PROSECUTORS' CALL FOR DEATH PENALTY RARE FOR WOMEN : IF CONVICTED, N. HOLLYWOOD SUSPECT COULD JOIN 8 OTHERS IN STATE.

Byline: Stacy Finz Daily News Staff Writer

Maureen McDermott of Van Nuys arranged the mutilation murder of her roommate to collect a $100,000 mortgage insurance policy.

Catherine Thompson of Sylmar hired a hit man to kill her husband, Melvin, to get $400,000 from his life insurance.

Mary Ellen Samuels of North Hills hired a drug dealer to kill her husband.

All three San Fernando Valley women are on Death Row now for their crimes and prosecutors want Donna K. Lee to join them.

The North Hollywood woman and her boyfriend, Paul Carasi, are accused of having slashed to death Carasi's 61-year-old mother and his former girlfriend in a Universal CityWalk parking garage on Mother's Day in 1995.

Regardless of whether Lee ever reaches California's Death Row, it is a rare occurrence for prosecutors in Los Angeles County to even seek the death penalty against a woman.

Since 1992, only five women have been prosecuted in a capital case in Los Angeles. Lee, 45, will be the sixth when she goes on trial, possibly by the spring.

If convicted and condemned, she would join eight other women on California's Death Row, including the three from the San Fernando Valley. There are 464 men awaiting execution in this state.

Nationwide, the numbers of women on Death Row are equally slim: There are 49 condemned women, as compared to 3,100 men. And in all U.S. history, only 511 women have been executed, as compared to 18,645 men.

Prosecutors, defense attorneys and legal experts alike say that women rarely end up before the executioner simply because they don't commit as many vicious crimes, and juries are more likely to spare their lives.

John Gilligan, one of the prosecutors on Lee's case, was reluctant to discuss the strategy, but he was adamant that society should not be more merciful on the defendant because she is a woman.

``I assume that the fact that she is a woman will have to be addressed while picking a jury,'' Gilligan said. ``But the egregiousness of the crime should speak for itself.''

Even when they are sentenced to death, women sometimes get the penalty reduced to life behind bars.

About 20 percent of the clemencies in this country have been awarded to women. The number is disproportionate to the paltry 1.5 percent of women that make up Death Rows nationwide, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit anti-capital punishment organization.

``It may be difficult for governors to execute a woman, but prosecutors tend to be dispassionate,'' said Lee's attorney, Henry Hall.

Former prosecutor Curt Livesay knows the difficulty in bringing capital cases against women; from 1979 to 1991, he determined every death penalty case in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.

``Women in our society tend to generate more sympathy from a jury,'' Livesay said.

Livesay said he decided to seek death in only 10 percent of the female special-circumstance cases he evaluated in this county, as opposed to 30 percent for the cases involving men.

Livesay maintains that the disparity in numbers is simple - women just aren't as violent as men.

For the most part, Livesay said he chose to spare these women because they had been followers, rather than leaders, and they didn't have significant criminal histories, he said.

Others argue that the difference is rooted in a sexist society that's squeamish about executing women.

``Study after study has shown that women are not treated as harshly as men by the judicial system,'' agreed San Diego County District Attorney Paul Pfingst. He prosecuted the first capital case involving a woman in California since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977.

In that case, Laura Troiani was accused of luring her husband to a desolate road in San Diego County, where five Camp Pendleton Marines had been hired to ambush and shoot him. Jurors rejected death, opting instead to send her to prison for the rest of her life.

Jurors said later that the fact that Troiani had been an active mother kept them from condemning the 26-year-old woman.

Texas and Florida, states that have led the nation in executions, have not put a woman to death in this century, even though both states have women on Death Row.

``There does seem to be some sense of Southern chivalry in these states,'' said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

But Dieter added that there is no conclusive proof that the justice system leans toward one gender or another.

``The numbers are so small that it would be hard to do a study to show a favorable bias toward women,'' he said.

In the case of Lee, prosecutors said they believe that long before the slayings, Lee and Carasi plotted to murder Carasi's mother and former girlfriend, Sonia Salinas, 29.

Not long before the stabbings, witnesses saw Lee pacing near the structure where the women were slain, Gilligan said. While Lee waited, Carasi treated Salinas, the mother of his child, and his own mom to a Mother's Day dinner at Universal CityWalk, Gilligan said.

Prosecutors believe the dinner was a ruse to lure the women into a death trap, one in which Lee played an integral role, Gilligan said.

Hall wouldn't reveal his defense, but he guaranteed that the prosecution's version of events is incomplete.

``There's more to this story than has been told,'' he said.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1) Maureen McDermott, at her 1990 sentencing for her roommate's murder, is one of eight women on California's Death Row.

David Sprague/Daily News

(2) Mary Ellen Samuels was given the death penalty in 1991.

Scott Garrity/Daily News