Advocates for the women, convicted of killing their husbands, argue they were both wrongly denied parole.
A 43rd Judicial Circuit judge is expected to decide within a week whether to order the Missouri Probation and Parole Board to release two women who are serving life sentences for the murder of their husbands in domestic abuse cases. Both women were granted clemency by former Gov. Bob Holden.
In 1981, Shirley Lorene Lute, 75, was sentenced to life with a stipulation that she serve 50 years after her son was convicted of killing her husband. Lute had reported abuse by her husband on several occasions, including incidents in which he burned her with a cigarette, locked her in an unheated basement for days at a time and forced her to wear a collar and bark like a dog, said Colleen Coble, executive director of the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence.
Lynda Ruth Branch, 59, shot and killed her husband after 11 years of abuse that included beatings and sexual assaults, according to an article published in January by the Missourian. In 1986, she was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.
Both women’s cases were among 11 chosen by the Missouri Clemency Coalition, which comprises lawyers and advocates from the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence and the law schools at UMKC, MU, St. Louis University and Washington University in St. Louis. All the cases involved battered women who were convicted of killing their abusive husbands.
In November 2004, acting on a clemency petition filed by the coalition, then-Gov. Holden commuted — a form of clemency that reduces a prison sentence — Branch’s life sentence to one with the possibility of parole. The following summer, the Probation and Parole Board rejected Branch’s petition for parole, saying in its rejection letter that her release would “depreciate the seriousness of the present offense.”
Holden commuted Lute’s sentence in December 2004, but when she came before the board in June 2005, she was denied parole and told to come back in 2007.
On May 23 of this year, attorneys for Branch and Lute filed actions of habeas corpus, which allows for a prisoner to argue for release on grounds of an expired sentence or an abridgement of constitutional rights. 43rd Judicial Circuit Judge Warren McElwain agreed to hear the cases. Branch’s case was heard June 16, and Lute’s was heard Monday.
Lute and Branch are both arguing the board used the wrong laws and regulations in rejecting their respective paroles. At the time they were sentenced, Missouri law said a person with a life sentence had to serve 15 years before being eligible for parole, while today’s statute, enacted in 1994, placed the minimum at 85 percent of a person’s sentence. This would require a person like Branch with a life sentence, which is 30 years, to serve 25½ years to be eligible, pushing back her parole date to 2011.
Coble said it’s the clemency coalition’s view that the board is incorrectly applying the new statute to both women’s cases, and that’s what they are trying to prove in court.
“I’m very hopeful,” Coble said of the outcome of the hearings. “The legal basis for the release of these two women was very clear in what was given to the court.”
Lute’s attorney, Jane Aiken, could not be reached for comment.