The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

It was an arranged marriage, agreed upon in the early 1960s by her father in Sicily and a distant relative in America, Michael La Pinta. La Pinta wed her practically right off the boat. She was 19 and spoke no English.

The marriage was conducted according to standards that some would call old world and others would call extremely abusive: La Pinta told his wife what to do, where to go and with whom; and if he didn't like her performance of her duties, he would beat her. He beat her for 20 years.

In court documents filed years later, her two sons would testify that although their mother tried to shield them from the abuse, they knew that it went on; and once saw their father throw a serving plate at her head because he didn't like his supper. She fell to the floor, bleeding.

It might have been a habit of trying to shield her children from the violence in their home, in fact, that helped send Marie La Pinta to prison.

Her brother, Leonardo Crociata, killed the abusive husband in the La Pintas' West Islip home on March 27, 1983, in a struggle over a gun. The struggle began with the two men quarrelling over La Pinta's treatment of Marie.

Because she tried to help Crociata hide the body - which she later testified was mainly about hiding it from her two sons - Marie would be convicted as an accessory to murder and sentenced to a term of 25 years to life, the same sentence her brother received.

None of the history of her abuse came up at her 1985 trial. And even if it had, the court might not have been receptive to a "battered wife" defense, which was not used successfully until the early 1990s.

Marie La Pinta didn't even know she was a "battered wife" until she attended group therapy sessions at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where she first heard the term.

"In a sense, she went to prison as a naive, unsure immigrant woman and grew up in there," said her son, Lenny La Pinta of Sayville, a saxophonist and high school music teacher who was 20 when his father was killed, and who still speaks lovingly of him as a fellow musician, the one "who put the saxophone in my hands."

Lenny and his brother, Anthony La Pinta, an attorney, have led a long - and until last week unsuccessful - campaign to free their mother from prison. They sought clemency from Gov. George Pataki three times, and were turned down three times without explanation.

But on Tuesday, in what seems likely to lead to their mother's release soon, a State Supreme Court justice granted a motion filed by Anthony La Pinta to vacate her conviction. The order was supposedly based on the fact that Marie and her brother were represented by defense attorneys who belonged to the same law firm - a potential conflict of interest - but really, between you and me, it had to have been based on compassion for a 69-year-old woman who should never have been sent to prison in the first place.

"She's an entirely different person now," Lenny La Pinta said. "She availed herself of every educational opportunity offered to her [in prison]. She studied for her GED. She was a model prisoner ..."

The two brothers and their families planned to visit Marie today for Mother's Day at the Albion Correctional Facility, where she was transferred recently. It will be their first visit since her conviction was vacated.

They have visited her so many times over the last 20 years, they know the routine like the catechism and will follow the rules like model visitors. "We'll line up and get scanned," said Lenny. "The guards will take any food we might bring for her, to have it inspected. Then they'll assign us a spot in the visiting room and we'll go sit there.

"She'll come out of a door on the other side of the room, having been searched, of course ..."

She'll be wearing state-issued dark green pants and a shirt of her choosing, as long as it's not blue, gray or black, the guards' colors. She'll sit across from them, facing the same direction all the other inmates face - just as they, the visitors, must face the same direction as all the visitors in the room face. Prison regulations.

Then the family will convene and, for the first time in 21 years, feel the mercy with which justice can be tempered.
"My father?" Lenny said in answer to a question. "I think he'd be very happy about this."

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-livit084250829may08,0,93196.column?coll=ny-li-columnists