A Killing Excuse

Expanding the limits of self-defense

More than one-fourth of U.S. murders are family affairs, and the courts have never been particularly tough on defendants who act in the heat of a domestic quarrel. In recent weeks, however, an array of women have managed to walk away unpunished after killing their husbands or even former husbands:

>In Chicago, Juan Maldonado capped a drinking bout by beating his eight-year-old son with a shoe, so wife Gloria, 32, shot him three times. The state's attorney ruled there was "insufficient evidence" to warrant her prosecution.

>In Lansing, Mich., Francine Hughes, 30, claimed that years of physical abuse drove her to pour gasoline around her sleeping ex-husband and light it. A jury acquitted her of murder on grounds that she had been temporarily insane.

In Orange County, Calif., Evelyn Ware, 29, pleaded self-defense after shooting her ex-husband five times. Accepting her evidence of habitual beatings, a jury found her not guilty of murder.

Can all this be justified, legally or morally? Feminist groups insist that it can. They say wives seeking relief from abuse come up against a bewildering series of societal pressures, as well as a legal system that is either indifferent or tends to regard it as a purely personal matter. Even when police encourage filing of complaints, women fear poverty if their husbands are removed and intensified abuse if they return.

But enforcement of the law--and especially a jury verdict--is often affected by shifts in public opinion. In two successful murder defenses of recent years, feminists succeeded in "raising the consciousness" of the national public about the emotional problems of Southern black women in the Joan Little case and rape victims in the Inez Garcia trial. Now they hope to shift the spotlight to a Wisconsin trial and the battered-wife syndrome.

In the bucolic dairy town of Waupaca, a slim blonde farm wife named Jennifer Patri, 32, is to go on trial Dec. 6 for the first-degree murder of her hard-drinking husband, Robert. To most neighbors, Mrs. Patri seemed happily active. She taught Lutheran Sunday school, presided over a local P.T.A. and supervised a busy hog farm. The reality of her private life was, however, grim. Her husband, an auto-body repairman she married at 18, continually slapped her around and subjected her to agonizing sexual abuse. Says Mrs. Patri's attorney, Alan Eisenberg: "He apparently dreamed up his own sexual circus and she was the ring monkey." But even after learning last year that Patri was molesting their twelve-year-old daughter, Jennifer failed to leave him or notify the authorities. She now says: "I felt dutybound to my marriage vows."

Finally Patri himself abandoned her, moving in with another woman. But, Mrs. Patri claims, he threatened to kidnap their two daughters or kill her, so she ordered a 12-gauge shotgun last February from a local store. A month later, when Patri arrived to take the girls on a day's outing, only Jennifer was waiting--with the loaded shotgun near by. "I was anticipating trouble," she admits. During an argument, she shot him in the back and head, buried his body in an adjacent smokehouse and later set her house on fire.

A defense fund has been formed by Wisconsin feminists to "inform the public of a woman's right to protect herself against physical and emotional attack." Though self-defense is still an adequate excuse for violence only in immediate, severe danger, now, notes New Jersey Lawyer Robert Ansell, "the cumulative effect of beatings on a woman's consciousness is often considered. A woman may well be allowed quicker resort to a weapon than a man." That worries some lawmen. Says Sheriff Lawrence Schmies of Waupaca: "I wonder if these people know what they're doing. If they get their way, there's going to be a lot of killings."

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