Two Women Given Clemency in Killings : Prison: Wilson considers battered spouse syndrome as mitigating factor.

Gov. Pete Wilson took the rare step Friday of granting clemency to two convicted murderers, becoming the first California governor to commute the sentences of women who say they were driven to kill their husbands after suffering continual beatings and abuse.

Using his constitutional power to extend mercy to convicted criminals, Wilson ordered reductions in the prison terms of Brenda Denise Aris, 33, a Riverside mother of two who killed her sleeping husband in 1986, and Frances Mary Caccavale, an ailing 78-year-old grandmother from Temple City who stabbed her spouse to death after nearly half a century of marriage.

At the same time, Wilson denied clemency to 14 other women, including Brenda Clubine, 42, a convicted killer who helped start California’s clemency movement for battered women imprisoned for violent crimes.

In each of the cases decided by the governor, the women had said they were victims of battered women’s syndrome--habitual abuse by fathers, husbands or lovers that eventually forced them to resort to violence for self-protection.

Applying a strict test to each case, the governor said many of his decisions to deny clemency were based on his determination that the women were only using claims of abuse as “a rationalization for cold-blooded murder.”

“The test of whether clemency should be considered in cases where the request is based on battered women’s syndrome must be: Did the petitioner have the option to leave her abuser, or was the homicide realistically her only chance?” Wilson said in a news release distributed while he was on a trip to St. Louis.

The governor said that in the cases he rejected, it was clear the women had been victims of repeated violence, but in his view they still had “the option of taking another course to escape abuse.”

“Society simply cannot condone preventive murder or homicidal self-help,” he said.

Wilson said the Aris case was the only one that met his test and for that reason he was reducing a 15-years-to-life sentence to 12 years to life. That moves Aris’ parole eligibility date to July, 1994, 1 1/2 years earlier than would otherwise be permitted.

Describing Aris’ dead husband as a man “chronically guilty of the most extraordinary cruelty,” Wilson said the evidence showed that Aris had ample reason to fear her husband would kill her if she attempted to leave him.

“Although I cannot condone the killing, even of Rick Aris, and the choice made by Ms. Aris on that fatal night, I feel compassion for the woman who is before me today,” Wilson said.

For different reasons, he said, he also had sympathy for Caccavale, who was granted full executive clemency permitting her to be released to her family within hours of the governor’s decision.

Normally, Wilson said, Caccavale would have been a poor candidate for clemency because police and court records showed she had stabbed her husband to death as he was packing to leave her. But, Wilson said, her age and deteriorating physical condition convinced him that she deserved mercy.

Wilson’s decision made him the 22nd governor in the nation to grant clemency to women who said that they were forced to resort to violence to escape constant abuse.

The decision caused a mixed reaction from advocacy groups, who praised Wilson for granting clemency to Aris and Caccavale but said they were disappointed he did not extend it in more cases.

Sheila Kuehl, an attorney with the California Women’s Law Center, said that in several of the petitions rejected by Wilson, particularly that of Clubine, the governor had ignored the “real terror and prisoner-of-war circumstances some of these women had have to endure.”

Christina Cordoza, an attorney for Geneva Love, a 28-year-old woman convicted of killing her husband during a domestic dispute, said the governor had overlooked clear evidence of self-defense.

She said Love, who was pregnant at the time, had shot her husband after he had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

But Wilson said that in Love’s case, he could not excuse the offense because a “young man is dead. . . . He did not deserve to die. . . . He will never know his children as they grow.”

The executive director of the California District Attorney’s Assn. said his group agreed with the governor’s reasoning in nearly all the cases and with his decision to apply a narrow test to each one.

“He focused correctly on the important issues, he took the cases one by one and he looked extensively at the records. I think he correctly exercised his discretion,” said Michael W. Sweet, the group’s leader.