Attorney Defends Children Who Kill a Parent : Courts: He says most of the young killers suffered years of sexual, physical and psychological abuse. But use of self-defense argument is difficult in most states.

Paul Mones pulls a handwritten letter from an office brimming with paper and reads aloud. It’s from one of his clients--a teen-age boy imprisoned for murdering a parent.

“It’s still a hard question of why I did it,” he wrote.

“I sincerely hope that other kids out there will have someone to talk to like I have. If it’s possible, maybe we can set up a correspondence net throughout the United States for kids like us. Who knows, it just might help in getting over the guilt I know we all feel.”

Mones understands. The Los Angeles attorney may be the only lawyer in the United States whose specialty is defending kids who kill.

To many of his colleagues, this is a strange vocation. But dozens around the country have called him for advice in defending parricide cases.

“They say with a nervous laugh, ‘Oh boy, that’s some specialty you got there,’ ” said Mones, who outlined his work in a book, “When a Child Kills: Abused Children Who Kill Their Parents.”

Parricides account for more than 300 of the nation’s 20,000 homicides each year. Most of the killers are white, middle-class boys between the ages of 16 and 18 with no criminal record. Mones argues that most suffer silent years of sexual, physical and psychological abuse before they act against a parent.

“These kids by and large are never insane. But it looks insane. It’s viscerally insane. Why would you want to kill your parents?” he said. “But when you come down to the real, unpleasant, sad, tragic reality, there’s a lot of logic to what the kid did. That’s when everybody gets very afraid.”

Donna Marie Wisener, a captain on her high school majorette team, endured her father, Glenn’s, explosive rages and punishing beatings until May 24, 1991, when she shot the 49-year-old truck driver six times with his revolver at their home in Smith County, Tex.

At her trial, Donna and her mother, Mamie, testified about Glenn Wisener’s abusive rages. The jury acquitted Wisener on Feb. 13.

Mones, a co-counsel in the case, said Donna’s defense was the first use of a Texas law enacted in September that allows evidence of family violence to defend a killing.

Texas is the only state to have such a statute.

But a Washington state appeals court in February overturned the second-degree murder conviction of a youth in the shooting death of his stepfather. The court held that the jury should have been allowed to consider evidence about the stepfather’s abuse of the boy.

“Neither law nor logic suggests any reason to limit to women recognition of the impact a battering relationship may have on the victim’s actions or perceptions,” the court said in remanding the case.

In California, evidence of battered women’s syndrome is admissible in spouse murder cases, but a similar extension hasn’t been made for children, Mones said.

As in Wisener’s case, many of Mones’ clients claim they killed in self-defense because they knew their abuse would continue.

A self-defense argument usually requires a fear of imminent and deadly harm. But in many parricides, children kill when the parent is most vulnerable--sleeping or watching television--and, as Donna did by firing six times, the murder often is perceived as overkill.

Defense attorneys must prosecute the dead for their alleged violence against children. When called in on a case, Mones often will file a child abuse report to launch an investigation.

“There’s nothing in the law that says a parent has to be alive at the time you file a child abuse action. That’s one of the few ways I can figure out to get the kid services,” he said.

Introducing a self-defense argument at trial also is difficult because the law--like society at large--tends to take the word of an adult over a child.

Police investigators, prosecutors and judges are reluctant to concede there may be a logic, however horrifying, behind a parent’s slaying, Mones said.

“I believe children are still to a large extent occupying the same role they have had for 500 years, which is basically the property of their parents,” Mones said.

Legal terminology reflects that status, he said.

“It’s called child endangerment, it’s not called attempted murder, when a child is slammed against a wall,” he said. “We call it incest. As far as I’m concerned we call it wrong. It’s rape.”

More than 1,200 children in 39 states died of abuse or neglect in 1990, and nearly 90% of those who died were under age 5, according to the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse.

“Prosecutors say they have an extremely difficult time convicting parents who kill their children because . . . there’s a basic understanding, except in the most egregious cases, of the parent who gets out of control,” Mones said.

But parricide cases nearly always “carry these symbolic connotations for the community. . . . ‘Thou shalt not kill, honor thy father and mother,’ ” Mones said. “Prosecutors often invoke the Bible in closing argument.”

Acquittals are rare and bittersweet, Mones said.

“These kids are never getting off. They sentenced themselves the moment they pulled the trigger,” he said.