Attorney Defends Children Who Kill a Parent

Associated Press
James Anderson
April 5, 1992

Paul Mones pulls a handwritten letter from an office brimming with paper and reads aloud. It’s from one of his clients–a teen-age boy imprisoned for murdering a parent.

“It’s still a hard question of why I did it,” he wrote.

“I sincerely hope that other kids out there will have someone to talk to like I have. If it’s possible, maybe we can set up a correspondence net throughout the United States for kids like us. Who knows, it just might help in getting over the guilt I know we all feel.”

Mones understands. The Los Angeles attorney may be the only lawyer in the United States whose specialty is defending kids who kill.

To many of his colleagues, this is a strange vocation. But dozens around the country have called him for advice in defending parricide cases.

“They say with a nervous laugh, ‘Oh boy, that’s some specialty you got there,’ ” said Mones, who outlined his work in a book, “When a Child Kills: Abused Children Who Kill Their Parents.”

Parricides account for more than 300 of the nation’s 20,000 homicides each year. Most of the killers are white, middle-class boys between the ages of 16 and 18 with no criminal record. Mones argues that most suffer silent years of sexual, physical and psychological abuse before they act against a parent.

“These kids by and large are never insane. But it looks insane. It’s viscerally insane. Why would you want to kill your parents?” he said. “But when you come down to the real, unpleasant, sad, tragic reality, there’s a lot of logic to what the kid did. That’s when everybody gets very afraid.”

Donna Marie Wisener, a captain on her high school majorette team, endured her father, Glenn’s, explosive rages and punishing beatings until May 24, 1991, when she shot the 49-year-old truck driver six times with his revolver at their home in Smith County, Tex.

At her trial, Donna and her mother, Mamie, testified about Glenn Wisener’s abusive rages. The jury acquitted Wisener on Feb. 13.

Mones, a co-counsel in the case, said Donna’s defense was the first use of a Texas law enacted in September that allows evidence of family violence to defend a killing.

Texas is the only state to have such a statute.

But a Washington state appeals court in February overturned the second-degree murder conviction of a youth in the shooting death of his stepfather. The court held that the jury should have been allowed to consider evidence about the stepfather’s abuse of the boy.