Pressure Rises to Parole Killer

The beatings began on her wedding night and continued, Cheryl Sellers says, for four years. They ended one June evening in 1983, when her husband threatened to kill her daughter and make her watch.

“I couldn’t let that happen,” Sellers said. So she killed him instead.

Sellers has spent 19 years behind bars for the killing, and now stands on the cusp of release. State parole commissioners have concluded that battered woman syndrome drove Sellers to kill, and have cleared her to go home.

Before she is freed, however, Sellers must pass muster with Gov. Gray Davis, who will decide by Wednesday whether to uphold the parole board’s decision or keep the inmate in prison.

History suggests the odds are poor for Sellers and five other battered women convicts seeking the governor’s blessing. Since his election, Davis has approved parole for only one of 84 convicted murderers deemed ready for release by the Board of Prison Terms, whose members he appoints. And though the one murderer Davis agreed to set free was a battered woman, he has denied other parole requests from women in similar circumstances.

Now, Davis must consider the issue in an election year, and must weigh his desire to preserve a law-and-order image against the risk of appearing heartless toward women who have been abused.

The Legislature’s women’s caucus is adding to the governor’s dilemma. Its chairwoman, Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier), has demanded a meeting with him to request freedom for Sellers and a second inmate, and to discuss the broader issue of battered women seeking parole.

“The governor has been very sensitive to the issues of violence against women, and we are encouraging him to recognize that these [inmates] were victims too,” said Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica).

The president of the Senate, Democrat John Burton of San Francisco, also is urging Davis to release Sellers, while Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) is lobbying him on behalf of another inmate who killed her batterer.

Even Davis’ gubernatorial opponent, Republican Bill Simon Jr., has weighed in, sending the governor a letter urging that he apply “discretion and judgment, not rigid, absolute policies,” in deciding the Sellers matter.

While the former prosecutor said it would be inappropriate for him to tell Davis what to do, he called the case compelling and said the outcome of her trial might have been different had a defense based on battered woman syndrome been available at the time.

“Parole boards rightly have been using considerable caution ... before granting parole to someone convicted of such a serious offense,” Simon wrote. “Yet they did choose to grant parole to Ms. Sellers.”

A spokesman for the governor, Byron Tucker, said Davis would “review these cases extremely carefully, as he does all parole cases sent to him.” Tucker also noted that the one murderer Davis has released--Rose Ann Parker--was a battered woman found to have shot her abusive boyfriend out of fear for her life.

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1999 Campaign Pledge Not to Free Killers

Critics say the governor’s record regarding parole adds up to an illegal policy rooted in his 1999 pledge to keep all killers in prison. They also say his actions are driven by politics--namely, the fear that a paroled ex-convict would commit a new crime and wind up in a campaign ad against him.

The governor disputes that notion, insisting that he gives each case an unbiased look and acts with public safety in mind.

Despite the high-profile nature of the battered women’s cases, advocates for the inmates are not hopeful. Already this year, they note, Davis has rejected parole for two battered women declared ready for freedom by the Board of Prison Terms.

Among them was Henrietta Briones, 42, who killed her boyfriend, Lawrence Daniels, in 1986 and was sentenced to 17 years to life. In approving her parole, the board said witnesses recounted Briones’ frequent bruises and black eyes. At the trial, a Compton police detective said officers had been to the couple’s home several times on domestic violence calls.

But Davis said that although Briones may have been abused, her claim that she fired in self-defense is unsubstantiated by the facts and is rejected by prosecutors. Though a prison psychiatrist said Briones would pose no risk if released, the governor said she remains a threat to society.

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Patterns of Violence Destroy Self-Esteem

Battered woman syndrome is a behavioral condition that some experts say afflicts women who are systematically abused. The pattern of violence, those experts say, destroys their self-esteem and leaves them feeling powerless. Many stay in abusive relationships because they feel responsible for the problem, lack money or fear reprisals or social isolation.

Studies of battered women who kill their abusers--there are an estimated 4,500 nationwide--show that they differ from other female inmates. They tend to be older and better educated, they have few if any prior offenses, most were married at the time of their crime, and they more often are white.

