Domestic Abuse Laws : Victims Find Little Safety in System

A Massachusetts woman asked a judge for protection from the abusive husband who bragged, even to police, of his plans to kill her. “This court has a lot more serious matters to contend with,” she was told.

In the District of Columbia, a man broke into an apartment and held the mother of his two children at gunpoint for hours. Prosecutors wrote the case off as a routine child custody spat and did not press charges.

A woman in Colorado, terrorized for years by a former boyfriend, pleaded that he be held in jail. But she had only a scratch to show from his latest attack, and he got out with a $100 fine.

These three women are now dead.

Killing Every Six Hours

Pamela Nigro Dunn, Leedonyell Williams and Sharie Burge were murdered by the enraged, obsessed men who had been their husbands or lovers. Such killings occur somewhere in this country every six hours and account for almost one-third of women murdered.

Rarely do they happen without warning. Almost always, the women leave their stories in a police file somewhere--one that chronicles an all too familiar pattern of escalating violence, one that spells out every opportunity the legal system had to step between the abuser and his victim.

The system’s last chance to save Maria Navarro came a week ago, when she telephoned the Los Angeles County sheriff’s 911 emergency number and told a dispatcher that her estranged husband was on his way over to kill her. The dispatcher refused to send a patrol unit to her apartment and, half an hour later, a gunman killed Navarro, her two aunts and a family friend. Authorities later arrested Navarro’s husband.

Questions immediately arose as to whether the department properly handled the call. But the real issue, according to authorities and advocacy groups, is that the system all too often fails the desperate women who turn to it for refuge.

“Maria Navarro did everything right, everything the system told her to do--she had left the husband, she had a restraining order (that had expired), she called police,” said Sheila James Kuehl, managing attorney for the Southern California Women’s Law Center.

‘A Very Serious State’

“What we must learn from this is that even the threat of domestic violence is a very serious state,” added Cheryl Ward, the senior assistant city attorney who chairs the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council.

“When there is an opportunity for authorities to intervene, they must take that opportunity,” Ward added. “Unfortunately, when there is violence short of death--threats, pushing, shoving--it seems to get trivialized.”

One reason for this apparent disregard may be that frequency has inured society to family violence. A University of New Hampshire study estimated that at least two-thirds of the 56 million married and cohabiting couples in this country have experienced at least one violent incident. California law enforcement agencies received 182,540 domestic violence calls last year.

Women are usually at the receiving end in the worst cases--the victims in 90% of the assaults and two-thirds of the domestic murders recorded by the U.S. Justice Department. The surgeon general in 1984 identified battering as this nation’s single largest cause of injury to women.

Not until the situation becomes almost unbearable will most women turn to the police, said Murray Straus, a sociology professor who directs the University of New Hampshire’s Family Research Laboratory. “It takes an incredible amount of abuse for a woman to take legal action.”

When she does, her problems often multiply. Interviews with family counselors, educators, prosecutors and various police officials, as well as research conducted by universities and law enforcement agencies, reveal the following points where the system is likely to break down:

* Despite a national trend toward arresting those who commit acts of domestic violence, and evidence that arrest is the best deterrent, she may encounter police who are reluctant to respond to her call or to treat an incident as the crime that it is.

* As in any crime, if an abuser is arrested, he usually can be free in a matter of hours in many jurisdictions, even if he has threatened in front of police to kill his victim at first opportunity.

* Easily obtained court protective orders, effective in most cases, are worthless against someone who is determined to hurt someone else.

* Prosecutors and judges, swamped by other types of criminal cases, may not give family violence high priority.

* Those who do pursue these cases stand a good chance of losing the victim’s cooperation. A woman may be caught in an unhealthy dependence on her abuser, frightened by his threats of reprisal, swayed by his promises to reform or disillusioned by a confusing and intimidating court system.

Historically, courts have granted men wide latitude in settling disputes with their spouses.

In English common law, a man was considered to have a right to “physically chastise an errant wife.” What passed for restraint was the notorious “rule of thumb,” which stated that the stick he beat her with could not exceed the width of his thumb.

Treated Differently

Even after domestic assaults were made illegal in the United States, a century ago, the system continued to treat them differently from other types of crime. Official policy of almost every police department was to try to reconcile the couple, to walk the abuser around the block until he cooled off, maybe recommend some counseling.

When these cases ended up before a judge, it was usually in family court.

“In family court, the orientation is the preservation of the family,” said Mary Werner, an assistant district attorney in Suffolk County, N.Y. “Most of the time the victim gets an order of protection. Period. End of story.”

It is only recently that domestic violence has been treated as a crime.

