Senate Votes to Toughen Law on Spousal Rape

Rejecting last-minute criticism that it was capitulating to women’s lobbies, the Senate voted overwhelmingly Friday to subject spousal rapists to the same long prison sentences given other rapists.

The bill, carried by Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles), would send most convicted spousal rapists to state prison for up to eight years, the same punishment given to most other rapists.

The law now distinguishes between spousal rape and so-called “stranger rape.” Spousal rape can be prosecuted either as misdemeanor with a maximum one-year term in county jail or as a felony with a penalty of three to eight years in prison.

Supporters of the bill said that most district attorneys charge spousal rapists with misdemeanors because juries often are reluctant to send a defendant, usually an estranged husband, to prison. But supporters contended that “rape is rape.”

The bill also would strike from existing law a requirement that a spousal rape victim report the crime within 90 days of the attack.

The bill required 21 votes in the Senate and was approved 24 to 2. It now goes back to the Assembly, which has approved a similar version, for final legislative passage.

Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-San Leandro), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the bill is aimed chiefly at estranged husbands who return to attack their wives.

“The (existing) law reflects the old Anglo-Saxon tradition that wives are chattel of men,” Lockyer said, urging that statutes be rewritten to provide the same punishment for all rapists, “whether they are husbands or strangers.”

In a speech that surprised the chamber during Friday’s debate, retiring Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), a former Los Angeles police chief, denounced the bill as “preposterous” and “without justification whatsoever.”

“We have no business passing an increase in penalties like this,” Davis told a hushed Senate. “We get beaten up by the women lobbyists. . . . Lets face it, we’ve been a little bit terrorized of late by the lobbies of women.”

Davis said on the Senate floor that he had opposed the bill in committee where he was confronted by “a bunch of grim-faced women glowering at me, most of them women that men would never touch.”

Responding to Davis’ criticisms of the bill, two women senators, Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) and Rebecca Morgan (R-Los Altos Hills), blistered Davis, who arrived in the Senate in 1981 as a reputed hard-rock conservative but has since moderated his views.

Watson told Davis that as a former chief of police he should know that “marital status should be no sanctuary for crime” and that California women no longer “are going to allow our bodies to be used on a whim.”

“Sen. Davis, you are expressing the state of denial that so many men are in (regarding rape),” Morgan told him. Noting that this is his last legislative session, she added, “I really regret your speech. . . . It doesn’t become the service you’ve given the state.”

Davis sat mute at his desk and did not respond, nor did he identify the lobbies he had in mind. He had cast some votes in favor of and some votes against earlier versions of the bill in committees.

Most district attorneys in California--but not Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner--initially opposed the bill on grounds that convictions would be more difficult to get if they lost the ability to charge a defendant with a misdemeanor.

A compromise was struck in the bill, however, that would allow some spousal rapists to go free on probation--at the court’s discretion--if they contributed up to $1,000 to a battered women’s shelter and/or reimbursed the victim for rape counseling or other expenses that resulted from the attack. Currently, felony rapists cannot be put on probation.

The bill was sponsored by the California Alliance Against Domestic Violence and supported by other statewide and local women’s organizations. It was opposed by the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a defense lawyer group.