Wilson to Rule on Inmates’ Battered-Women Pleas : Abuse: Governor may reduce some sentences today. But most of those seeking clemency will be rejected.

Furious that her 19-year-old daughter was poaching on her boyfriend, the woman put the teen-ager in the trunk of a car, drove to a desert mine shaft, let the girl say goodby to her baby and killed her with a shotgun.

The cold-hearted murder was one of the easier cases to decide. Brenda Aris’ case, not as extreme or clear-cut, was more difficult.

Aris killed her husband, who announced one August night after 10 years of vicious beatings that he didn’t think he would let her live until morning. When she went next door for ice for her swollen face, Aris found a neighbor’s gun.

She said she brought it back for protection, then shot her husband five times as he lay in bed, passed out from drugs and alcohol in a room with her two children. Even the dead man’s sister testified that Aris did the right thing.

The two women, and 28 others behind bars, have been waiting for two years for Gov. Pete Wilson to decide their pleas for executive clemency based on claims that they committed their crimes at least in part because they were battered women--physically, mentally or sexually abused for years.

Aris and another inmate, an ailing 78-year-old Temple City woman who stabbed her husband as he was packing to leave her after 49 stormy years of marriage, are rated the likeliest candidates to be told today that their prison terms will be reduced by the governor but not suspended, The Times has learned.

It would mark only the second time on record that a California governor has commuted the term of a prisoner not on Death Row.

At least a dozen other women, including Brenda Clubine, the leader of the Frontera prison group called Convicted Women Against Abuse that launched the clemency drive, are among those likely to be turned down today as Wilson begins announcing his decisions.

Four of the 12 women killed their husbands. Two killed their children, two were convicted of sexually abusing children, and four killed or injured others. All have contended in sometimes wrenching detail that abuse by a parent, spouse or lover influenced their actions.

A new law empowers Wilson to recognize battered women’s syndrome as one basis for considering clemency. But Wilson, reviewing each case on its own and refusing to consider them as a “class-action clemency” group, appears ready to exercise his authority cautiously within the new and highly emotional psycho-legal arena of battered women’s syndrome.

“These women were battered by the very person they killed,” said Barbara Zelkind, a Century City attorney who heads a pro bono lawyers’ group representing some of the women, including Clubine. “The evidence of that wasn’t presented (at their trials) or, if it was presented, it really wasn’t taken into account in a legal sense. That’s the basis of this whole movement.”

The best-known cases in the group Wilson reviewed include those of:

* Aris, 33, the Riverside mother of two who killed her husband in 1986. Appellate judges found that the trial judge erred by allowing only limited testimony about battering, but the exclusion was not serious enough to overturn her conviction for second-degree murder. Still, the ruling made battered women’s syndrome--in which some habitually abused women are driven to violence in fear of their lives--an accepted defense in California. The Legislature then wrote it into law.

“Brenda’s case changed the law, yet she never got the benefit of it,” said her attorney, Valerie Moseley. Fellow inmates, Moseley said, believe Aris deserves clemency more than anyone. Aris’ husband’s family has pleaded on her behalf. Some jurors said they might have decided differently had they known more about battered women’s syndrome.

Prosecutor Dodie Harman has opposed clemency; Superior Court Judge Edward Webster says he has written the governor that “I don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other. . . . The evidence at the trial established that Ms. Aris was an abused spouse. Her husband was portrayed as being a thoroughly obnoxious human being. However, he was shot five times as he was asleep.”

* Frances Caccavale, the other woman who may get some form of clemency, is in failing health after half a dozen years behind bars for stabbing her husband to death. Testimony indicated that they may have abused each other. Wilson’s decision in Caccavale’s case is expected to be a simple gesture of mercy on the grounds that it serves no purpose for her to remain in prison.

* Clubine, 42, has been interviewed widely on spousal abuse. In her case, testimony and interviews have sometimes conflicted with the record, even on such matters as how long she was married to the man she killed in 1983. She is serving a sentence of 16 years to life.

