9781422284018

Many people believe that women are less threatening andmore restrained than men, a belief that makes the physical attacks they commit seem more shocking. When Lorena Bobbit cut off her sleeping husband’s penis, she was taking her revenge for his marital infidelity . Inadvertently, the American housewife was also making herself notorious as the woman who acted out every male’s nightmare; and she was sending out a general warning that women can be vicious, too. Women kill far less often than men and represent only 1.5 percent of the prisoners on Death Row in the United States. Unlike men, women rarely have sexual or financial motives for murder. And there are no known cases of a woman abusing and killing a child unless a man was involved, too. So could Rudyard Kipling, the Victorian writer, possibly have got it right in that much-quoted line, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male”? Certainly, the courts everywhere have often behaved as if it is true. For example, in the U.K. in the 1980s, it emerged that when men and women were convicted of equally serious crimes of violence, the women were generally given longer sentences, partly because of the perception that violence by a woman was worse. However, there was also a legal problem for women defendants arising from the fact that men and women commit violent crimes in different ways. Discrimination in the Legal System Aman who lashed out at his nagging wife on the spur of the moment and killed her was unlikely to be convicted of murder. He could plead provocation as a defense, meaning he had suffered a momentary lapse of reason and had acted irrationally for a terrible second. Yet for a woman who had endured physical cruelty for years, and eventually killed her abuser while he was asleep or drunk, the provocation defense would rarely succeed because her act was deemed premeditated . The simple fact that a woman is too weak to kill a man with her hands and has to fetch a weapon has been used to prove premeditation. After much debate and a fewwell-publicized cases—including that of Sara Thornton, given a lengthy prison sentence when she killed after years of abuse—it is increasingly accepted that legal systems discriminate against women charged with murdering men. This change of attitude has led to a bid to overturn the murder conviction of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the U.K. A London prostitute and nightclub manager, she was 28 when she was hanged on July 13, 1955, for killing her racing-driver lover, David Blakely. He had left her, but she traced him to the Magdala public house in London and, as he walked out into the street one April afternoon that year, she shot him dead with a Smith and Wesson. They had been together for several turbulent years. In 1953, she had had an abortion and he

13

A Woman Scorned