The case often cited as the turning point began on June 10, 1983, when Tracey Thurman telephoned the Torrington, Conn., police to complain that her husband was harassing her in violation of the protective order that was supposed to keep him away.

It took 25 minutes for an officer to arrive from a nearby station, and by the time he did, Charles (Buck) Thurman had stabbed his wife in the face, neck and back. As the officer called an ambulance, he watched Thurman continue to kick her and grind his heavy work boot into her neck.

Sued Police Department

In the first case of its kind, Tracey Thurman sued the Police Department in federal court and collected $2 million for the partial paralysis and other injuries she had suffered.

The decision put station houses throughout the nation on notice that they could be held liable for their failures to stop domestic violence. Their insurance companies began to demand that they retrain their officers, with greater emphasis on intervention.

Los Angeles Police Department standards, considered among the nation’s most progressive, were rewritten as part of a 1985 settlement of a class-action suit in which three women alleged that despite repeated assaults by their husbands, they could not get police to arrest the men.

The women said police had argued that domestic violence was a civil, not criminal matter, and that a jailed husband could lose his job and the family’s income.

Agreement Signed

The department’s 7,000 officers signed an agreement to treat domestic violence like other battery cases--in other words, like a felony. It is then up to prosecutors to determine whether a case should be pursed as a felony or a misdemeanor or dropped.

In the last few years, more than half the big-city police departments throughout the nation have established what are called a “pro-arrest policies.” Every state but West Virginia has also adopted statutes aimed at encouraging arrest.

California’s law, passed in 1985, requires that all sworn police officers receive 8 1/2 hours of training on how to handle domestic violence complaints. The dispatcher who answered Maria Navarro’s call had been through such a program.

Adding to the pressure for more arrests was an experiment conducted in Minneapolis for the U.S. Justice Department in 1981 and 1982. Researchers discovered that suspects who were arrested were only half as likely to repeat the offense as those who were simply counseled or taken away from the scene. Arrest appeared to be a strong deterrent, even though only a handful of people who were hauled in ever spent as much as one night in jail.

Arrests Have Skyrocketed

“The lesson is the fact that wife-beating is against the law,” said Richard Berk, a UCLA sociology professor who co-wrote the study.

Law enforcement agencies nationwide say the number of domestic violence arrests has skyrocketed as the result of new pro-arrest requirements. Los Angeles saw a sevenfold rise in domestic violence arrests when it began its policy four years ago.

Attitudes take longer to change.

Even in communities where there is an official pro-arrest stance, many say police do not treat domestic violence with the same urgency accorded when the assailant is a stranger.

“Definitely, the way to get a quick and effective police response is to tell them, ‘There’s a man in my house with a knife.’ If you say, ‘It’s my husband,’ you get an entirely different response, with a lower priority,” said Joan Meier, a Washington attorney who is on the legal committee of the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

‘We’re Swamped’

A torrent of domestic violence arrests is adding to the burden of overloaded jails and courtrooms. “We’re swamped,” Suffolk County’s Werner said. “We cannot give the time and effort and the person power that we want to the prosecution of these cases.”

In the past, some Los Angeles prosecutors have been openly resentful at having to spend time on what they see as frivolous cases arising from the city’s pro-arrest policy. One, who asked to remain anonymous, did not disguise his scorn as he showed the evidence from a case to a Times reporter in 1986.

“Look at this, a scratch on the stomach,” he told the reporter. “What am I doing with this? They (the police) know better.”

Judges, too, have been known to express low regard for the domestic cases that have crowded their docket.

In 1987, Massachusetts Judge Paul H. King was disciplined, in part because he was rude and insensitive to battered women whose cases were heard in his courtroom.

“I don’t believe she was beaten. I didn’t see any bruises. Most women bruise pretty easily,” King once said of a victim, even though her story was verified by police.

King asked another woman, “What did you do to make him hit you?”

Today, King remains on the bench and last April he was named Man of the Year by the Quincy Bar Assn.

Unwilling Judges

With jails already full of dangerous criminals, judges often are unwilling to hold wife beaters there for long. Further, in New York and many other states, the law prohibits them from taking a family’s safety fears into account when setting bail. The amount is based instead on ensuring that a suspect will return for his next court date.

If he appears to have roots that will hold him in the community--a job, a house--the arrested man is likely to be released on his own recognizance, often to return to the home he shares with the woman he abuses.

In California, it is left up to the judges to consider public safety issues when setting bail.

“There have been innumerable times when a judge has refused to hear my information that this man is a threat to his family and should have a higher bail,” said Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. Alana Bowman, who heads the agency’s domestic violence prosecution unit.

Experience had taught Lisa Bianco everything she should do to protect herself. After she got her ex-husband sentenced to five years in prison for his years of abuse, she counseled others at the battered women’s shelter in Elkhart, Ind.

