April Rose Wilkens
American criminalized survivor
April Rose Wilkens (born April 25, 1970) is an American woman serving a life sentence at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center after her conviction for the murder of Terry Carlton in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is the subject of the podcast series Panic Button: The April Wilkens Case. She was the first to apply for resentencing under the Oklahoma Survivors Act when it took effect in August 2024, but was not the first released. She awaited her resentencing hearing until September 2025, over a year after she had applied.
Wilkens is featured as starting head of the dog rehabilitation and adoption program in Mabel Bassett in the 2015 student documentary Bassett Tails by Friends for Folks. She also leads a physical health training program at the prison. In 2023, she was mentioned in the "Kill or be Killed?" episode about Nikki Addimando in ABC's 20/20, along with other criminalized survivors. Her essays in support of criminalized survivors have been published in The Oklahoman and USA Today.
She has been incarcerated for over a quarter of a century. She was last eligible for parole in Spring 2025.
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