Jailing Women Who Choose to Live
By Matthew Behrens
Anyone
wandering into Ottawa’s Courtroom 30 this week might be taken aback seeing the
slight, 26-year-old Ashley White standing before a judge who could sentence her
to 14 years in prison. Last year, White was declared
guilty of aggravated assault (and acquitted of attempted murder) for stabbing
her abusive former boyfriend after he beat her so severely that she required
facial reconstruction surgery.
The man who
put White under the surgeon’s knife, Patrick Halcro, was mysteriously never
charged with the assault, even though he admitted in court that in fits of rage
and jealousy, he punched her, claiming, “I used proportional force. I felt
threatened.”
White
suffered a shattered nose and cheekbone in addition to post-concussion syndrome
and a diagnosis of PTSD. As one press report noted, “Medical evidence suggested
her head trauma and the shock of seeing her face bathed in blood could have
placed her in a state where she wouldn't have known what she was doing when she
stabbed Halcro. As for Halcro, the knife blade nicked his lung but a trauma
surgeon said the injury was relatively minor.” The Citizen
reported that White was punched to the floor
after telling Halcro to leave her apartment, and she testified that “I
ended up on my back and he was standing above me with his legs either side of
my body…He said, ‘I’m trained to kill and will kill you’ or words to that
effect…I thought I was going to die.”
Four
years after the original beating, White remains bound by restrictive bail, trying
to pay down a six-figure legal bill with lengthy shifts at an east end sports
bar. Her current conundrum raises serious questions about a legal system that
still fails to heed the brutal context reported last year by the World Health
Organization, which concluded that more than a third of all women worldwide
will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, a phenomenon it
declared “a global health problem of epidemic proportions.”
Why
is Halcro walking the streets freely while White nervously ponders a
penitentiary term? Will the sentencing judge consider the fact that in choosing to
live, White thankfully refused to end up as part of the annual “femicide”
report issued by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses, a grim
reminder of women’s lives snuffed out by men?
Indeed, why
do we continue to react with shock and judgment when – in a country where the
almost 600 women’s shelters are constantly filled to capacity and women’s
services are the first to go on the chopping block – some women feel they have
no choice but to use force to defend themselves against abusive men in their
lives?
That
question is soundly addressed by the University of Ottawa’s Elizabeth Sheehy,
whose recent Defending Battered Women on
Trial brilliantly examines the complexities of key court cases affirming
women’s right to self-defense against abusers. Yet when the book was released
last fall, it stirred controversy:
rather than feeling rage about the shockingly high levels of global violence
against women, some wondered why women were being reminded that legal
precedents existed to protect them if they dared to take the actions necessary
to live?
It’s
a question that’s also haunted Marissa Alexander, now facing a possible 60-year
sentence for choosing to live. Alexander, an African-American mother of three in Florida, did not
kill her abusive ex-partner when he physically attacked her and threatened her
with death only nine days after she gave birth. Instead, she fired a warning
shot into the ceiling to scare him off, and as a result was sentenced to 20
years behind bars.
During her trial, Alexander recounted numerous incidents of severe physical
abuse she suffered including choking, attempted strangulation, and other
incidents that required hospitalization. Her abusive ex-husband admitted
in a sworn affidavit, “I honestly think [Marissa] just didn’t want me to put my
hands on her anymore, so she did what she feel like she have to do to make sure
she wouldn’t get hurt, you know. …The gun was never actually pointed at me.”
While
an appeals court rejected her contention that she should have been granted “Stand
Your Ground” immunity from prosecution (under which an individual can use
deadly force if “he or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to
prevent imminent death or great bodily harm”), it did confirm, in granting her
a new trial, that Alexander “was charged with aggravated assault but – under
any possible review of the evidence – inflicted no injury.”
Alexander
is now under house arrest, while the man who threatened to take her life walks
free and the chief prosecutor is now seeking 60 years in prison if Alexander is
convicted a second time.
Ashley
White and Marissa Alexander, staring down the full force of the state, force us
to seriously consider a final question: why do we deny what Sheehy calls “the
stark choices that women face when men will not let them go” and subsequently
try to jail women who choose to live?
Matthew Behrens is a writer and community
organizer in Perth, Ontario.