1921: Female Judge Recognizes Female Sentencing Discount
This comes to us courtesy of our 'resident historian,' Richard Stephens.
Previously we saw what Seattle Judge Rhea M. Whitehead, had so say about chivalry justice. The highest ranking female judge of the period, Florence Ellinwood Allen of Cleveland, was of like mind. Here is Judge Allen speaking before the Women Lawyers’ Association, on the same topic, chivalry justice, the tendency of men jurors to render verdicts in favor of women litigants on sentimental grounds whether the woman be the accused or the accuser:
“This fault should be corrected. It is not born of chivalry, but of what men choose to call chivalry, something totally different.”
“’Criminal men take advantage of this condition. They use woman to perform acts essential to crime, counting on a woman to serve as a screen and as a blind. They figure that if she is arrested she will be acquitted and that would weaken the case against them. It is quite true that all men – lawyers, judges, prosecuting attorneys, witnesses and jurors – are inclined to be lenient with a woman on trial or in any way connected with a case. The leniency is not deliberate, but instinctive. Pretty women are all too likely to make a man loose (sic) his balance.’”
Judge Florence Allen was the descendant of American Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. A dedicated women’s suffrage campaigner, she was elected judge in 1920. In March 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Allen was the was the first woman to sit on any federal bench of general jurisdiction. She held the seat until her retirement in 1959 at the age of 75.
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