male belongings,” Kinsley said later. “We argued that the contraband did not belong to Alexis and the evidence suggested she was not aware it was in the apartment.”
Among the supporters who testified on Martin’s behalf was Chelsea Golterman, a senior legislative aide for Ohio state Sen. Teresa Fedor (D).
Fedor is the author of Ohio’s “Safe Harbor” law to protect child-sex-trafficking victims from being prosecuted for crimes they commit as a result of being trafficked.
Safe Harbor was passed the year before Martin was arrested. Fedor’s office has long argued that under that law, Martin should have received supportive services rather than time in adult prison.
Golterman pleaded with Ohio’s Adult Parole Authority not to continue to punish Martin for a crime the legislative aide said she shouldn’t have been punished for in the first place.
“If we would have protected her when she was 15, we wouldn’t be here today," Golterman said she testified. "Our state has repeatedly let her down and treated her like a criminal.”
The parole authority had the power to allow Martin to remain under the same parole conditions, to increase the level of supervision she was under or to remand her back to prison to serve any number of years. They chose the harshest level of punishment available: a complete revocation of her commutation and reinstatement of her full sentence.
“The Ohio Parole Board has carefully considered all of the factors and circumstances brought to its attention,” the revocation order stated. “The hearing officer recommends that you finish out the rest of your sentence as if the commutation had not been granted.”
DeWine did not intervene.
“It is the role of the parole board to determine sanctions in response to any violations, and the Governor has no further comment/opinion on the matter,” said Dan Tierney, DeWine’s press secretary, in an email.
Now, Martin could remain in prison for the rest of her life. She will not have the chance to return to the parole board until November 2034, after having served a total of 21 years.
In an interview supervised by the prison warden, Martin said she is struggling to adjust to the reality that she is no longer free.
“I believed that I was living the successful life of a 23-year-old. I had my own car, I had a dog, I had two jobs, I had a boyfriend that supported me,” she said. “I was at peace.”
She’d started dating, she said, because she wanted to have a family. Her own childhood was marked by homelessness and sexual abuse, including a rape that led to a pregnancy and miscarriage when she was 12 years old.
During her teenage years in prison, she took classes about domestic violence and came up with her own definition of a healthy relationship: someone who didn’t hit her, yell at her or use her money. Her new boyfriend didn’t do any of those things, she said. She believed him when he said his involvement with drugs was behind him.
“There’s going to be some people that says he took advantage of me because he was 41. There’s going to be some people that says I knew better, and I wish that I did,” Martin said.
“In here, girls ask me like, ‘What did I do?’" she continued. "And I feel like the only thing I did was, I was a 23-year-old girl who wanted to be loved.”
While Martin has been mourning the loss of her freedom, her story has continued to influence the criminal justice system. Courts and lawmakers across the country are re-examining whether the unique trauma of sex trafficking should minimize punishment for victims involved in crimes. In Wisconsin, Martin’s case was invoked in a brief to the state Supreme Court as it weighs the fate of sex trafficking survivor Chrystul Kizer. In Washington, Martin was one of multiple survivors whose experience influenced the “Abolish Human Trafficking Reauthorization Act" introduced in Congress last week.
Martin had visited the nation’s capital for the first time a few weeks before her arrest. She accepted an award in front of more than 800 people at a conference for anti-trafficking organization Shared Hope International.
“To reimpose her sentence is devastating,” said Christine Raino, Shared Hope’s senior director of public policy. “If there is no room for her to make mistakes, we are just going to keep punishing survivors over and over.”
Martin’s legal team still plans to work to have her original sentence overturned by the courts. They argue that under Ohio’s Safe Harbor law, Martin should have been granted a guardian ad litem to represent her interests and given supportive services, and that her case should have remained in juvenile court.
But because a 2018 Ohio Supreme Court decision ruled there was not evidence to show Martin’s crime was related to her trafficking, her legal options are limited. Her attorneys said she can claim ineffective assistance of counsel, because her first attorney did not introduce the evidence that would have shown how her crime was related to trafficking.
Prosecutors in Akron, where Martin was first arrested, plan to contest any additional attempt to have her released.
“It has been the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office’s position throughout Martin’s proceedings that her status as a human trafficking victim did not have a legally significant relationship to the crimes that she committed in this matter," prosecutors Brad Gessner and Rick Raley said in an emailed statement. "The court’s original sentence of 21 years to life was appropriate and the Office maintains that position today.”
Marjorie Rumph, the mother of the man who died in the 2014 robbery, said she is pleased Martin will serve the remainder of the sentence. She said she does not believe her son, 36-year-old Angelo Kerney, was involved in sex trafficking.
“He was a wonderful son, brother, uncle and father," Rumph said. "When we lost Angelo, it was like a piece missing from all of us.”
Martin remains hopeful that one day, she will walk out of the Ohio Reformatory for Women again. She wants to enroll in a survivor-led treatment program in Michigan that she could not go to while on parole because she was not allowed to leave the state.
Until then, she is passing the time by working on the prison’s cleaning crew and hoping she can return to the HVAC job she had last time she was incarcerated. She regularly calls her 8-year-old niece on the phone. And she is reading as much as she can, she said, mostly love stories.
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