read this article! It's a column in today's paper about the injustice in sentencing in cases of domestic violence. If a man kills his wife/girlfriend, chances are he'll do short time and he'll get out and do the same damn thing. If a woman kills her husband/boyfriend - EVEN WITH EVIDENCE THAT HE ABUSES HER and she's in legitimate fear of her life - typically she gets life in prison (or average 15 years - three times more than men).
In my Crim Law class we talked about this - how "self-defense" means AT THAT MOMENT in most states. That means (and we read numerous cases just like this) that if a man beats a woman over and over and over and then says, "I'm going to the gas station to get some gas and I'm going to light you on fire, and if you try to escape I'll torture and kill all your family and then I"ll find you and do the worst possible things to you," and if she waits for him with a cast iron skillet and hits him over the door when he reenters - that's not self-defense and she'll probably go to prison for at least 15 years.
On the other hand, a man can say, "She sassed me back and flirted with the neighbor" and kill them both and if any punishment it's much less. More punishment usually for the neighbor, who is the innocent victim of the woman's evil ways.
This isn't just New Orleans or the South - this is the U.S. And I'm riled up and what's cool? This is MY JOB NOW. Yup, this is my research topic for the summer.
So I better get up off my caboose and head on in to work today to find research to help her flesh out her article and publish and get national outcry and change sentencing guidelines. I get frustrated with domestic violence like I do with education - there are SO MANY sociological factors at play and it's overwhelming. But something like this, noting the disparity of domestic murder convictions & sentencing, this is a focused enterprise.
Going easy on men who kill partners
Everette Simpson married three times, and three times he murdered his wife. Simpson stabbed his first wife 16 times with a butcher knife and then served nine years in prison. He stabbed his second wife with a hatchet, was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter and served 11 years before being paroled. Last month in Slidell, Simpson beat his third wife and her brother to death and then set the house on fire to conceal the murders. He died in the fire, so at least he won't be released and marry again.
Sheriff Jack Strain asked how a "monster" like this could have been free to kill again. The answer is simple -- the national average sentence for men who kill their female partners is two to six years in prison. Criminal justice systems and juries do not, on average, treat the murder of women by their husbands terribly seriously.
In contrast, women who kill their male partners are sentenced to an average of 15 years, three times as much as male defendants, despite the fact that many of these women killed in self-defense.
Women in abusive relationships find themselves trapped. They know that the system will not, or sometimes cannot, protect them from husbands who promise to track them down and kill them. Ashley Ruffins was stabbed to death last year after the police in both Orleans and Jefferson parishes failed to answer her repeated begging to enforce a protective order. Even when the police respond immediately, as they did in Mandeville last month, they could not protect Adrienne McGee from being shot down in the middle of the street in broad daylight.
But if these women try to save their own lives, fight back and end up killing their batterers, they often face life sentences in prison. Their children are effectively orphaned. Three recent New Orleans trials, all held in the same month, illustrate this fact:
In March, an Orleans Parish jury convicted Catina Curley of second-degree murder for shooting a husband who had abused her. Catina provided police records and witness testimony that her husband had beaten her for years, broken her nose and dislocated her shoulder. Catina testified that she shot him in fear for her life, but the jury was neither willing to acquit her or convict her of a lesser charge of manslaughter. Second-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
Another jury offered different justice to Clarence Warden for beating his girlfriend to death with a banister. Warden claimed that he acted in self-defense. Given disputed evidence of a physical fight between the two, the jury erred on the side of acquittal of the male defendant.
A third jury convicted Jeremy Colbert of manslaughter rather than murder. Prosecutors provided evidence at trial that Colbert stalked and beat his ex-girlfriend for years. When he saw her speaking to a male friend (an acquaintance she had only known for a few weeks), Colbert shot and killed the man. Colbert's lawyer successfully argued to the jury that Colbert's ex-girlfriend "riled him up" so he should not be subject to a murder conviction.
Like Everette Simpson was, Jeremy Colbert and Clarence Warden are, or will be, free to marry again. Catina Curley, however, will spend every day for the rest of her life in jail.
When we look at other cultures overseas, we understand that violence against women is a function of power. We know that honor killings and bride burnings systematically exclude women from public life and make women fear for their lives if they disobey the rules.
But in our own country, despite more than 1,000 such murders a year, we see domestic violence as aberrant, the result of a bad upbringing or mental illness. We treat domestic violence as sad but inevitable, as irrelevant to our own safety, as having nothing to do with the status of women.
In our own community this last year, we have never connected the dots between the cooking of Addie Hall by her boyfriend, the stabbing of Ashley Ruffins as the police walked away and the shooting of Adrienne McGee and her children. We need to muster the same outrage for these murders as for all of the other killings. These are the killings that the system usually has multiple chances to prevent.
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