Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️@sappholives83
One of the biggest perpetual miscarriages of justice is that women who murder an abusive partner spend more time in prison on average than abusive men do for beating their female partners to death.
This is largely due to the fact that these women must kill deliberately, in order to overcome their disadvantage in strength and speed, while the men under discussion are seen as having lost their temper or “accidentally” gone too far. The law sees the former as premeditated, first degree murder, while a man who beats his wife to death or strangles her after years of abuse is often charged with nothing more than manslaughter.
Obviously this is madness, yet in spite of five decades’ worth of efforts to change the way these women are seen in court, women are still being overly punished for killing abusers, with very little weight given in sentencing to their experiences with abuse.
Until relatively recently, abuse couldn’t be presented as a mitigating factor in a homicide case at all. They could blame Twinkies and video games, but a woman who’s had five broken ribs, two broken arms, a fractured wrist, multiple concussions and lacerations, and been choked unconscious on numerous occasions couldn’t cite her experiences as a reason why she felt she had to kill the man who was doing it.
