Good news for women killers

Jask

Sexist nonsense. Invert man/woman in the last paragraph.

Tiberius

I think, Mary, your conclusion amounts to profiling.

If we are to bring the concept into law, I can think of a much more obvious and useful area into which it should be introduced.

C Powell

This is the sort of nonsense we will get if Harriet Harpie becomes PM. A trial should be conducted on the evidence not on gender assumptions. All this does is bring the law, the idea of the rule of law, justice being blind, all those old-fashioned concepts into disrepute as the law is manipulated to fit with people's preconceived ideas about how the world should be not about how it is.

Anthony Kenny

Up to now I had always considered Mary Wakefield to be a reasonable and balanced person. Thank God she's not a feminist. What views would she hold if she were?

Tony Pandy

Never heard such sexist rubbish. Women not 'natural killers', so being an unnatural killer is OK then? Tosh, flim-flam and piffle.

J H Holloway

The trouble with this is that Harpie and her mates have now removed the existence of female infidelity and female psycho pressure (we all now how powerfully effective women's tongues can be and how they can chill a room with their moods) from law.

Even if these things happen and happen for years and even if adulterous behaviour can send a man demented, they no longer exist.

Another nail - if it were needed - in the Labour coffin.

These are the same people, note, that allow women to break court orders over child access without fear of punishment.

The result has been lots of miserable fatherless children and lots of childless 30-something women.

jacob

Utterly offensive garbage. The law should not have preset value judgements to reflect an irrational prejudice in favour of women.

Jock

Wife/women beaters are despicable and the law should be geared up to identify, convict and severely punish them - though not, I think, to the extent of capital punishment.

This proposed change is seriously misguided with a real risk of creating a slippery slope. Effectively, a victim of domestic abuse will be able to convict and premeditatedly execute her tormentor in cold blood.

Surely the proponents of creating this specific defence can see that, even in genuine cases of serious abuse, there will be an increased risk that some individuals will act out of fear to kill the abuser as an alternative to seeking help or as an act of first rather than last resort? And what about the risk that a killing for other reasons will be planned in advance with the intention of using this defence or using it to falsely attempt to justify the killing after the event ?

Judges have the power now to deal with these types of situation and there have been cases where they have done so Creating the new specific is not the way to tackle this problem. It is wrong to create this defence for the same reasons that it is right to end or dilute the defence of provocation.

I do not agree that this is good news for women. The answer to misogony is not misandry.

Doug

"I don't think women are natural killers." Oh, but men are? Misandrist rubbish.

My problem with it is that it may actually incite murder. I'm against murder even for toe-rag husbands who beat their wives. The problem is we will never know what the wife was thinking when she killed her abusive husband. She may kill instinctively out of self defence or she may plan to murder him knowing she will get lighter punishment.

And this will do nothing to reduce domestic violence because the abusive husbands don't care about the potential sentence of a wife who kills her husband. It's irrelevant to the abuser who is the problem that needs to be dealt with.

The real challenge is to teach women that they must go to the police and make a complaint. The police also have to be far more sympathetic, if possible they need to remove the husband from the home and if not there also has to be an expansion of secure hostel facilities so that abused wives and children can be removed from danger.

Chuck Unsworth

Harman has done women and justice an appalling disservice by this crass attempt to grab headlines. Up until recently we were all equal in the eyes of the law. Now we are all victims.

If this is the quality of thought and intellect we can expect from Harman then we should all take heed. Imagine La Harman in the position of Prime Minister. Is she remotely capable of leading this country out of the economic and social disaster of the past decade?

jsfl

I agree with Mary Wakefield - she is not a feminist - she is what has replaced feminists - sexist bigots.

Utterly ridiculous legislation. Murder is murder. No doubt there will be numerous unintended consequences of this legislation

When the first child kills a mother for killing that child's father. What then?

When the first abusive male explains that he killed his partner (rather than solely abusing her) because he feared retaliation. What then?

