The Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project conducted a study of homicide convictions in Oakland County from 1986 to 1988, concluding that “Overall, a white female defendant with no criminal history who was convicted by a jury of killing a white person could expect an average sentence of 10 to 30 years. However, if the woman was a victim of domestic violence, her predicted sentence increased to life.” That’s blaming the victim with a vengeance.

It really isn’t ‘blaming the victim’, it has to do with the fact that the individual states set the laws for what is or is not justifiable self-defense. Many states simply consider any killing of another unless under direct threat to be murder, unless you are a soldier, prison guard, or police officer (in which case there are some exceptions). Thus killing an abusive spouse in him/her sleep is automatically murder in those states.

The length of sentence also has to do with the charge. Killing an abusive spouse by stealth (as sometimes happens in battered woman cases) normally requires planning and is thus charged criminally as Murder in the 2nd Degree at least. Some instances, like the famous ‘burning bed’ case, would actually qualify as 1st Degree Murder under the law in Illinois (but not New York, which would call it Murder 2 under its current laws). By contrast, a female involved in drug dealing who shot someone in response to an argument or fight might well only be charged with manslaughter, or at least plead down to it. Prosecutors, however, are often unwilling to make plea deals with those accused of premeditated homicide, as in their eyes this is the worst of crimes that they are assigned to prosecute.