Phone Threats

He oftened phoned her from prison to tell her what he planned to do to her when he got out, and each time, Bianco would report it to prison officials. They agreed to inform her if he ever got out, even on a short furlough.

They didn’t. When Alan Matheney got an eight-hour pass last March, he headed straight for Bianco’s house 150 miles away. He is to stand trial in November on charges of bludgeoning her to death on her front sidewalk with the butt of a gun.

Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh has agreed to a $900,000 settlement to be paid her estate and her two daughters.

Christy Doheny is afraid that the same thing may happen to her. Her former boyfriend, Anthony Young, is to be released soon from a Connecticut prison where he is serving time for burglary and for beating and choking her.

Young has written her more than 45 threatening letters.

“I bet you this time here I kill you,” he wrote in one note, quoted in a front-page story by the New Haven Register. He also has mailed her pictures of their daughter with her eyes poked out and mutilated copies of the court order that ostensibly bars him from contacting her.

“In many cases, the protective orders work really well--I would say 80 to 90%,” said Robin Murphy, head of the New Haven Legal Assistance family-child unit, which is working on Doheny’s case. “But in the other 10% of the cases, the restraining orders mean nothing.”

Indeed, in the space of nine days last December and January, three Long Island women holding protective orders were killed by their husbands.

Authorities say one of their biggest problems is that victims themselves often are unwilling to cooperate in prosecuting those who batter them.

For example, police say that in fully half of their Suffolk County domestic violence calls, the victim does not want her attacker arrested. In misdemeanor cases, this means police must let him go.

Of those victims who do allow arrest, another half change their minds by the time the case gets to court.

Suffolk County’s Werner blames this on the unhealthy dependence that many victims, their self-esteem and confidence battered out of them, have on their abusers.

“The woman is someone who married this man, who loves him. She’s had children with him,” Werner said. “She depends on this battering man for every satisfaction in her life--for social support, for financial support, for emotional support.”

Because of these strong attachments, many women become caught up in cycles of escalating violence.

The pattern begins with what counselors call the “battering incident,” which is followed by a “honeymoon phase,” a time of reconciliation when the victim denies her troubles and hopes for better times. Tensions then rise again until another beating takes place.

“The cycle can continue for years to the point where victims are being stalked,” said Barbara Kendall, director of the Victim Witness unit of the Boulder County district attorney’s office in Colorado.

They also grow disillusioned with the disjointed and intimidating justice system, others say. In Los Angeles, for example, a woman may have to take her case to Juvenile Dependency Court, Family Law Court and criminal court.

“The woman will have to appear in three different places and tell the same story over and over. . . . It’s a mess,” said Sheila James Kuehl of the Southern California Women’s Law Center. She and others advocate establishing a single domestic court to handle all such cases.

The 1985 California law gave law enforcement officers the ability to arrest domestic violence suspects even when the victim refuses to press charges.

Some argue that it is important to take batterers into custody, even without the consent of their victims, because this will impress upon them that their actions are a crime, even if they are never put in jail.

“A good arrest does not have to lead to a conviction. A good arrest leads to a change in behavior,” said Edmund Stubbing, an ex-New York City police officer who now works for the nonprofit Victim Services Agency and organizes seminars to help police executives set up pro-arrest systems.

Other agencies are taking pro-arrest policies one step further--to “pro-prosecution.” San Diego is considered to have perhaps the most aggressive pro-prosecution efforts in California, taking about 1,400 misdemeanor spousal abuse cases to court each year.

“About 80% of the cases involved victims who did not want us to prosecute,” said Casey Gwinn, a deputy city attorney in charge of San Diego’s domestic violence unit. “But society only recently is beginning to treat domestic violence like any other crime. We never ask an armed robbery victim if she wants to prosecute. We just prosecute. Why should it be any different in domestic violence cases?”

When battering is still at the misdemeanor stage--pushing, shoving, bruising--the legal system has its best chance of changing an abuser’s behavior, Gwinn argued.

Study of Abusers

A 1988 San Diego study tracked 200 misdemeanor abusers who were sentenced to one year of weekly counseling sessions. None of the 72% completing the class were rearrested within the next year. But nearly half of those who dropped out were.

Officials worry, however, that highly publicized tragedies such as Navarro’s slaying will make women even more fearful of calling for help or leaving their husbands or boyfriends. Often, they say, a husband will show his wife a news clipping of such an incident and warn her that she could be next.

“The wrong message gets out,” Werner said. “There is hope.

“God, we have to believe that.”

Karen Tumulty reported this story from New York, and Stephanie Chavez from Los Angeles.