When that same man then claims self-defence because he could prove that she did intend to kill him. What then?

When a woman hires/ uses another person to kill her abusive partner. What then?

This will end up causing more trouble than it resolves and it is nothing more than poltically crass bigotry!

Bert

but not good news for women-killers.

Lee Jakeman

Crap.

bill

These suggested reforms are yet another illogical affront to English law. It is preferable for all to be equal before the law. But if the law is going to be particularist, then it is illogical and hypocritcal to say a special case should not be made of one group but should be made of another.

PS

My partner was a family lawyer. Some of the worst cases of abuse she came across (psychological and physical) were ones perpetrated by women against their children and male partners.

john miller

Dodgy headline...

At first I thought it was good news for people who killed women, but then...

Hereford

Bodicia, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Indira Ghandi, Golda Mayer, Lucretia Borgia, Cleopatra and many many more. History is littered with women who, when in postitions of strength and invulnerability have not flinched from killing or causing people to be killed.

The only difference is that men do not have the wit to be devious about it.

Also, how can the inversion of a previous prejudice help equality?

This article, as well as this law is claptrap. If we truly believed in equality we would just extend the old male orientated defence of provocation (or a modified version of it) to women.

Women must make up their minds. Either they want equality, with all the consequences that come with it, or they don't.

Verity

Wakefield writes, with breathtaking socialist myopia: "Reform is overdue -- there hasn't been any change in the law for 50 years .."

My God, we've had a law for 50 years without fiddling with it? What the hell is the matter with us! No wonder our laws of freedom of speech have been sliced, diced and julienned! They were ancient!!! Change was long overdue.

A fifty year old law is the blink of an eye in the history of a people, Ms Wakefield. There are absolutely no new circumstances obtaining that would demand the law be modified. We are still talking about men and women - a very ancient condition.

Dear God, will you people never STFU?

Matt, US

What a load of tosh. Do women never off their husbands to run away with someone else or for insurance money?

As for "fear of serious violence:" I've heard horror stories about the victim of burglaries in the UK being arrested for defending themselves, but I'd always thought those were aberrations. Surely it hasn't taken until now for killing in self-defence to become lawful in the Isles?

Not-Ambitious-beyond-my-capabilities Harperson

Doug - As a woman, agree. This way lies lunacy. Men and women seem to have found each other rather interesting for millennia - or perhaps hundreds of millennia. We deal with one another as best we can, to our mutual advantage and amusement.

Now women are to be handed a heavyweight advantage, through "law as defined by destructive socialists".

Why?

Why?

Why?

Ninety-nine percent of the men on the face of the earth provide for their children. They stick around. They like the family situation. It's only the slithering British and EUSSR socialists who want to control the intimate relationship of the family.

Why? For the good of families which have prospered all over the world for a million years? Or for the furthering of the socialist, One Worlder Agenda?

What the fascists refuse to admit is, woman already have an age old advantage. We don't need another one legislated by Jack Straw and Harriet Harperson up on their hindlegs.

Dear God! Give them a biccie!

Dizzy Dolly

I see what Mary means. I mean, take some of those Commandments:
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Honour thy father AND thy mother [my stress]....
I mean..like..no change FOREVER.

OF COURSE all that matters is to be in fashion (especially about gender studies), and to get down and dirty with our superiors: the cultural invaders - - -sex, drugs, trashing our own culture, and all.

But wait....didn't Tacitus indicate that was how the Romans first got the Brits to WANT to be Romans, and to love being ruled by their Empire and everything?

Nicholas

Political ideology made law is usually a bad idea but New Labour has been doing it relentlessly. Jack Straw's ridiculous Ministry of Injustice has accelerated New Labour's legislative proclivities. If the legislative and regulatory crusade to "protect" wimmin and children continues at this pace expect all adult male activities to be illegal by 2020 and adult males to be illegal soon afterwards.