Elizabeth Leonard, a sociologist who published a study of 42 battered women at the California Institution for Women in Corona, said that by the time they killed their batterers, all of them had taken some action to escape the abuse.

“Some had been to shelters, many made calls to police, some had restraining orders” from courts, Leonard said. Many, she notes, “perceive that every possible escape route away from the terror is closed off from them and the only apparent avenue to end the ongoing violence is through suicide or homicide.”

The fate of battered women in prison became a significant issue in the early 1990s, when advocates filed clemency petitions on behalf of 34 California inmates. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson granted clemency to three of them and rejected 10. Most of the others remain in prison, their petitions dubbed pending by the Davis administration.

Recently, the issue has been revived, in part because the Board of Prison Terms now reviews inmates’ cases for evidence of battered woman syndrome. Under new regulations passed by the Legislature, the board must consider such evidence as a mitigating factor when deciding on parole.

The cases are studied by a team of investigators who research the crime, interview witnesses and detectives and dig up old documents. In 2001, 36 cases were reviewed and 14 inmates were found to have suffered from battered woman syndrome at the time of their crimes. Of those, eight so far have been given parole grants by the board.

Among them was Sellers, 43, convicted of first-degree murder for shooting her husband as he lay in bed.

At her parole hearing in December, she told the board that Norman Sellers began abusing her on their wedding night, when he shoved her against a bathroom wall, put his arm to her throat and raped her because she had not come to the bedroom quickly enough.

Another time, she said, he kicked her repeatedly in the stomach, causing her to miscarry. On a third occasion, she said, he shot her in the leg for moving when he told her not to.

Dave McAuley, chief of investigations for the parole board, said his team gathered validating evidence from another woman who had lived with Norman Sellers and also experienced abuse.

“There was a clear pattern,” McAuley said in an interview. “When he was with this other woman, he was a batterer in training. With Sellers, the abuse escalated. The feeling was that eventually, she probably would have died [at his hands].”

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Second Case to Be Decided This Month

The other woman whose case the governor must decide this month is Valere Boyd, 41. Like Sellers, Boyd had no criminal record. She shot her husband, Kermit Boyd, in 1985 after suffering what investigators concluded was years of physical and mental abuse.

At her parole hearing, Boyd said her husband had tried to run her off the road, had pushed her out of a moving truck and had broken down their front door after she had nailed it shut the night of the crime. Once, when she called the police for help, she said he ripped the phone out of the wall before beating her severely.

“So therefore,” she told the parole board, “I really didn’t try to call the police on him anymore.”

McAuley, who investigated Boyd’s case, said the abuse from her husband created cumulative stress that contributed to the killing. The trial judge, who supports her release, wrote a letter to the board calling the crime “completely out of context for Ms. Boyd.”

But prosecutor Brian McCarville, now a Superior Court judge in San Bernardino, opposed parole. He said he believes the key to that night’s events lies in Boyd’s statement in a probation report: “I guess my temper really got me in trouble this time.”

Sellers and Boyd were convicted in the mid-1980s, before expert testimony about battered woman syndrome was routinely permitted in court. Lawyers for the women argue that had such testimony been allowed, they might have been found guilty of lesser crimes carrying shorter sentences.

Some prosecutors, however, see it differently, arguing that women often use stories of beatings as an excuse for cold-blooded murder.

In Sellers’ case, for example, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Keith Thompson called the inmate’s accounts of abuse self-serving and fabricated, and said she had also “flip-flopped” on her account of the crime.

“The version she’s selling now is, ‘Oh, I suffered from battered woman syndrome,’” Thompson said. “It’s really been a bandwagon here that people are jumping on.... If there’s credible proof, fine, a person deserves the credit. But when there is not any credible proof, they don’t.”

Parker, the one convicted murderer released by Davis, lives in San Bernardino, where she runs a ministry to counsel young women on domestic violence and tries to make up for lost time with her three children.

In an interview, Parker said she hopes Davis will think hard about those women inmates who “have survived violent relationships.”

“I thank him for taking a chance on me,” Parker said. “I know it’s an election year, but God will bless him and give him wisdom to do what’s right.”