Legislators Listen to Women Who Killed : Jurisprudence: The officials visit a prison for a hearing on whether battered wives who murdered their abusive husbands belong behind bars.

The doctor’s wife too afraid of ruining her husband’s career to tell anyone about how he abused her.

The housewife, two years from her golden wedding anniversary, whose priest told her to counter her husband’s beatings with love.

The undercover cop’s wife whose husband ordered her during their last fight to take off her rings so no one could identify her body.

All of them were abused by their husbands. All of these women killed the men who abused them. And all of them are in prison for it.

Whether they should be is a question that brought 10 state legislators here Tuesday for a hearing on whether battered women who kill their batterers are being battered by the courts as well.

Over four sometimes wrenching hours, behind the barbed-wire fences of the California Institution for Women, eight women convicted of killing their abusive husbands told the legislators just what it was that had brought them to the moment when they pulled the trigger, picked up the wine bottle, plunged in the knife.

“I was stabbed, I had my nose broken, I had the skin torn off my face. I pretty much went through it all,” testified Brenda Clubine, the police officer’s wife. In a period of five months, she said, she signed 46 police reports against her husband for abuse.

Clubine, in here since 1983, organized the Convicted Women Against Abuse Group that meets in the prison here weekly. Her first full parole hearing is set for today.

The injuries and the weapons used against the women varied--sledgehammer, gas can, fists--but the stories bore the same hallmarks, and even legislators who had already read about the cases were stirred by the halting, tear-choked testimony they heard.

Brenda Aris, married at 16, mother of three, told about the night when her husband put his hands around her neck and said, “I’ve had it with you. I don’t believe I’m going to let you live till morning.

“I just knew that he meant it, he wasn’t going to let me live,” Aris said. She saw the gun on the refrigerator when she went to get ice for her beaten face. She used it.

“There isn’t a woman who testified here today who I thought deserved 15 years to life,” said Assemblywoman Jackie Speier, head of the Legislature’s Women’s Caucus. “Most of the women should never, to my mind, have seen the inside of the walls here.

“And for those who should be serving some time, I don’t believe they should have been charged with anything more than manslaughter,” Speier said at the hearing.

Thirty-four women confined at Frontera have petitioned Gov. Pete Wilson to do what the governors of two other states have done for other battered women who killed their abusers--to grant clemency.

This week, waiting on the governor’s desk with the clemency petition, is a bill passed by the Legislature that would allow testimony about battered women’s defense syndrome at trials of women like these. Such testimony is now admissible as evidence of self-defense only at the judge’s discretion.

Evidence of battered women’s syndrome might have affected the cases of women like Frances Caccavale, 76, who snatched a knife off a drain board and stabbed her elderly husband as he bent to pick up the gun he had sworn to kill her with.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” she wept on Tuesday. “I just wanted him to stop hurting me. After all those years, I couldn’t take it no more.”

“I don’t think it was the right thing to do,” said her brother, Jasper Buffa, who sat in the hearing audience. “But she just had a breaking point for all those beatings.”

James Lee, a spokesman for Wilson, said the governor has not decided whether to sign the bill and will review each request for clemency case by case.

Even if Wilson grants some clemency petitions, and also signs the battered women’s defense testimony bill, Speier and Burton said statutory definitions of self defense and imminent danger may need to be retooled to accommodate women like these.

“We’re not talking about coldblooded killers here,” said Assemblyman John L. Burton, whose Public Safety Committee joined the Women’s Caucus at the hearing. “Not one of these women is a threat to society, and here they are in prison maybe for life.

“One, it’s a tremendous waste of taxpayer money,” he said, “and, two, it almost defies descriptions that they’d be here.”

The eight inmates, sitting in their prison-issue jeans and pastel T-shirts, patted one another supportively, and nodded unself-consciously as experts like Linda L. Ammons, who is executive assistant to the governor of Ohio on the clemency matter, detailed the battered women’s syndrome as “a post-traumatic disorder like what hostages and concentration camp prisoners have gone through.”

She discounted criticism that such legal changes would open the floodgates to what has been called “preventive murder.”

Afterward, committee members spoke with some of the eight women. Watching from one side was a prison guard who had known an abused woman in her family as she was growing up.

“It’s about time,” she said quietly. “This has been going on for too long.”