Seriously though, this is just gesture politics. It is already possible for a person charged with murder to be convicted of the lesser offence of manslaughter. The thickos in Labour do not understand the need to prove mens rea - the guilty intent - for murder. It always required the offence element of "with malice aforethought" to be proven in order to convict. It is frightening that we have people tinkering with our long-established laws who do not even understand them to begin with.

There is a significant difference in a woman killing her husband in self-defence and one who plots to do so. And so there should be. The individual circumstances should be judged at law in a court - not by the statute book before the case is ever brought. New Labour seem to be trying to determine the outcome of the cases by the way they frame the laws. Dangerous stuff.

Labour are running out of control, far beyond their manifesto, and into extremes of radical, ideological barminess. Reds under the bed masquerading as government by tabloid.

Super Dad

I felt sick last night watching two women with equally nonsensical views battle this issue out on Channel 4 News. Men suffer domestic violence regularly. Plates thrown, hands hit with spoons, aggresive screaming arguements. This case once agains show that divorce, child custody and murder laws are incredibly pro-female.

Jennie

Women are not 'going to get away with murder'. The proposed new laws will apply equally to men and women.

A woman who kills her male partner because he was unfaithful or was a nag will no longer have the defence of provocation.

A man who kills his female partner because he was in fear of domestic violence in future will be charged with manslaughter, not murder.

seb

Harriet Halfabrain strikes again. Any responsible government would encourage wives and partners of abusive men to find somewhere safer to live [permanently]. Killing a man while he is asleep hardly seems, to a sane person, anything but murder.

authenticdasein

Holloway writes: "The trouble with this is that Harpie and her mates have now removed the existence of female infidelity and female psycho pressure (we all now how powerfully effective women's tongues can be and how they can chill a room with their moods) from law."
Hopefully, what has been removed from what you deem "law" is exactly *this* kind of biased profiling and prejudice. "We all know" - the type of sentence which removes the necessity for a trial, wouldn't you say? If we already know... For the sake of balance, you might have mentioned how the presence of a violent father and husband generates something slightly more sinister than a chill in the room.
The changes to the law do not remove female infidelity - and by the way, nor did the old law. Infidelity is not a crime. The change reflects the thinking that female infidelity is not provocation enough to warrant a *murder*. This is what you might want to think about. A woman has sexual intercourse with a man you don't approve of (he happens not to be you). So she forsakes her right to exist?! Can you really say, regardless of gender, that one human being has the right to kill another because the second had a sexual relationship with a third? This was *always* absurd.

authenticdasein

Jennie - exactly. A sane voice. Hurrah.

Roger Thornhill

These proposals contain elements of madness.

The Rule of Law includes equal treatment, and in this it fails. It allows neighbours to be excused, yet dismisses as "nagging" anything that a husband may endure. As others have mentioned, women go in for more psychological abuse - witness any school yard.

A man killing in a rage (e.g. discovering their wife in bed with another) is to be deemed more serious than a woman killing a man in cold blood. One is on the spur of the moment and the latter is planned. How can that be? It is a gold-diggers' charter.

I also see plans for lawyers to be able to act even if the victim does not wish to proceed, another outrageous concept and takes sovereignty away from the individual - which is just what Socialists want.

p.s. given the leadership moves and the pushing by Harman for the right to kill an abusive partner, I suggest Gordon Brown double locks his door and checks under the bed before turning in each night...

Talia

On a talk radio programme yesterday a woman called in to say she had suffered domestic violence for an extended period at the end of the 90s and if these proposals had then been law she would have “availed” herself of them. She truly meant she would have killed her husband. Scary but predictable.

Marian C

Mary, sorry, but I can't agree with your report. This law will most certainly be abused.

Murder is murder no matters who does the killing. If a woman kills her husband/partner or vice versa in self defence and this person has been abused physically, mentally, verbally etc over a period of time, then Judges will take all those things into account. We don't need a change in the law, this is nonsense

Verity

Not-Ambitious-beyond-my-capabilities Harperson - Well said that person!