Group Calls Wilson Too Slow on Clemency

SACRAMENTO —  A group that represents imprisoned women who killed batterers says Gov. Pete Wilson has been slow to act on clemency requests and lags behind governors in other states.

“California is pretty unique in that Wilson has waited so long,” said Sue Osthoff, director of the Philadelphia-based National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women.

“There’s a very high percentage that he has failed to act on. Governors in other states have chosen to take a stand by saying either yes or no. It isn’t always good news, but at least the women have an answer. It seems grossly unfair to the women [in California] whose lives are in the balance.”

The issue was reported in today’s editions of the San Francisco Examiner.

Sean Walsh, Wilson’s press secretary, said Wilson considers the clemency process “one of his most important duties. . . . We make no apologies for the due diligence the governor conducts in all clemency matters.”

As part of a national campaign to help survivors of domestic abuse, the California Coalition for Battered Women in Prison helped 34 women draft petitions to Wilson in 1992 asking for executive clemency. In each case, the woman had killed her batterer and had exhausted legal avenues. On average, the women were serving sentences of 15 years to life.

Since then, Wilson has issued decisions on only a handful of the 34 cases, commuting one sentence, reducing another sentence from 15 years to life to 12 years to life, and denying seven.

“His delay is unconscionable,” added Kenneth Theisen, an attorney with the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation. “These women should never have been sent to prison in the first place. Wilson is the only one who can grant clemency. By failing to act, he is not exercising his constitutional duties.”

Since 1978, 102 battered women from 22 states have been granted executive clemency, according to Osthoff’s group. Most governors act within a year of clemency filings.

Wilson and his legal staff have devoted an enormous amount of time to reviewing clemency petitions, Walsh says, some of them coming from death row inmates.

Several of the battered women’s petitions are on the governor’s desk and he will decide soon, Walsh added.

“I don’t think Pete Wilson gets it, I don’t think he understands the battered woman’s syndrome,” said Glenda Virgil, 49, who was sentenced to 15 years to life for killing her boyfriend. She’s been at the California Institution for Women at Frontera since 1986.