On this evening last year, I was pleading for my life on the kitchen floor.

My attacker had struck me in the head with a bottle of wine, and when I crumpled to the ground, he choked me until I lost consciousness.

I awoke with my face in a puddle of blood and this man straddling my back, tying my hands behind me and threatening to kill me if he heard a siren or anyone at the door - holding a kitchen knife to my throat to punctuate the threat.

"Please, please, please don't kill me," I begged.

"Shhhhhh," he hissed in my ear. "Suzanne, I don't want to hear a sound."

He was the man I loved.

I had met Brian three months earlier, when he was working with a PG&E crew outside the Chronicle building.

On our first date, I found out his full name, birth date, address, hometown, that he was on the U.S. Masters Swimming team in Palo Alto and had served six years in the Marines, including in the Gulf War and at Camp Lejeune, N.C. - enough, I thought, to check him out online.

Using some of the research tools I've employed as a reporter, I dug up one DUI arrest from 1990 in North Carolina. When asked about it, Brian admitted the transgression and asked what else I had found.

"Nothing, baby," I said.

My search results might have been different if a bill introduced two years ago by Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, had been made into law.

AB1771 would have created an online registry of men and women convicted of felony domestic violence or multiple related misdemeanors - similar to the sex offender list and with the same premise: Domestic abuse is a repeat behavior, the convictions are public record, and centralizing access to them is in the interest of community safety.

The idea stemmed from a 1995 double-murder case tried by former San Francisco prosecutor Jim Hammer.

Nadga Schexnayder and her mother were shot in the face at point-blank range by Schexnayder's ex-boyfriend. Ronnie Earl Seymour had a 20-year-history of violence against women, including two felony convictions. In 1977, he beat his then-girlfriend in the head with a hammer and left her for dead. In 1992, he shattered a window in an ex-girlfriend's home and held her and two friends at knifepoint for hours while threatening to kill them.

"During the trial, the family kept saying, 'Wow - we wish we had known,' " Hammer said. "For any potential victim of domestic violence, knowledge is power. Then people can make choices."

Ma was shocked by the vehement opposition her bill received - virtually all from groups that support domestic-violence victims.

High among their concerns: The database might provide a user with a "false sense of security."

That is, the kind of false sense of security I felt when Brian's name came up clean everywhere I looked.

"When I hear that being said - 'false sense of security' - it more than irritates me," says Heidi Markow, who runs the Beginning Over Foundation in Easton, Pa.

On June 15, 2005, Markow's big sister was shot in the neck at point-blank range by her estranged husband, who then locked her into her apartment and left her to bleed to death.

Over the next 10 hours, the man repeatedly phoned Markow and described how he had ambushed and killed her sister when she opened the front door to go to work. Finally, he told Markow where police would find his body and fatally shot himself while she was on the line.

"A few days later I got a call from a reporter who was doing a story on domestic violence," Markow said. "He said, 'Heidi, did you know that your brother-in-law previously tried to kill his first wife with a pickax?'

"All this information was buried in paperwork. We had no idea," she said. "It was like losing her all over again - we could have saved her."

In addition to founding Beginning Over to support victims of domestic abuse, Markow last year persuaded Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Lisa Boscola to introduce Robin's Law, similar to Ma's bill and others that have been tried unsuccessfully in New York, Illinois and Nevada - all opposed by groups whose mission is to support domestic-violence victims.

Robin's Law died Friday when the Pennsylvania Legislature adjourned. Boscola plans to resurrect it next year.

"It's very hard to change this type of behavior, whether it's domestic violence or sex offending," she said. "These individuals are the ones who committed this crime. I didn't commit it, I just want to protect women from this abuse. It's another tool for them to use."

Another concern over such laws is that a victim won't report the crime for fear that her attacker's shame at appearing on the registry would incite reprisal.

Myra Spearman, an Indiana woman who endured 18 years of an abusive marriage and now publishes her own registry relying on public documents (theweakervessel.org), acknowledges that many victims are hesitant to report abuse. But, she said, that is a reality that already exists and is complicated by a slew of factors.

