Justice minister, Maria Eagle has announced changes to laws around murder. One of these reforms means that men can’t argue provocation as a defence when accused of killing their wives. About bloody time!
The sexist double standards and misogyny inherent within the criminal justice system has allowed men to get away with murder and women like Kiranjit Ahluwalia, Sara Thornton and Emma Humphreys were sentenced to life having experienced ongoing systematic violence.
I was involved in the campaigns to release these women, part of that was to highlight the sexist double standards prevalent in the treatment of women over domestic violence. Organisations like Southall Black Sisters led these campaigns, as Cath Elliott says in her article, along with Women’s Aid.
Domestic violence generally, and not just where there is a death, still destroys womens’ lives on a vast scale. In a time of punative rhetoric about law and order and out of control teenagers a form of violence that dwarfs gangsterism gets hardly anyone hot under the collar: indeed it is probably a safe bet that most of the hang’em and flog’em brigade will come over all sympathic to the rights of the indivdual man in the dock when it comes to talking about these proposals.
July 28, 2008 at 8:00 am |
Both sexes should be treated the same, I’ve seen both who needed locking up.
This idea that women are less able to fight then a man, well thats rubbish.
Murder should be murder and the sex should not be brought into it.
July 28, 2008 at 8:52 am |
My brother once told me he could understand men who killed their wives because women nag so much. He’s a nice guy in general, and he’d just ended a bad relationship, but it’s still kind of worrying. Also worrying is that I think he was trying to impress me with his cold logic and common sense.
July 28, 2008 at 9:37 am |
Tendentious tosh, of course, so I’m not sorry to introduce some hard facts. Thus, when you claim that:
“The sexist double standards and misogyny inherent within the criminal justice system has allowed men to get away with murder ”
the fact is:
“The Home Office have published (see Law Society Gazette 13 November 1991) the results of research, showing more than 50% of the women found guilty of killing their husbands or lovers get their charges reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of provocation compared with only 30% of men”.
It is also important to stress that this woman did not win her appeal on the basis of ‘provocation’ but on the (doubtful?) grounds that new ‘evidence’ had come to light on her mental condition at the time:
“The case raises important questions about provocation; at the re-trial the judge said her new plea was accepted on the strength of fresh evidence of Ahluwalia’s mental health, not on the grounds of provocation.”
Claiming ‘provocation’ is never easy:
“The definition of provocation is narrow, Lord Goddard said in R v Duffy (note) [1949] 1 All E.R. 932, that it was an act or words “…which would cause in any reasonable person and actually causes in the accused, a sudden and temporary loss of self control, rendering the accused so subject to passion as to make him for the moment not master of his mind.” What is vital is the interval between the provocative conduct and the defendant’s reaction, the length of time might wholly undermine the defence.”
In this case she had already purchased a can of petrol; she went to bed at midnight and brooded until 2.30 when she went downstairs to the garage and filled a bucket with petrol, because that would make it easier to throw, and then went upstairs and set her husband on fire. Her three year-old son was in the house at the time!
My first question is, did she have an alternative? Well, of course she did; in modern Britain there are all sorts of people offering shelters for battered women, including, of course, our very own Southall Black Sisters! But instead, with cold and calculating intent she took the life of a man in one fo the cruellest ways possible – it took him six days to die! He wasn’t much of a man but if we are to be permitted to go around killing anyone who doesn’t amount to much – I may be the last man standing!
All my quotes from:
http://www.rjerrard.co.uk/law/articles/ahluwali.htm
July 28, 2008 at 2:45 pm |
I agree that the defence used is spurious in the extreme and should be abandoned. The answer to a nagging partner is to dissolve the relationship, not kill or abuse the partner. I find it interesting how there appears to be the view that
it is oh-so-easy to leave a violent and controlling partner to move to a DV shelter (always full and under great pressure) – if your partner then decides to follow you around the country from one shelter to another, that’s just bad luck, I guess….
Trying to equate nagging and the violence carried out by men against women is unacceptable.
The difficulty with gaining any conviction in DV cases is the British legal system, which I think is not suited for cases where there is likely to be no witness, given the importance laid on the evidence provided by external witnesses.
The problem with claims that women do better out of the current system is the fact that the vast majority of DV is carried out by men against women has to be the starting point. Any police officer working in the field will confirm that. Doesn’t mean that there are no male victims or DV in same sex partnerships, but the majority are to do with male violence against women, and there is no other example of so few cases ever leading to convictions.
About time men stopped making excuses. One of those is to try and place all the attention on the very small number of examples of women instigating violence and a minimalisation of male violence – it is a disgrace that shelters need to exist at all. It is equally reprehensible that the appalling figures with regard to DV are considered acceptable – imagine if those figures were the same for all areas of crime?
July 28, 2008 at 3:12 pm |
“The difficulty with gaining any conviction in DV cases is the British legal system, which I think is not suited for cases where there is likely to be no witness, given the importance laid on the evidence provided by external witnesses.”
‘It ain’t neccesarilly so’! For example, in this particular case the woman’s GP confirmed injuries consistent with violence.
“The problem with claims that women do better out of the current system is the fact that the vast majority of DV is carried out by men against women …”
You are confusing what I wrote which was that 50% of *all* the women acused of murdering their husbands succeed in copping a plea to manslaughter, as opposed to only 30% of *all* men accused of murdering their wives. If the law has a bias, as supposed by our hostess, it appears to be in favour of women for this particular offence.
“if your partner then decides to follow you around the country from one shelter to another, that’s just bad luck, I guess….”
Possibly but you seem to be suggesting that rather than accept the bad luck she should ‘off’ him!
July 28, 2008 at 3:14 pm |
Or even ‘necessarily’ – well, it is stinking hot and muggy and I did have a glas of wine with my lunch …
July 28, 2008 at 4:22 pm |
No, I suggest that we should make sure we take DV seriously enough to stop him harassing her in this way. This is basically the problem – that the key issue , which is men beating up women, is not taken seriously and is marginalised.
I’m not convinced that the current court systems fit this type of case. Actually, I don’t rate common law and adversarial court procedures at all….but thats another story.
July 28, 2008 at 11:44 pm |
The main reason, a few years ago when I was a bit involved with such things, for the low number of domestic violence convictions was that it was not realistic for a woman to give evidence against her abuser: sometimes there were financial or housing issues sometimes she was palin terrified of revenge. I also got the sense that lots of people in the criminal justice system regarding domestic violence as something that just happened and that you did not really need to do anything about it.
The other thing I learnt from the work I did was that juries were not fools. They can see through BS defences. This might well be the reason for a lower success rate for male defendants using provocation defences: the juries see right through them.
David Duff treats the point flippantly but women victims of domestic violence are terrified into silence. And some men do stalk their ex-partners. It is a real fear and it is something that society still does not treat seriously.
July 29, 2008 at 9:44 am |
Zenobia: I can totally understand what you say and why you felt his comments worrying.
Btw: totally off-topic but is your blog still functioning..?
August 6, 2008 at 6:47 am |
[...] Harpymarx welcomes the news of a legal reform in the UK that will disallow the “but she was a bitch!” defense for men who have murdered their wives. [...]