Debbie Peagler has spent 25 years in prison for the murder of a man she says brutally abused her and her children. Now in the late stages of terminal lung cancer, she’s set to hear this week whether the parole board will grant her an early release.

In years past Debbie Peagler raised her voice to praise and thank the Lord as the leader of the prison choir, but she’s no longer able to lead the chorus. She has advanced lung cancer that has spread to most of her major organs and throughout her body.

Bay Area attorneys Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa have been fighting for six years for free to get Peagler out of prison.

“Deborah Peagler unfortunately has been someone that the system has failed in every possible way that it can,” said Safran.

Peagler was 15 years old when she met Oliver Wilson, a man she says was a drug dealer and a pimp. Over the six years that followed, she says Wilson forced her into prostitution, raped her, beat her with his fists and bullwhips, and more than once made her play Russian roulette with a gun.

In court documents, Peagler describes what she says was the last time Wilson raped her. She says said she thought he was going to kill her.

“There was no escaping him. There was no getting away from him,” she said.

In 1982 Peagler says she was hiding from Wilson in South Central Los Angeles when her mother told her Wilson was molesting Peagler's 5-year-old daughter and the couple's 2 year-old.

Days later, she set him up to be ambushed by two gang members at a Los Angeles park. Wilson was killed, strangled with an electrical cord.

Peagler was in a car waiting for the men and drove them home. She says she didn't ask what they did to Wilson and only found out days later that he'd been killed.

“Even though I hated him and I was mad at him, I didn't want him dead,” Peagler said. “I just wanted him to leave me alone. That is all I keep saying twenty years later: If only he had left me alone.”

Peagler pleaded guilty to first degree murder, she says, to avoid the death penalty.

But her current attorneys say a 1983 internal memo shows prosecutors knew the star witness lied about Peagler's role, and they didn't have the evidence for a death penalty case.

In 2005 Los Angeles County district attorney's office said they would agree to her release, but later withdrew their offer. Representatives from the attorney's office declined to comment. But in court documents, prosecutors say Peagler changed her story many times over the years, and in 1991 even testified she had discussed killing Wilson with the men because she believed Wilson abused her daughters.

One of the men says that discussion never took place.

Peagler collected $17,000 in life insurance after Wilson's death, sharing it with the men who killed him.

Debbie Peagler doesn't think she's innocent, her lawyers say. They point to these statements from current and former members of the Los Angeles District Attorney's office who say with her history of abuse, voluntary manslaughter would have been the appropriate charge, which now carries a maximum sentence of 11 years.

This week, the parole board is scheduled to decide if 25 years behind bars is punishment enough for the murder of a man Peagler says battered her for years.

“I always worry that her last breath will be inside those walls instead of with us,” said her daughter, Natasha Wilson. “There is no way I can get peace if it happens that way.”

For more information on Peagler’s case, visit her website. For more on the organization assisting in the case, see the Free Battered Women website.