How many women are in prison for killing their abusers? The simple answer: We don't know. Every once in a while, there is a case in which the sense that there has been a miscarriage of justice is so overwhelming, so impossible to deny that the story manages to break through and capture the attention of the larger public. This happened with Cyntoia Brown, who was sentenced to life in prison for killing a man who had picked her up as a child sex-trafficking victim. It happened with Nikki Addimando, who shot her abusive partner after enduring years of physical and sexual abuse. These stories are often met with outrage on these women's behalf and, sometimes, petitions for clemency. What can easily go overlooked, however, is how so many similar cases unfold outside of the spotlight, through quiet plea deals in anonymous courtrooms. The questions around how the legal system handles — or, more typically, mishandles — cases like these have always been larger than the individual cases that garner attention. In an article published yesterday, the Times Opinion contributing writer Rachel Louise Snyder, who has written extensively about domestic violence, details the ambitious efforts of a group of Stanford researchers to study this problem. They've started by surveying all the women in California's state prisons who have been convicted of murder or manslaughter; their plan is to continue surveying the whole country. What they've found so far offers a disturbing new look into what one of them terms "the abuse-to-prison pipeline" — the ways in which being in abusive relationships often leads directly to women being convicted of violent crimes, including some that don't involve the deaths of their partners. Along the way, the essay also examines the history of self-defense laws: how the principles that govern when they do and don't apply have always been developed with men in mind, and why they're still failing women today. It's a thought-provoking read — one that's persuasive about the scale of the problem, as well as our capacity as a society to take steps to improve how our legal system handles these cases. I hope you'll give it a read. Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Thursday, September 5, 2024
Opinion Today: Who gets to kill in self-defense?
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