Crimes of Passion

[Mike]

The idea of crimes of passion or temporary insanity have always been around and are a thing I just sort of take for granted as part of our legal system. I've never questioned it much, but my son just had the following discussion with me:

Random fact you might find interesting that I'd learned studying criminal justice. If someone murders a spouse or spouse's lover after catching them cheating, in most states it would likely be classified as manslaughter classified under a "crime of passion" or "temporary insanity."

Personally... if you have the capacity for murdering someone when enraged or hurt, I think you need a bigger punishment and professional help. Not even just temporary insanity.

People who would claim "love can make you do crazy things" can shove it. Someone's dead. Haha! But that's my own take. Murder should never be an "understandable result" to a personal shock or offense. Only self defense.

If even my closest loved ones had an incident in which one cheated and the other got killed, my reaction wouldn't be "oh you poor thing." It would be "what the hell is wrong with you, you psycho?"

If something can make you that angry, there's something else going on.

Yeah. He's right. Why do we still accept "I was really really angry in the moment" as a reason to mitigate or effectively eliminate serious punishment in some cases?

I mean, I know why. But that doesn't make it right.

[bralbovsky]

My cynical hot take on it is that the system accepting that explanation is subtly supporting the status quo. It's another example of privilege and defense of the hierarchy. It's mostly men that get away with this excuse.

Women who kill their husbands in parallel circumstances, or even in self defense, rarely get this pass.

[Mike]

Exactly, I assume that if I had the stats it front of me, I'd see that being white, male, and not poor are all factors that make it far more likely for this defense to be accepted.

[Phoebe]

Relevant tangent:
Michelle Branch's shitty husband cheated on her and she allegedly slapped him when she found out, then apparently admitted this, and was then arrested for assault. I don't condone serious violence but I feel like he got off easy, if only because you have to consider the likely physical violation of having sex you wouldn't have consented to if you knew you were exposed to other partners in the chain. I think that's way worse than a slap, honestly. I'd MUCH rather be slapped that have to wonder whose STIs I just won.

[Kyle]

The very term "crime of passion" is rooted in sexism. It refers to a man walking in on another man having sex with his wife, losing it, and murdering one or both. The effect being that women are objects to be possessed and it's understandable if another person has adulterated your property. I'd never really thought of this. Interesting.

[Phoebe]

Women are ruled by emotion and insufficient reason, on this view, so they're always prone to hysteria and need to be regulated, and largely for such inherent reasons they ain't loyal. Men are self-regulating rational animals and normally this renders them fully responsible for their actions, but when you're dealing with the passions roused by the challenge of regulating the unregulated disloyalty of these female Bacchants, we all understand why that's no longer under your control, at least briefly. The same is true if someone insults your mother, in kind of the opposite direction but along the same line of track. But your mom isn't your property - it's just that you're responsible for her defense.

A lot of k-drama romances offer a light and friendly version of this problem, in which the woman is pure but child-minded and irrational and thus subject to the risks of predatory males because she doesn't have any sense. The boyfriend thus may need to get violent from time to time to protect his property, not only because it's his property but because the nature of the property is such that it has a built-in tendency to wander mindlessly away into risky situations. It is thus very romantic for a man to suddenly tell a woman never to go anywhere alone again, or to call him whenever she needs to e.g. walk to work down a normal street.

This all sounds really bad but when you think about how often, in this kind of patriarchal setup, women really are being raped or harassed as opposed to consensually cheating, it makes a kind of twisted sense. The motives and intentions of the woman can be sorted out later unless the assailant is non-white, in which case it is automatically assumed he's an assailant. There were so many lynchings just like this, except maybe the guy merely glanced at the woman, or didn't glance at all, or was falsely accused of something so that a dalliance with a boyfriend could be hidden (this is true story behind more than one 1910s and 1920s public lynching).