The two had argued and fought throughout their turbulent seven-month marriage; Clubine once obtained a restraining order and later spoke of reconciliation. Finally she struck her husband in the head with a bottle; he bled to death. The conflicts in her story, which abuse experts say are characteristic of such cases, were expected to influence the governor’s decision in her case.

Wilson’s reasoning on the clemency cases reportedly follows the standard he used for double murderer Robert Alton Harris, the first person executed in California in 27 years. Fetal alcohol syndrome and child abuse may indeed have left Harris with brain damage, but Wilson said that Harris could still plan and understand his acts and should be held to some level of responsibility that a nightmarish childhood did not excuse.

Mercy, not innocence, was the issue in Wilson’s deliberations. The Wilson Administration would not comment Thursday on the clemency requests, but Janice Rogers Brown, Wilson’s legal affairs secretary, has previously quoted a clemency application as asking Wilson to act as “the distilled conscience” of society.

Certainly the plight of battered women has come to weigh on the public conscience. And for Wilson, a former Marine officer who has signed 10 bills dealing with domestic violence, there are compelling social and political arguments on both sides.

But that does not help him through the murky, churning political waters of spousal abuse.

In spite of painstaking reviews and consultations with the Board of Prison Terms , judges and prosecutors, Wilson’s clemency decisions are expected to be criticized by both sides.

In recent years the governors of Ohio and Maryland have freed nearly three dozen women inmates who had acted against their abusers. They were severely criticized by prosecutors who warned that it could open the floodgates to the murders of husbands.

Michael L. Sweet, executive director of the California District Attorneys Assn., said that the best protection for battered women is jailing their abusers.

“I can’t imagine (Wilson is) going to grant mass clemency and say, ‘Geez, battered women’s syndrome just convinced me,’ ” Sweet said.

Countering that is the rising political voice of women who are making public policy issues out of what were once considered women’s concerns, such as abortion, child care and spousal abuse.

Supporters of battered women say the floodgates are already open--for men to kill women. Men kill female partners more often than the other way around, by nearly 3 to 1, but their average sentences are shorter than those of women who kill their mates, according to studies.

Clemency and new laws merely right the scales of justice, advocates of reform contend.

“It doesn’t equate to a . . . license to kill, which is what I think people are coming up with,” said Sue Osthoff, director of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women in Philadelphia.

Among the first cases to cross Wilson’s desk were those of 11 women who could not get representation from the pro bono attorneys working for battered women, including:

* Carol Louise Hargis, wife of a San Diego Marine drill instructor, who with a friend tried to kill the Marine by putting bullets in his car’s carburetor, LSD in his french toast and a tarantula sac in his blackberry pie, and were looking for a sidewinder to put in his bed. The friend finally beat him to death with a sash weight. Hargis, who said her husband was mentally abusive, was convicted of first-degree murder.

* Darlene Ann Brazil of El Dorado County, who said she smothered her young sons out of fear she would lose custody of them. She also tried to kill herself. Brazil said she was physically and emotionally abused by her husband and earlier boyfriends.

* Laura Troiani of Oceanside, serving life without parole for a 1987 scheme in which five Marines were promised money to kill her husband. An expert in battered women’s syndrome testified that Troiani was sexually abused as a child and was struck by her husband when she was pregnant.

Sweet, of the prosecutors group, said that some of the petitioners “give the cause (of battered women’s syndrome) a bad name. . . . I guess if I was in prison for an indeterminate term and there was this cause that was floating by and I thought I could attach myself to it as a key to unlock the prison door, I probably would be highly motivated to do so. That’s the problem with all of this.”

But Osthoff of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women said there are virtually no “good battered women” cases with perfectly innocent victims and wholly evil men. Instead, “women who have some of the most complicated cases and may not look sympathetic at first blush may need help the most.”

Wilson’s decisions on the remaining clemency cases are expected to be reached over the next few weeks.