BATTERED WIVES PLEAD SELF-DEFENSE

Last July, Marlene Roan Eagle was acquitted of the murder of her husband on the ground that she acted in self-defense. Roan Eagle, a seven months pregnant American Indian in South Dakota, stabbed her husband through the heart after he came at her with a broken broomstick. It was established that he had beaten her on several occasions. The case was typical of a new legal trend--not only are lawyers increasingly using a plea of self-defense in cases where wives have killed husbands, but such cases are receiving sympathetic treatment from judges and juries.

For instance, recently Sharon McNerney was found innocent of murdering her husband. The Marquette, Michigan housewife fired a shotgun at him as he walked through the front door. Police described her as a battered housewife who had long been abused.

Evelyn Ware was acquitted of murdering her husband after pleading self-defense last month in Orange County, California. Ware shot him five times. Evidence of past beatings was used as part of her defense.

A jury in the rural town of Bellingham, Washington acquitted Janice Hornbuckle of murder last spring. After her husband had beaten her and threatened her with a knife, Hornbuckle grabbed a shotgun and shot him. She had previously sought police protection on several occasions.

Two current cases are also focusing attention on the plight of battered wives and their right of selfdefense against an abusive husband.

Jennifer Patri, a Sunday school teacher and president of the Parent Teachers' Association in Weyawega, Wisconsin, is currently on trial for fatally shooting her husband twice with a shotgun and then going back to their home 19 hours later and setting it afire. Patri entered a plea of self-defense, claiming that she shot her husband during an argument while he was threatening her with a butcher knife.

For years, Patri says, she was beaten and sexually abused by her husband, who had also molested their 12-year-old daughter. At the time of the kil ling she had started divorce proceedings; her husband had threatened to kidnap the children and kill her.

The second case involves Roxanne Gay, a nursing student charged with the stabbing death of her

husband, a former defensive linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles. Gay was the victim of repeated brutal beatings by her husband, and on numerous occasions called the police to complain. The police only told her husband to leave the house for a while to "cool off".

Last December, Gay drew a knife on her husband and stabbed him to death. After nearly a year in jail awaiting bail, she has been released on $45,000 bond posted by the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for Women.

One reason that battered wives resort to fatal violence is that law enforcement officials and society in general minimize their problems and tend to view domestic problems as extralegal situations. The women are given inadequate protection, and are forced to stay in the marriage for economic reasons or because they fear further assaults and death if they seek divorce. Estimates of battered wives in America range up to 28 million.

According to Margie Heller of the Women's Resource and Survival Center in Keyport, New Jersey, "There is a real Catch 22 for these women, The first or second time a wife seeks help, she's told by law officials, the priest, relatives, you name it, to go home and try to patch things up. So the 14th time, she's called a masochist for staying there. And

Silkwood's Death

then when she shoots the guy, everyone's shocked.'

As Candice Wayne of Cleveland's Legal Center for Battered Women states, "If the police and the courts would make it more realistic for a wife to turn to them and get results, maybe some of these situations could be resolved before the shooting takes place." Wayne referred specifically to the case of Patricia Evans, 30, now serving a 2-6 year jail sentence for fatally shooting her husband in September 1975. Due to appear before the Ohio Parole and Pardon Board, she is asking it to recommend that the Governor pardon her or commute her sentence on the grounds that, after four years of increasingly brutal beatings, murder was her only

recourse.

Evans had repeatedly sought protection from her battering husband. On several occasions she managed to call the police, but after they left, "my husband would snatch the wires from the phone so I couldn't call the police again and he beat me again." In 1973, Patricia had her husband admitted to a mental health center after he tried to poison her and her four children. She says that shortly after his release, "he started dragging the children from their beds and made them watch him beat me." Even after she filed for divorce and left him, her husband continued to come to her apartment, beat her and shoot at her. Finally, after he had beaten her with a dog chain and pistol-whipped her, she followed him out of the apartment and shot him.

