Gender Bias in the Courts — and in The Washington Post
By Hans Bader © 2007
This article originally appeared on OpenMarket.org
For a glaring example of gender bias
in the courts (and the media), you need look no further than a
recent Washington Post story by Tamara Jones, in which she
commiserates with convicted felon Teressa Turner-Schaefer, who spent
a mere 11 months in jail for killing her husband after an argument.
Now Turner-Schaefer gets to collect
$400,000 in life insurance for killing her husband. In a plea
bargain, she pleaded guilty to the crime of involuntary
manslaughter, which, amazingly enough, doesn’t bar you from
collecting life insurance taken out on the person you killed.
It’s not surprising that the
prosecutors let her plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, even
if they thought she deliberately murdered her husband. Prosecutions
of wives for killing their husbands are among the most difficult for
prosecutors to bring, since judges and juries invariably assume that
the victim must have done something to deserve it, even if the
victim was blameless.
Even when a prosecutor succeeds in
obtaining a conviction, penalties are often slight. (I wrote earlier
in the Post about Mary Winkler, the Tennessee woman who served only
two months in jail after her conviction for killing her preacher
husband).
The federal Bureau of Justice
Statistics’ study of large urban counties found that wives who kill
their husbands without provocation receive an average sentence of
just six to seven years, while husbands who kill their wives receive
a much more reasonable average sentence of 17 years.
And getting a conviction is quite
difficult, since even the killing of a small, physically harmless
man is often defended on the ground that his wife was suffering from
“battered woman syndrome.”
“Battered woman syndrome” is a
concept popularized by Lenore Walker, who was later exposed by the
Post’s Ken Ringle for falsely claiming that watching the Super Bowl
results in men beating their wives more. Walker defines “battered
woman syndrome” so broadly that mere verbal abuse or quarreling
qualifies. Despite being exposed for the Super Bowl hoax, Walker has
been cited hundreds of times in judicial opinions.
Last year, in In re Nourn, 52
Cal.Rptr.3d 31 (2006), the California Court of Appeal cited the
“battered woman syndrome” concept to overturn a woman’s conviction
for getting her abusive lover to kill an innocent third party, whom
the woman accused of sexual impropriety in order to curry favor with
her abuser. The “abuse excuse” thus claimed a victim who no one even
alleged was abusive. (The California Supreme Court ordered that this
controversial decision be stripped of any precedential value, but
refused to review it or uphold the conviction).
It is easy for a female defendant to
find a “rent-a-shrink” willing to testify that the husband she
killed was a batterer — even if she in fact dominated and abused
him, not vice versa. (The Bureau of Justice Statistics says that 1.5
million women and 800,000 men are physically battered every year).
Such testimony for hire is admissible, while the testimony of the
slain man’s family that he was the victim is not.
The Maryland Court of Special
Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Diana Motz (who was later appointed
to the federal appeals court), held in Banks v. State, 608 A.2d 1249
(1992), that a man’s family were not allowed to testify that he was
in fear for his life of the wife who later killed him, and expressed
such fear to them repeatedly. The court said his out-of-court
statements were inadmissible hearsay. Yet an “expert” who never met
the man was permitted to testify about battered women’s syndrome in
that very same case, depicting him a negative light.
By contrast, similarly relevant
out-of-court statements about female victims are not so rigidly
excluded. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, permitted
diary entries about abuse of a female victim to be admitted at her
husband’s murder trial in Parle v. Runnels, 387 F.3d 1030 (2004).
The courts can be quite indulgent
even when it is clear that a woman has deliberately attempted to
kill her husband. In another case, U.S. v. Working, 224 F.3d 1093
(2001), the Ninth Circuit held that federal trial judge Jack Tanner
(whom the Ninth Circuit later admitted was gender-biased against
male victims) had the power to reduce a woman’s sentence for
deliberately maiming, and attempting to kill, her ex-husband (Tanner
sentenced her to just one day in jail) because he had supposedly
disturbed her emotionally by seeking custody of their kids. It is
hard to imagine a court reducing a man’s sentence for maiming his
ex-wife on the grounds that she had the temerity to seek custody of
their children. Such a man would rightly receive a long prison
sentence, and no sympathy from the press.
Hans Bader
