The Only Time You’ll See A Favourable Attitude To US ‘Stand Your Ground’ Gun Laws In CiF…

Sadhbh Walshe on the awful US justice system that criminalises women that murder their husbands and boyfriends:

A few years ago, a young woman named Natasha shot and killed her boyfriend in the apartment they were sharing.

Note that ‘sharing’. It’ll be important later.

He had trapped her in the bedroom and was about to launch into another of what had become weekly "beatdowns", where he would hit her with a closed fist. Prior to the killing, the beatings had become more severe and more frequent, as were the threats that he was going to kill her. None of this seemed to count for much at her trial.

Well, no.

Because no doubt the jury were asking themselves the question that the DV campaigners would love to see them forbidden to ask…

She was given a 15-year sentence and is now in prison, along with countless other battered women (pdf) who found little protection from the criminal justice system when they needed it, but who felt the full force of its prosecutorial might when they took steps to protect themselves.

Except, if she’d fled the home, gone to a motel, shot and killed him when he followed her there, she probably wouldn’t be facing charges, would she?

Every state in America has a self-defense law that allows an individual to use deadly force in situations where a threat to his or her well-being is imminent. If an intruder enters your home with a loaded gun, thereby posing an imminent threat to your life, you're allowed to use deadly force to protect yourself.

Well, yes. It doesn’t work that way if you yourself voluntarily entered that home for good reason. It’d be a recipe for murder.

God knows, as Hogday points out, it's difficult enough to write laws that allow for self-defence while precluding the possibility of deliberate murder masquerading as such. Are you really suggesting more tinkering?

When the intruder with the loaded gun (metaphorical or otherwise) is your intimate partner and living in the house with you, the imminence law frequently fails to apply – mostly because of the perception that the abused woman could have, or at least should have, found a more palatable way of ending the violent relationship.

Well, yes. They should. Who the hell could suggest otherwise?

Only in the pages of the ‘Guardian’, defender of every criminal going and sympathiser of terrorists, could you expect gun-law ‘justice’ to be cheered on, simply because it’s an abused woman wielding the weapon…

Like many abused women, Natasha had made several attempts to escape the relationship, only to be brought back [by the boyfriend] to face harsher beatings and more death threats.

‘Brought back’ how? Physically? That’s kidnap.

The presumption is that a woman who is in a violent relationship, and whose life has been threatened, should simply walk away. In theory, it sounds like a piece of cake: just leave when he's asleep, or at work, or whatever.

Reality is a lot more complicated.

Well, not really. Your own example did it several times! She just couldn’t seem to make it stick.

Much like my mother’s claims that it’s ‘impossible to give up smoking’ which usually draws the retort ‘It can’t be that impossible, you’ve done it so many times!’.

Michael Dowd, a New York attorney dubbed the "black widow lawyer" for having successfully defended a number of women who killed their abusive partners, likens a battered woman's predicament to a hostage situation.

Really? That’s rather an insult to real hostages, isn’t it? Some of them might be guilty of naivety and carelessness, but none of them chose their fate, or refused to come with the rescuers when they turned up…

Dowd most recently defended a woman called Barbara Sheehan, who shot her abusive husband with his gun. Sheehan's case perfectly illustrates the hostage situation. Her husband, who had subjected her to savage beatings during their 20-year marriage, was a police officer, so the option of turning to the police for help was not available to her.

Did she try..? We aren’t told.

Sheehan was acquitted of the murder but sentenced to five years in prison for unlawful possession of a firearm (the same firearm her husband had so often threatened to kill her and their children with). In a more just society, she would have been compensated for the 20 years of abuse she suffered at the hands of a husband whose job it was to uphold and enforce the law.

And just who should ‘compensate’ her? The police, who may have never been informed, and could hardly have therefore been responsible? The state, who, well, ditto?

Is there to be no personal responsibility from these women, at all? Are we to treat them as children, incapable of making decisions? I thought the women’s movement was against that sort of thing…

But, like Natasha's case, and so many other women's, Sheehan's story illustrates that even now, in 2012, our criminal justice system is much better-equipped, and much more likely, to prosecute and punish abused women than it is to protect them.

No, love. It’s much more likely to prosecute and punish murderers. Male AND female.

And that’s what your example is – a murderer.