Early on the day that she murdered her husband, Janet Luster witnessed something that she said pushed her over the edge after 12 years of a violently abusive marriage.
Her husband was in bed with their 7-year-old daughter.
It was not a complete shock. Her husband had threatened almost daily to sexually attack her two daughters. At one point, Luster recalled, her husband told her while raping her at knifepoint, “If you don’t do this, I know someone else who will-and I don’t have to leave the house.”
“I just got more and more desperate, and more and more frightened,” the Tuscola, Ill., woman said.
But that day in 1992, she said, she could take no more. She shot her husband and hid his body from authorities.
It surprised her lawyers when Luster’s self-defense plea was rejected and she was sentenced to 24 years in prison, especially as courts have grown more accepting of self-defense pleas from battered women.
But they were even more surprised last week when Gov. Jim Edgar declined to release her and 17 other battered women from Illinois prisons-especially since their cases were so similar to those of four women released last year. Edgar completely rejected the 17 other requests and announced that he would only reduce Luster’s sentence to 15 years.
Although courts and governors increasingly have set free battered women who have killed their abusers, Edgar’s decision may indicate that he wants to slow the pace of releases, perhaps out of concern that the practice may be getting out of hand.
But what the governor actually is thinking is unclear. He denied last week’s clemency requests without commenting on them, and aides declined to shed any light, denying requests for interviews.
Edgar’s action raises questions about the standard applied in court and clemency decisions. How violent must the abuse be? And how well documented?
Women’s advocates say the governor’s standard suddenly seems muddled in clemency cases.
“I can’t see any method at all,” said Mary Becker, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a volunteer who worked on several of the 17 other clemency pleas. “It doesn’t look like the cases really got the individual consideration they deserved.”
Across the country, battered women have found increasing acceptance of their stories. Since the outgoing governor of Ohio released 25 battered women from prison in 1990, 47 other women from 11 states also have been set free, according to the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women.
Critics point out the need for official records that substantiate tales of abuse. Some women could fabricate claims of domestic abuse after committing murder. Juries and judges are charged with figuring out which claims are valid; in most of the Illinois cases turned down this week, courts already had rejected abuse claims.
Edgar hinted that this was his problem with the 17 other petitions. He noted in a brief statement that there was a report from the Department of Children and Family Services to back up Luster’s story that children in the home had been sexually abused.
Still, the lack of such reports did not stop Edgar from granting early releases to four women in 1994.
The biggest difference between this year and last may be changes in the political climate. Then, Edgar was running against a Democratic woman for re-election. Now, he is concentrating on tough-on-crime matters such as the construction of new prisons.
Beyond the discrepancies, battered women’s advocates question the new demand for public records to substantiate the women’s claims. Terrified by their husbands or boyfriends, battered women often refuse to call the police or child-welfare authorities, they said.
The story of Luster, 46, they say, is typical.
She moved to Tuscola to live near her family after she was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army due to pregnancy. In 1979, at age 30, she married Dale Luster.
After about a year and a half of marriage, her new husband began to beat her and abuse her verbally, Janet Luster said in an interview. He also abused their young daughter and her son and daughter from a previous marriage by beating them with belts and dragging them out of bed by their hair in the middle of the night and forcing them to clean a house that Janet says already was clean.
When she tried to stop him from beating the children, Luster said, her husband would slap and punch her.
Then, in the late 1980s, Janet Luster’s sister called DCFS to report that Dale was sexually abusing the two girls in the home. DCFS ordered Dale to leave the home. But local prosecutors never took the case to trial, and Dale eventually moved back home.
Besides being terrified of him and his retribution, Janet Luster said, she did not believe that calling the police or getting an order of protection would help her.
So, she said, she never reported the continuing abuse. When he threatened to molest her children if she did not submit to his violent sexual advances, she said, she simply gave in. She said she did not realize until the day in 1992 that he was raping her daughters when he thought she was not home.
“It was like being in prison, living like that,” Luster said. “I found out it had been going on for a while. He told my daughter if she told me, she’d be cleaning house in the middle of the night.”
Janet Luster was convicted of killing her husband. She received a 19-year sentence for second-degree murder and a 5-year sentence for concealing his body.
Women’s advocates consider that a long sentence for the circumstances. Like other abused women, Luster acted in self-defense, said Margaret Byrne, an attorney and executive director of the Women’s Clemency Project.
“Unfortunately, the law of self-defense is not interpreted from a woman’s point of view,” she said.
But prosecutors are not so moved by such tales of woe.
Cook County State’s Atty. Jack O’Malley contested all the pleas of local women who applied for clemency this year. O’Malley spokesman Andy Knott argued that juries and appellate courts already had ruled on the relevancy of the claims.
Besides that, prosectors say, the lack of documents to back up the stories seems a little too convenient. The cases of the 17 women who were turned down by the governor are marked by the absence of intervention by authorities.
Paul Robinson, a professor of law at Northwestern University, notes the need for some evidence of abuse.
“If you’re a woman in Illinois prison who is convicted of killing her husband, that’s not enough (to win clemency),” Robinson said. “I can be sympathetic to battered women and still think that’s not enough.”
But Robinson said there are many sources for evidence, such as testimony of friends and records from visits to doctors or emergency rooms.
Ever since the 1984 New Jersey case of a woman who fatally stabbed her husband with a pair of scissors, courts have looked more favorably on such evidence. In that case, the court accepted the battered woman’s plea of self-defense.
Women’s advocates hope the trend extends to clemency petitions.
“We haven’t moved so far that there aren’t biases in the courts,” said Sue Osthoff, of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women. “That’s why we still need clemency.”
