Once Again, the Female Criminal Justice Sentencing Discount
Background: I’ve discussed the kid gloves treatment the criminal justice system gives women on numerous occasions. The most recent example is the Lisa Nowak case–to learn more, see my co-authored column Scott Peterson in a Space Suit  (Philadelphia Daily News, 2/26/07) and also click here and here.
Both the man and the woman in the story Lovers’ 30-year murder sentence (BBC, 5/18/07) deserve little more than a rope and a tree, but I can’t help but notice the gender bias in sentencing here.
The husband and his lover plotted to kill the man’s wife. The husband urged his girlfriend to commit the crime, but physically played no role in the murder. The girlfriend stabbed the man’s wife 16 times with a knife. Yet the husband got an 18 year sentence and the girlfriend–the one who actually committed the murder–got only 12 years, partially because she cooperated with prosecutors, but also because she’s a woman, and women are treaded with kid gloves by the criminal justice system.
Also, when a man and a woman commit a crime together, the state is more likely to offer a deal to the woman to testify against the man than vice versa.
A cheating husband and his lover have been jailed for a total of 30 years for
plotting and murdering his wife.
Stephen Marsh, 36, was sentenced to 18 years for persuading Rebecca Harris, 30, to stab his wife Jaspal to death at the marital home in Gorseinon, Swansea.
Harris was given a 12-year sentence for carrying out the July 2006 murder.
Passing sentence at Swansea Crown Court, Judge Roderick Price said: “It was a well-planned killing – I’m tempted to say an execution.”
It is chilling to think of you – a young mother – driving to Gorseinon to carry out a murder in a manner that was so violent. (more…)
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Stumble It!
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:38 am
It all starts with “victim hood,” the feminist Holy Writ. Over the last few decades the victim is the hero and deserves sympathy. Since popular culture now portrays women as a “victim class,” men are then portrayed as the “oppressor class.” Hence, the oppressor class (men) are not deserving of sympathy.
This affects the criminal justice system and then one witnesses the double standard. The female murders her husband, claims “battered women syndrome, or some other such thing.” Then she becomes the “victim” and the murdered husband the “oppressor” who got what he deserved. She gets off with either a light sentence or Scott free.
In today’s world being the “victim” grants you sympathy and entitlements. In the wage gap women are portrayed as yet another “victim” of those “men” whom oppress them economically by not paying them as much as men.
I could sit here and type examples to Ad nauseam, but you get the point and “why” there is a double standard. Stereotypes are important, just as words are important.
In today’s popular culture men are portrayed as potential sexual predators, and this has an effect on the criminal justice system when a man is accused of a sex crime. The likelihood of a conviction is very high now, even in the most weakest of cases… Refer to innocenceproject.org
Had these negative male stereotypes not been in place these innocent men wouldn’t had been convicted.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:12 am
A feminist government favors woman, but men are the source of most evil.
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Less often appreciated is the gender bias of capital punishment in the United States, though it is a much stronger predictor than race or social class. According to the Justice Center Website of the University of Alaska – Anchorage, “Of the 19,000 confirmed executions since 1608 in what is now the United States, only 515, less than three percent, were executions of women. Until this year [1998], Velma Barfield, executed in North Carolina on 2 November 1984, was the only woman executed in the U.S. since executions resumed in 1976.” Two more women have since been executed, for a total of 3 out of 596 (0.5%) between 1976 and December 1999. (See Paul Duggan, “Rising Number of Executions Welcomed, Decried,” The Washington Post, December 13 1999.)
The Death Penalty Information Centre notes that “Women are more likely to be dropped out of the system the further the capital punishment system progresses. … Women account for about 1 in 8 (13%) murder arrests; … 1 in 52 (1.9%) death sentences imposed at the trial level; … 1 in 77 (1.3%) persons presently on death row; and … only 3 in 540 (0.6%) persons actually executed since [1976].” (DPIC, “Women and the Death Penalty: Brief Facts and Figures.”) Using the updated figures cited in the previous paragraph, the statistic can be framed another way: 99.5% of those executed in the United States since 1976 have been male.
The bias against men carries over to juveniles and the mentally handicapped. Here, in fact, it is exclusively underage and handicapped males who are killed by the state: “There are presently 58 inmates, all male, on death row for crimes committed while juveniles. … As of year-end 1997, 31 mentally retarded men had been executed in the U.S. since 1976.” (Source: Justice Center Website.)
