For Battered Women Behind Bars, New Hope

Marva Wallace says the night she shot her husband, he had forced her to perform a sexual act in front of their 2-year-old daughter. During a yearlong marriage, he beat her so often that she recalls sporting a black eye “like it was part of my makeup.”

When Jeanette Crawford killed her husband, she had gone into their bedroom intending to shoot herself in front of him but changed her mind. Her lawyers say her action resulted from five years of physical abuse, including being forced to have sex with other women.

Wallace and Crawford were convicted in the 1980s, before battered women’s syndrome was recognized as a defense by California courts.

Both women have been serving what could amount to life terms in state prison. Today, they see a glimmer at the end of the tunnel.

Making use of a new state law, a group of legal advocates has mobilized volunteers to help Wallace, Crawford and dozens of other female inmates across the state challenge their convictions.

Senate Bill 799, enacted in January, gives inmates convicted before 1992 the right to file habeas corpus petitions to overturn their convictions on the grounds that battered women’s syndrome evidence was not used in their defense.

It was not until 1992 that California courts were required to admit expert testimony about the syndrome, which refers to the effects of repeated physical and psychological abuse. The 1992 change--and a 1996 state Supreme Court ruling allowing for acquittals of battered women who acted in self-defense--has helped many women in more current cases avoid murder convictions.

The state Board of Prison Terms is investigating claims from about 100 women who say their crimes should have been mitigated by evidence of domestic abuse, said chief investigator David McAuley. The board, which evaluates inmates for parole, has found that battered women’s syndrome was a factor in 14 cases so far.

There are 442 women in the state prison system for pre-1992 convictions for murder or attempted murder, though not necessarily of a spouse. Advocates for battered women say many of those inmates may be eligible to have their cases reexamined.

On a recent evening, two dozen attorneys gathered around a large conference table in a law office on the Westside of Los Angeles to learn about the new law and be matched with the files of inmates they have volunteered to assist.

Twenty-six inmates from the California Institution for Women in Corona--ages 35 to 65--have been selected for assistance by the project’s organizers, the California Women’s Law Center, USC’s Post-Conviction Justice Project and the California Coalition for Battered Women in Prison.

In a scene that smacked of a college study session, the pro bono lawyers--many of them young and with little criminal law experience--munched on pizza as they listened to advocates and criminal defense experts.

The organizers began with a pep talk.

“I hope that you’ll get to see yourselves as part of a growing movement,” said Olivia Wang, a staff attorney with the battered women coalition. “What happens here in California very likely is going to start a trend nationwide.”

The California law is unique, organizers say, and could prompt similar legislation elsewhere. The California movement to treat battered women killers with leniency was fueled by a decision of former Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste to pardon 26 such inmates in 1990. In California, the only two killers released on parole by Gov. Gray Davis have been two women who had been abused by men they later killed.

How-to booklets and sample petitions like the ones that will be filed on the inmates’ behalf were handed around the table.

The volunteers were instructed to include the woman’s complete story in the petition. You have only one chance to get the court’s attention, they were told. Don’t assume that a judge will know or care about your case.

“With some of our clients, they’ve been in prison for so long that the judges [who presided over their cases] have long since died,” said Mike Brennan, a criminal law professor in the post-conviction project at USC. “Sometimes that’s a help,” he added, eliciting chuckles.

The organizers plan to visit the state’s three other women’s prisons soon in search of additional inmates who may benefit from the new law.

Many of the volunteer lawyers say personal experiences have made them want to help.

Commercial litigation attorney Andrea Diallo, 31, said the inmates’ stories revived the pain she felt as a child, watching a relative suffer in an abusive marriage.

Diallo said she was eager to meet her future client, Susan, who shot her live-in boyfriend in 1988 after enduring repeated rape and imprisonment. Prosecutors used the evidence of domestic abuse to argue that Susan had a motive to kill. “That is so degrading, to have to live through that, and then to have it brought up to use against you as your reason for killing somebody,” Diallo said.

Jessica Mayer, a recent Harvard Law School graduate, said her experience as a rape hotline operator in college has helped her understand why women who are repeatedly raped by their spouses may believe killing is their only option.

Her client’s trucker husband raped her and forced her to perform sex acts with animals until the day she shot him in his sleep, Mayer said.

“I think that being raped is a kind of death,” she said. “There’s only so much a woman can take before you’ve effectively killed her, even if she’s still breathing.”

Although the mood among the lawyers and activists was one of optimism, they also were told that evidence of battering isn’t necessarily a ticket to freedom.

Kay Duffy, a Ventura-based criminal defense lawyer, recently lost a case defending a woman who killed her abusive husband of 15 years, then dismembered and burned his body.

Duffy believes that although evidence of the battering was presented, the jury was swayed by grisly photographs of the husband’s remains. She said she isn’t going to allow the defeat to discourage her from defending others. She picked up two inmates’ cases at the training session.

“All of these women I have worked with, they are very strong, courageous women who [were] put in a bad situation and dealt with it as best they could,” Duffy said.

“They’re not criminals. They’re victims themselves.”