Should These Women Have Gone Free? : Backlash: Second-guessing dogged governors in Maryland and Ohio after they granted clemency to wives who killed men they said abused them.

BALTIMORE —  With the political pounding William D. Schaefer has absorbed since granting clemency to eight battered women who killed or assaulted their mates, other U.S. governors probably are wondering: Is it worth it?

But critics of the Maryland governor say a better question may be: Do I know enough about these women’s cases to release them from prison?

In fact, the experience of Schaefer and former Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste has forced activists to reassess how they go about seeking group clemencies for abused women. Sue Osthoff, director of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, said her group is organizing a spring meeting of advocates to “talk about what went wrong and what we should be doing next.”

“It’s not a simple process getting these clemencies,” said Osthoff. “And we’ve learned a lot. I do not see it as the role of the governor to retry these cases. But if it’s helpful to get extra information or if it’s politically valuable to get prosecutors involved in the process, and if all of this protects women from having to be left out on the limb in the press, then we have to try it all.”

Schaefer and those who helped him review the clemencies have been accused--by local newspapers, prosecutors and even other battered women inside a Maryland prison--of doing a sloppy job. These critics have charged that the governor did not know the complete stories of three of the eight women: One woman was allegedly prone to violence; another earned insurance money from her husband’s death; for the third, evidence to corroborate her abuse was in question.

Schaefer and his staff have defended the commutations and the review process. The House of Ruth, the Baltimore advocacy group for battered women that requested the clemencies, said the newspaper reports and prosecutors who fueled them had misconceived the larger point of the clemencies: They were not to eradicate guilt, rather to grant mercy because of special circumstances.

Yet Celeste, who weathered similar public scrutiny last year when he became the first governor to grant clemency to a group of battered women in Ohio, said the Maryland backlash could have been predicted.

“You can do all types of things to blunt criticism,” said Celeste. “You can talk to prosecutors; you can go through lengthy reviews. I personally spent a half hour talking to each woman who we granted clemency to. But you’re still going to get raked over the coals.”

Celeste granted clemency to 26 women last December, a month before he left office. “The problem is these are never easy cases; these women come from complicated backgrounds that are not always pretty,” he said. “Sometimes you have to do what’s right.”

That’s not always easy.

The main problem, clemency advocates say, is that judges in 37 states are not required to consider evidence of spousal abuse during trial. In California and New York, among other states, the trend is toward allowing such evidence. But most state courts rarely hear the long history of battering these women allegedly endured before killing their spouses.

In Maryland, for example, the law has defined self-defense as occurring only during or at the point of an attack that is deemed murderous. Therefore, if a battered woman was classified as an “aggressor,” she was banned from using expert testimony about her abuse. (A bill to change that law passed the Maryland legislature earlier this month and awaits the governor’s signature. It would allow judges to consider evidence of repeated physical and psychological abuse when spouses plead self-defense to charges of murder or attempted murder.)

Experts on “battered-woman syndrome” describe a cycle of violence that destroys the woman’s self-esteem, leaves her feeling powerless to escape her mate and eventually pushes her to respond violently.

In several of the Maryland women’s cases, they were so ensnared by abusive relationships-- and so guilt-ridden--that they wouldn’t have allowed their attorneys to introduce evidence of their abuse if state law had allowed it.

Between 800 and 1,000 women kill allegedly abusive husbands every year and less than one-third are acquitted, according to Osthoff, whose Philadelphia-based group provides assistance to battered women charged with crimes.

Rep. Constance A. Morella (R-Md.) has tried for years to get Congressional attention on the issue. Last month, she introduced legislation that would encourage states to change their laws, and would fund judicial and police education programs on battered-women syndrome.

“This bill would show the ‘sense of Congress,’ but we need the states and the governors to take action,” said Morella.

It was Morella who first urged Schaefer to take a look at the circumstances of women who feel so debased they hide their abuse, yet who are so fearful they kill. On Jan. 14, Morella took Schaefer to Maryland’s women’s correctional facility in Jessup, where he spent 90 minutes talking to five women who had been abused and were involved in weekly sessions to talk about their experiences. (In the last few years, such inmate groups have grown from three to 71 nationwide.)

The governor said that he was moved by the women’s stories and that everyone from defense lawyers to judges needed to better understand their problems. Then on Feb. 21, after reviewing 12 cases, Schaefer announced the commutation of eight sentences that ranged from three to 40 years in prison.

He told reporters: “It’s a startling experience for a governor to come in and sit across from women who committed murder. This isn’t something they made up. A long history of abuse, terrible abuse. So I felt that for some of them there was not any question in my mind, that they were in danger for their own life.”

But in series of stories, the Baltimore Sun questioned the depth of the governor’s knowledge about three of the eight women whose sentences he commuted.

One was Bernadette Barnes, who had been sentenced to life in prison, with all but 40 years suspended, for hiring someone to kill her husband. Barnes, who weighs about 90 pounds, is paralyzed on her right side because, in the course of 20 years of abuse, her husband shot her in the head and leg while she slept.

The Sun article said, “No question exists that Bernadette Barnes suffered prior abuse,” but it then pointed out that she had received $22,000 in insurance money. It quoted the prosecutor as saying the killing was a “contract murder plain and simple.”

“Gov. Schaefer could not even ponder this argument,” the story said. “He was never told about the murder-for-profit element of the Barnes case.”

What is clear is that some of the governor’s advisers knew of the possible profit motive and that others didn’t. Certainly, members of the Maryland Parole Commission--which reviewed the cases and recommended the clemencies--knew about the insurance money. But they decided there was no evidence that Barnes killed her abusive husband for the cash.

Said Ray Atkins, her lawyer: “This woman had a bullet in her head and was so involved in the syndrome that she went to a Baltimore city judge after she was shot up and begged him to have her husband released from jail. But one day she just snapped and couldn’t stand the abuse any more. It cost her five grand to have this guy killed and she got 22 grand out of it in insurance money. Big deal. This man wanted to kill her; she lost a good job; he abused her family and I couldn’t tell a jury about any of this so she went to jail. I don’t understand why the papers had to skewer Bernadette and drag her case out again.”

And Paul Davis, Maryland Parole Commissioner, disagreed with local editorial writers’ and individual prosecutors’ assertions that the governor’s staff should have reviewed the trial transcripts in all eight cases to ensure he had all the facts.

The prosecutor’s one-page summary report of the case may be “scanty information to rely on,” Davis said, but “there is another side to the coin. When you’re looking at an issue like this, we felt obligated and would again feel obligated to look at it not as though it was a black-or-white issue. There’s an extremely gray area of what led up to this murder. What about the history of the abuse? I don’t think police and prosecutors are in practice of seeing things other than guilt or innocence, which is their job. In these cases, though, we had to look at the gray area and decide whether to grant mercy.”

One newspaper editorial and a Maryland legislator accused the House of Ruth of being “overzealous,” claiming that advocates sanitized certain parts of the women’s lives to win their releases.

Judith Wolfer, an attorney for the House of Ruth, said her group would do nothing different if it could redo the dossiers on the women and the hundreds of hours of work it took to put together the confidential report the governor used to grant the clemencies.

“Despite all this, we hope to get the governor to keep looking at imprisoned women’s cases and keep looking at how the whole system fails these women,” said Wolfer.

In the meantime, advocates are sending petitions to governors in at least eight other states, calling for clemencies for abused women.

Wolfer’s advice to the other governors?

“Just do your homework and be prepared for backlash,” she said.