In fact, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the top reason by far - 21.8 percent - that women don't report abuse is that they consider it a "private and personal matter." "Afraid of reprisal" clocks in at 12.4 percent.

"I just can't wrap my head around why people wouldn't want this." Spearman said. "You need to put the knowledge where it's needed most - in the hands of people who can actually make the decision of whether they live or die. We have databases out there to let you see if the car you want to buy has been in an accident ... but we can't have this one."

Yet another objection by domestic-

violence activists is that "innocent men" will be snared by the database.

"There are always going to be false accusations out there. There are people who play games with the system," Boscola said. "The way we weed it out is to get a conviction. It's not like they didn't go out and commit the crime. This isn't just an accusation."

San Francisco's First Comprehensive Report on Family Violence, released last year, recorded 6,583 domestic violence-related calls to 911 dispatchers in the fiscal year ending in mid-2008. Far fewer wound up in the court system; of the 472 cases filed, the district attorney's office won 15 trials and executed 444 plea deals.

The proposed laws would capture only the convictions.

Another argument is about the privacy of the victims.

But in the age of the Internet, the privacy being protected by the status quo is that of the offenders, whose criminal history lives on papers filed away in individual courthouses, requiring physical searches and a fee to collect them.

Meanwhile, a quick Google search of myself - and I changed my last name in 1994 - turned up pictures, address, relatives' names, age, hometown, place of employment, given name, education and every city of residence. None of that stemmed from my own online activity.

And then there is the issue of cost. Ma's bill did not include the potential price of such a registry or a source of funds.

What we do know, however, is that family violence is expensive.

"Tangible costs include medical care, police response and investigation, property damage, mental health care, victim services and lost wages and productivity," the San Francisco report says. It quotes 1996 statistics from the National Institute of Justice, which put the price tag of domestic crime at $67 billion annually.

When contacted for this piece, domestic-violence groups shied away from taking a stand on an offender registry.

Most notably, the office of Vice President Joe Biden - who with much fanfare created a White House post of domestic abuse czar - declined to comment, as did the Violence Against Women office in the Department of Justice, and the San Francisco district attorney's office.

On this evening last year, I lay on my kitchen floor for an hour before I was able to convince Brian that I would help him get away.

I waited until he started packing some clothes into a gym bag a few feet away, unlocked my front door and ran screaming across the hall in hopes that my neighbor, San Francisco police Officer Patrick Kennedy, was home. Before I could reach Pat's door, Brian said, "Oh, no you don't" and lunged for me.

He pulled me back inside, threw me to the floor and dead-bolted the door.

He leaned into my face and whispered, "Pat's not home."

I thought, "This is it. I'm going to die."

He started punching me in the head and gouging my eyes and finally choked me again.

I was about to lose consciousness for the second time when my neighbor - who was home, after all - used a master key to unlock the door. Brian fled, leaving me choking on my blood, with eyes so swollen I couldn't see, and with multiple facial fractures.

Because Brian was a fugitive, the federal marshals came to interview me - and told me Brian had a violent history: three restraining orders and two prison stays of a total three years on felony domestic-violence convictions.

While on medical leave for three months, I traveled to Solano and Placer counties and paid to copy his court files.

He was nearing the end of his parole, it turned out, when we met.

He was apprehended eight days after the attack on a $2 million warrant for attempted murder. He recently accepted a plea agreement of 10 years in prison and two strikes - the only deterrent at my disposal to keep him from hurting anyone again.

A domestic violence offender registry might have saved both of us from this tragedy.

I thought I knew Brian: If he were a Jelly Belly, he would be buttered popcorn flavor. If he had a super power, it would be the ability to time-travel.

He was a master chess player - carrying on virtual games in his head - and he liked to turn his knights sideways because they felt better in his hand.

He liked to hold my hand as we fell asleep.

It's what I didn't know about Brian that almost killed me.