Ohio Law Aids Battered Women : Crime: One woman’s case shows how enduring beatings led to a crisis and prison. But now she and others are free and prosecutors are not happy.

Because Asya Cole loved her boyfriend, she endured his beatings and kept quiet about them for two years.

Until one day in April, 1985, when she killed him.

It happened after a struggle over a gun he had put to her head, and Cole thought it would be a clear case of self-defense. Instead, she was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Kenneth Moore and sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison.

But now, after 58 months in prison, Cole is at home in Cleveland. On Dec. 21, Gov. Richard Celeste commuted her sentence and those of 24 other women for killing or assaulting abusive husbands or companions. On Jan. 10, he granted clemency to a 26th woman; she had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of her abusive father.

Celeste said Cole and the others might have been acquitted if they had been able to use a new state law that strengthens protections for battered women accused of violent crimes.

The law allows women to introduce evidence that they had been subject to repeated beatings for a long time. It also permits them to call expert witnesses to testify about the psychological effect the beatings have on women--a condition known as the battered-women’s syndrome.

Prosecutors criticized both the new law and Celeste’s clemency.

The governor did not seek the advice of prosecutors on the cases he was considering and even commuted the sentence of a woman who was convicted of shooting an abusive spouse as he slept, said Dennis Watkins, president of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Assn.

“That, clearly, is not self-defense, and that should not be a case to which an expert witness should be allowed to testify about the battered-woman syndrome,” Watkins said.

He said the new law might lead women to think they can kill people and escape punishment: “Instead of seeing their ministers or the police in those situations, you worry now about women going to see their hit men.”

But Cole, 38, says she was unfairly convicted because the old law turned a deaf ear to the special tribulations of the battered woman.

“Every time I’d try to tell them things about it, they’d tell me it wasn’t him who was on trial, that he wasn’t here to defend himself. I had a couple of witnesses who had admitted to seeing him hit me before,” she said.

He hit her often, Cole says--but not at first, when they became lovers. It was 1983; she was a nurse and he was an aide at the Cleveland Psychiatric Institute. They lived together for much of the next two years.

A mother in her teens, she had earned her high school diploma and her nursing certificate while rearing a son, now 20, and a daughter, now 19.

Cole said that soon after she and Moore moved in together, she saw how alcohol made him paranoid, jealous--and violent.

“I wasn’t always afraid of him. Not at first. I thought maybe I could help him at first. I found out that I couldn’t, but I kept trying because I loved him,” she said.

“He told me what to do, when to do it, how to do it, what friends I could have. He didn’t want me around my family. He was putting me down all the time. He drank every day . . . and when he drank he got mean.”

Sometimes, she ended up in hospital emergency rooms. But she would lie about the cause of her injuries to doctors, her employer and co-workers, even her family.

“I would go to the doctor and tell him I got attacked, robbed, things like that,” Cole. “For a long time I kind of looked at myself as useless and unworthy, but that was the result of the conditioning.”

In February, 1985, she moved into her own apartment and told Moore to stay away. But she allowed him to visit her children. It was during one such visit that Moore was shot.

Moore asked her to give him a drink and have sex with him, and she consented. Afterward, he accused her of seeing other men, became belligerent and refused to leave, Cole said.

She said that when she threatened to call police, he grabbed a .38-caliber pistol she kept under her pillow, forced her to her hands and knees and put the pistol to her head.

Cole’s children were downstairs at the time.

“I thought of my kids, and I knew that if he killed me he’d probably go down and get them,” she said. “I had this strength I never had before because I was so scared. We had a fight trying to get the gun.”

During the struggle, the gun fired, hitting no one.

“I kicked him in the scrotum, then he dropped the gun,” she said. “Then, he says, ‘I’m going to kill you. . . .’ I got the gun. He came at me, and I just closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.”