“After all, the poor kids lost their father”
Sep 11, 2007 Lex scripta, O Mores!
In the courts there is no limit to chutzpah:
The woman who killed her minister husband with a shotgun is seeking custody of her three daughters, or at least frequent visits.
A petition filed in Carroll County Chancery Court argues that Mary Winkler’s continued separation from the girls — ages 2, 8 and 10 — is “unconscionable and detrimental” to the children.
Trudy Schuett, where are you?
September 11th, 2007 at 11:44 am
I posted this at Gather the other day.
But for the benefit of your readers, I’ll re-post it here in its entirety.
“kid glove” Treatment for Violent Women
In recent news is another story about Mary Winkler, the Tennessee woman who killed her husband last year. Convicted of voluntary manslaughter, she served a 67-day sentence in a mental health facility. Her children have been living with her husband’s parents since her arrest last year, and now she seeks to get them back, though the Tennessee Supreme court has declined to intervene in this case.
Glenn Sacks, columnist and men’s rights advocate, pulled no punches in his reaction. On his blog he says, “What’s really amazing is the way Winkler sees herself as the victim of her murdered husband’s parents. Her court pleading reads “The three minor children continue to be withheld from their mother without just cause.” “Without just cause?” How about the fact that she shot the children’s father in the back and let him slowly bleed to death for 20 minutes? If that’s not “just cause” for withholding a child from a parent, what could ever be?”
Wendy McElroy of iFeminists was no less direct. She said, “The woman is a cold blooded killer and the kid gloves with which the ‘system’ is handling her is a travesty.”
While the Winkler case may be the best-known of recent murders of men by their wives or live-in girlfriends, there isn’t much about her handling that is unusual. For example, in 2004 in Maine, Amy Dugas stabbed her husband to death one night, and assaulted the police officer who arrested her. In her 2005 trial, she was found not guilty of killing her husband, but was given probation in the assault of the police officer. This despite the fact she had other charges pending against her, and a long-standing record of abusing other adult family members as well as her husband. She was allowed to both change her name and relocate to another state.
I live in a state that validated premeditated murder as a solution for domestic violence. Back in April of 2001, Arizona Governor Jane Hull commuted the sentence of convicted murderer Carol Harriman. She’d been tried and found guilty by a jury of her peers in this case, where the accused was known to have gone to bars and other places in her hometown of Camp Verde and the surrounding area soliciting someone to kill her husband for her. When she failed in this effort, she took on the job herself.
On August 11, 2006 in Yuma AZ, Margo Moore bludgeoned her live-in boyfriend to death with an unknown blunt object as he slept. Whereupon she proceeded to go out and walk her dog. When Bill Kirkham’s body was discovered 12 hours later by a driver for a medical facility where Bill had an appointment that day, Margo was on the phone arguing with her ex-husband. Bill and Margo had been drinking the night before, and she claimed she thought Bill had just passed out – a rather odd conclusion, considering the room was spattered with blood.
Like Mary Winkler, Margo Moore seemed to think her life should go on much as it had before the murder. In fact, at a mitigation hearing I attended prior to sentencing, she asked for the judge’s mercy on the grounds she now considered herself a widow.
Margo was sentenced to three years in jail, and three years supervised probation on an unrelated drug charge, possibly the toughest sentence given a female murderer of an intimate partner in recent memory. Yet her own son was glad of the outcome, because he believed jail is the best place for this woman with a long history of violent behavior.
For the last thirteen years, judges and law enforcement officials alike in this country are “trained” (one might say indoctrinated) by state coalitions on domestic violence, which are authorized and funded by the Federal government under the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. Unfortunately for the cause of justice, these state coalitions and VAWA itself are based on radical feminist theories of intimate partner abuse which have little basis in fact or logic.
There is a movement toward allowing women to take the law into their own hands, serve as judge, jury, and executioner in what are drawn as “extreme” cases of domestic violence. This may seem like a compassionate kind of reaction from society, but once you look deeper into this, perhaps you may feel otherwise.
Amy Dugas, allowed to move to another state, has subsequently been arrested in further charges of domestic violence no fewer than three times, against separate male victims. The Kirkham family is concerned that three years in jail may not be enough to have any effect on Margo’s lifetime of abusing others, and wonder about their own safety once the jail sentence is over.
In these cases, it has begun to appear that both prosecution and defense cooperate in blaming male victims for their own deaths, and encourage accused women in their “battered woman” defense strategies. It is almost as if, having already decided that the man deserved to die on principle, these trials are for the purpose of demonstrating only the extent of the man’s real and imagined faults, ignoring the fact that since he is dead, the victim is unable to defend himself.
Accused women are rarely, if ever, asked if they sought any kind of help for their problem, once a claim of abuse has been made. With over 2000 facilities for abused women across the country, no woman who wants to seek aid should be unable to find it. Yet with laws in place defining all domestic violence as a crime by a man against a woman, there is quite literally no help for violent women who wish to stop abusing their families.
VAWA – and the nearly 700 state and municipal laws it spawned – are often touted as laws “protecting” women from domestic violence. With an increase of women murdering their partners (this is the only form of domestic violence that has not declined) it’s coming clear that creating a rigid, unrealistic public policy on a complex problem is having serious unintended consequences.
How does a policy that encourages a group of people to kill protect anyone?
Trudy W. Schuett has been online since 1995, and writes fiction and non-fiction in a variety of genres and subjects. She is also an entrant in Gather’s First Chapter Romance competition.