Capital punishment increasingly seems a weapon of choice in the U.S. Ninety-nine prisoners — all male — were executed in 1999, “a significant increase in government-sanctioned killing over last year, and far more than any annual total since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976.” (Duggan, “Rising Number of Executions …”) (Update: On February 24, 2000, Betty Lou Beets became the fourth U.S. woman executed since 1976. See Michael Graczyk, “Woman Executed after Bush Rejects Plea for Clemency”, The New York Times, February 25 2000. On May 2, 2000, Christina Marie Riggs was executed by lethal injection in Arkansas for suffocating her two children; she was the first woman executed in Arkansas in over 150 years.)
Numerous other abuses and atrocities can also be cited within the U.S. prison system, which has long been notorious for its high rates of violence, torture, and rape (see the extraordinary efforts and resources of Stop Prisoner Rape in the United States). Recent indictments by human-rights groups have cited the use of prisoners as borderline slave labour: the prison population mysteriously continues to rise as crime rates fall nationwide. Billions of dollars of corporate investments now depend on prisoners working for miserable wages (see “The Prison Industry: Capitalist Punishment,” Corporate Watch, October 28 1999). As Rage Against the Machine put it in their 1999 song “New Millennium Homes”: (Cf The United States)
http://www.gendercide.org/case_imprisonment.html
Also almost nine out of every ten inmates are men.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/jailag.htm
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:53 pm
On December 31, 2005, there were 2,193,798 people in U.S. prisons and jails. The United States incarcerates a greater share of its population, 737 per 100,000 residents, than any other country on the planet. But when you break down the statistics you see that incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment.
Gender is an important “filter” on the who goes to prison or jail, June 30, 2005:
Females: 129 per 100,000
Males: 1,371 per 100,000
http://www.prisonsucks.com
America’s government prisons are big business, housing 25% of the world’s inmate population, the largest prison population on the planet. Though America is home to about 4.5% of the world’s population.
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:30 pm
The feminist (man bad, woman good) model drives government larger – bigger enforcement agencies (police), larger court system, growing correction facility, and, huge prison network (the world’s largest).
Support industries ought to see job growth lawyers, government experts, professors in academic, social workers, psychologist, psych testing, and family & children services, among others.
Feminism Inc. fits well into America’s new service economy.
Through divorce man is re-imaged as violent. Definitions of legal terms re-defined to convict men, for example, change “violence” and “abuse” feeling a threat vs. bodily contact. Then add a few new terms like “harassing” and “stalking”.
It is now easy to begin to fill a system build to protect woman and children from men. Brilliant.
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:35 pm
EXCELLENT link mruffolo! http://www.prisonsucks.com/
Prisons are BIG business! With all the outsourcing of jobs, a fresh new source of income has been found, incarcerating men.
Soon even kissing will be “simple sexual assault” as it has become in Canada. More and more laws criminalizing normal male behaviour creates more “raw material” for the prison INDUSTRY. All the while perpetuating the feminist myth all men are amoral, and should be locked up anyway for the safety of women and children, and salvation of the society.
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Couple facts @4 with the fact that Judges and Legislators have their pensons filled with the income for the Prison labor, and Mr. Usher finally admitting that the Judges and the ABA are the enemies that violate the laws, at this point would make the picture quite clear to the thickest individual.
Shawshank Redemption was nano-corruption in comparison.
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:32 pm
The more and more I read, it seems that the most important thing to the female populace seems to be to “criminalize men” as much as possible?
It just seems that almost any action a man might take has an “air” or criminality?
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Joi said, “Soon even kissing will be “simple sexual assault” as it has become in Canada. More and more laws criminalizing normal male behaviour creates more “raw material” for the prison INDUSTRY.”
Laws are applied differently depending on the background of the person. How many rich, white doctors would you expect to see jailed for a DUI?
Law enforcement and prosecutors are afraid of prosecuting some while more afraid of not believing the false allegations of others. As soon as somebody pulls a card, I’m black, I’m gay, I’m a female, I know so and so, it’s hands off.
Then there are some types of people that typically commit a disprortionate amount of certain crimes and then have the gall to complain that they are being unfairly targeted.