Other states besides Ohio have been unsympathetic to the rights of battered women. A police official in Wisconsin, for instance, referring to selfdefense pleas by battered wives who killed their husbands, said, "If they get their way, there's going to be a lot of killings." And New Hampshire's status of women commission this fall turned down a proposal to aid battered wives, saying the rise in feminism abetted the phenomenon. "Those women libbers irritate the hell out of their husbands,' said one commissioner, Gloria Belzil.

As Jennifer Patri's lawyer puts it, however, "I nothing else, the enlightened attitude on selfdefense in these cases [where battered women kill their husbands] is a good Inducement for every man to be a model husband.”

(Material gathered from The Washington Post, Her Say, and The Guardian).

Death Raises Nuclear Raises Nuclear Safety Issue

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol called the crash "an accident", stating that Silkwood had fallen asleep at the wheel." However an investigation conducted by OCAW disputed police officials' claim. OCAW's investigation concluded that another car deliberately forced her off the road. Recently, Silkwood's allegations were confirmed by two former department heads at Kerr-McGes. In the October 20 issue of Rolling Stone, Jim Smith and Jerry Cooper described the company's “devil may care" attitude toward nuclear safety, before and after the death of Silkwood.

"We were told to operate or else," Smith declared. "We didn't have a choice."

Cooper had worked with the company for eleven years before he was transferred to the plutonium plant--a month after silkwood's death--in an attempt to improve safety conditions. He said that he was surprised by Kerr McGee's lack of commitment to specialized handling of the radioactive substance. "They thought of plutonium as if it were no different than oil.'

17

"The whole place was one big leak," Smith added. "Every time you turned around there was another leak."

Smith and Cooper also spoke about the plant's haphazard handling outside the plant, when disposing of left-over liquid plutonium. "They had a

hell of a problem" Cooper said, referring to the transporting of the liquid. "It sometimes leaked out of the barrels before the truck pulled out of the plant." Truck drivers dumping the plutonium some. times had to race the entire 300 miles to the delivery site in Kentucky before holes in the barrels started to spout.

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which investigated Kerr-McGee, conceded that the plant was guilty of some safety violations but dismissed them as "technicalities and aberrations." Smith and Cooper, however, have said that the agency's appraisal was wrong. "Kerr-McGee and the AEC put on rose-colored glasses and said everything was smooth when it actually was screwing up by the numbers,"Cooper reported. Smith was similarly skeptical of the AEC officials who periodically visited the plant for what were supposed to be unannounced, on-the-spot inspections. "There wasn't one time we didn't know about an inspection three days ahead of time. Somebody at Kerr-McGee had a connection somewhere, because we'd always be told about the inspection in the morning management meetings."

The plant closed in 1975 after lingering doubts about the Silkwood controversy caused the Energy Research and Development Administration not to renew its contract. Thirty-eight pounds of plutonium

were unaccounted for at the time of the closing. Kerr-McGee said 22 pounds were left inside the system, and the government attributed the remaining 16 pounds to "statistical variations,”

Smith and Cooper and others involved in the case disagree. Smith, who controlled the flushing operation of the system before the plant's closing, has asserted that security at the plant was incredibly lax. More than $5,000 worth of plutonium used in the plant laboratory was stolen orice, he said; and in another instance, a stereo in a five-foot case was smuggled out of the plant past guards at the front gate. According to Senith, there was "no way twenty-two pounds [of the valuable substance] could still be in there."

Karen Silkwood's estate has filed a suit against the firm, charging Kerr-McGee with violating her civil rights and claiming that her fate was an outgrowth of company negligence. So far, few potential witnesses seem eager to get involved-a reluctance that lawyers for the Silkwood estate blame on a continuing pattern of intimidation. Jean Jung, one of Silkwood's co-workers who saw her leave with the documents and has agreed to testify, has reported that her own apartment was ransacked and that she has received anonymous phone calls warning her against testifying.

What She Wante/December, 1977/page 5. --

SCCC