Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [274]
In State v. Lynch, a Louisiana case (1983), the defendant, Sheral Lynch, was nineteen; she had been living for three years with Jimmy Dyess, a big, strong logger in his forties. He once beat Sheral “with a bat to the point where she was unable to walk for a couple of weeks.” Another time, he knocked out one of her teeth. One night in 1977, he hit her and threatened her—and she shot him to death. A jury convicted her of manslaughter, but the appeals court was willing to stretch the conventional meaning of self-defense and set her free.50 In another highly publicized case, two men beat and assaulted Inez Garcia sexually. They threatened to come back and do it again. She got a shotgun, and several hours later, she went looking for the men, and killed one of them. There were two trials; in the end she was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. 51
In fact, some form of self-defense underlies many—perhaps most—of the cases where a wife kills her husband. One study, conducted in the seventies, claimed that 40 percent of the women doing time for murder or manslaughter had killed abusive husbands or lovers. A survey of women in a California prison, published in 1978, found that twenty-nine out of thirty women who killed a mate had been abused.52 The new consciousness of the eighties brought about a definite change: Angela Browne interviewed forty-two women charged with the death or serious injury of their male partners. One case was dropped; when the rest went to trial, nine were acquitted and twelve received probation or a suspended sentence; twenty did time, ranging from six months to fifty years.53 These results were probably much more lenient than they would have been ten, twenty, or a hundred years before.
The Law of Rape
Here is another branch of law where change—reform—can be laid explicitly at the doorstep of a revived and militant women’s movement. Rape, of course, had always been a crime, and a serious one; but the definition of rape, and the enforcement of the laws, had been warped by the interests of men, not women, consciously or unconsciously. There was no dialogue over rape, between men and women; nice women did not talk about such things, and women who were not nice were more or less outside the pale.
As Susan Estrich has put it, rape is a crime “which is defined more by the actions, reactions, motives and inadequacies of the victim than by those of the defendant.” The rules themselves were unsettling. As Estrich observes,
We do not require people to resist a mugger, even if the mugger was once a friend. We do not insist on witnesses to robbery. We rarely question the virtue of the robbed store clerk or even the defrauded company owner. We do not downgrade larceny if the victim wore an expensive suit or walked on a dangerous street, or even if he contributed to panhandlers in the past.
But victims of rape, to the contrary, historically had been asked to “prove their virtue,” and the law imposed on them “obligations of actual resistance.”54
Nothing in the formal law said it was all right to force sex on a woman who was divorced, or sexually experienced, or not-so-nice, or who drank and was chummy with men in bars; but the law in practice was another thing (see chapter 10). Kalven and Zeisel, in their jury study (published in 1966), found that jurors tended to convict only in cases of “aggravated rape,” that is, cases of gang-rape, or where there was “evidence of extrinsic violence,” or where defendant and victim were complete strangers. Anything else was “simple rape,” and the jury had a habit of letting