Why I refuse to wear a white ribbon part 59.

So let’s go back to that quote again. to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. Let’s paraphrase it: to learn who rules over you, simply find out who is allowed to beat the shit out of you and still have you convicted of assault.

Many years ago I was training in my craft and as part of that I worked in that subsection of psychiatry that deals with the courts. As part of that, you need a working knowledge of the laws around insanity and fitness to plead. One of the cases that set a precedent in NZ was a trial for murder in which a woman drugged her husband, tied him to a bed, and burned him alive, then buried him.

She claimed that he was abusive, and that she had a form of Post Traumatic Stress commonly called Battered Women’s Syndrome. This was argued, using the insanity tests — which require that your mind is disturbed to the point that you have no understanding of the moral quality of the act or were unable to control it. Locally, the test is very high, and if you are found not guilty by reasons of insanity you must be detained within a psychiatric institution for at least the equivalent time that you would serve inside prison before parole. For a murder, that is around 12 years. [Now, this varies from place to place, but I work in NZ, so I’m talking about how we define the law]

So when I find that someone is arguing that this should occur all I think of is that I don’t want the work. I don’t want these people in the psychiatric system. We are stretched enough already dealing with those who are quite distressed — and we don’t have the units to house such.

The recommendations Sheehy put forth are quickly summarized as follows:

1. Battered women who kill their spouses should not be tried for murder.
2. They should not go to jail as they have already been “prisoners of war” in their own homes.
3. We should refine the definition of “excessive force” to allow women who kill sleeping men the ability to claim self defence.
4. Charging women, who have murdered men, with murder is “arbitrary”

Surprisingly, the Canadian public are not yet ready to tolerate a public academic and legal scholar advocating the murder of their sons, brothers, husbands, or male colleagues. Barbara Kay’s own rejection of Sheehy’s intellectually bankrupt ideology seems to have hit its mark, but actually gave the morally-depraved professor entirely too much credit.

Where Kay excused her with the comment that “[w]hen ideology takes up the brain space normally reserved for reason and the golden principle of equality under the law, the very best minds can go AWOL” Elizabeth Sheehy should not be coddled as one of “the very best minds”. Despite that misplaced generosity by Kay, she correctly points out that the existing “theory” called Battered Woman Syndrome, used to excuse murder and other violence by claimed abuse victims, is essentially a pile of shit.

In fact, “battered woman syndrome” (BWS) is merely a theory, with the “science” behind it too flimsy to support any change to the legal codes. (See David M. Paciocco’s 1999 book, Getting Away with Murder: the Canadian criminal justice system. Ironically, Paciocco was a colleague of Sheehy’s at Ottawa U’s law faculty.) Moreover, BWS has been rejected in other high courts, such as Australia’s, which used Canada as a (negative) precedent.

The University of Ottawa’s murder advocate replied “I wish I were the radical that columnist Barbara Kay claims I am in her column”.

Well, that was the case. The other defense that used to exist was provocation, but that was removed from the law after an economics tutor used that to excuse murdering a graduate student. She was getting a good job in the treasury. He could not get a permanent job in the University — in part because he was quite difficult to get along with. But it appears that they are coming back.

This case really hits home how little value is given to male victims of women’s violence, and indeed how little value is placed on men’s lives. It also highlights the sexist double standard in our justice system, in this case allowing a de facto partial defence of provocation in the case of a female murderer even though this defence was abolished for men several years ago.

The judge’s summing up instructed the jury that they “must use their knowledge of human nature to deliberate their verdict” and that “the jury must consider what Ms Scollay’s state of mind was like the night she stabbed her husband.” (Radio NZ news broadcast 13/02/2014).

No judge, the jury’s job was not to consider the impact of Ms Scollay’s ‘state of mind’ that night, only whether she deliberately committed her actions intending to kill. Going to the kitchen to fetch a large knife, bringing that to the victim’s bedroom, straddling the victim who is lying on the bed, rising up with her body over the victim and plunging that knife deep into his chest surely could never be anything other than murder. If her state of mind meant she could not be held fully responsible for the murder then this should have been assessed and established through psychiatric evidence, not by the jury. If the jury believed the murderer acted under ‘slow burn’ provocation then sorry, that should not have affected the verdict and the judge should have warned the jury to that effect. Instead, the judge’s instructions were clearly aimed at encouraging the jury to let this murderer off with the lesser charge.

This woman’s provocation defence was a variation of the fallacious ‘battered woman’s syndrome’ defence, in this case a ‘dissatisfied woman’s syndrome’. Her partner was unsatisfactory to her and was now inconvenient to her renewed affair with another man, so she killed him.

The judge’s transparent instructions may well provide a ground for an easy appeal by the Crown of this pussy pass verdict. However, appeals by the Crown it seems are reserved for males seen to have received lenience, never females.

So all that’s left is to await sentencing and to see how much of a pussy pass is awarded then too. In the meantime, read the following newspaper stories (1, 2) about the case and marvel at the constant sympathetic understanding shown towards the murderer, the excuses and minimization in describing this case. Consider how differently the stories would be written, and how different the outcome of the trial, if the genders had been reversed in this case.

This case sends a clear message to women throughout New Zealand: It’s ok to kill a man if he displeases you.

This is Scollay:

Well, reading the trial reports it becomes clear that Mr Scollay was not violent or aggressive. Instead he had addiction and anxiety problems. It was not that he was a brute, it was that the was a disappointment. He was inconvenient.

The couple’s only son, Louis Augustus Scollay, then 19, was woken by the scream of his mother Lucille who had just stabbed her husband as he lay sleeping. He heard her saying, “What have I done?” her murder trial heard.

The panicked teenager found his mother using a towel to try to stem the flow of blood gushing from Mr Scollay’s chest. He phoned 111 and helped his mother who was telling her husband not to die. But Mr Scollay was going very pale.

“He just got quieter and quieter,” his son told the court. “He was saying it was okay … he had accepted his fate.”

Louis Scollay was giving evidence on the opening day of his mother’s High Court trial in Christchurch. Lucille Scollay, 45, “simply broke”, defence counsel Rupert Glover argued.

She accepted her actions had fatal consequences but denied murdering Guy ‘Guido’ Scollay, 48, at the pair’s Edgeware Rd home in February last year. There were only two possible verdicts – guilty of murder or guilty of manslaughter, defence counsel Rupert Glover told the court.

“So what is really on trial is not the facts of the case but the state of mind of Mrs Scollay. It’s a very, very tragic case indeed.”

The court heard Scollay, a cleaner, stabbed her husband after becoming frustrated with his mental illness and worried he would never change. In the early hours of Sunday, February 10 last year, she returned home after a night out drinking with a man she had become close to, Greg Van Dyk.

Lulu, as Mr Van Dyk called her, had drunk eight or nine stubbies of beer and had been good company that night, he told the court. They parked outside and talked, at which point Scollay became emotional and upset as she talked about her husband.

“It all came gushing out,” Mr van Dyk told the court. “She was miserable … conflicted. She loved Guy but was unhappy with him.” Mr Van Dyk told her “not to do anything rash” but walking up the drive, she decided to kill her husband, the Crown argued.

Prosecutor Mark Zarifeh said Scollay took a large kitchen knife into the bedroom where her husband of 20 years was sleeping.

“She took her husband by his shoulder as he lay sleeping on his side, rolled him onto his back, got on top of him, straddling him as he was still half asleep, brought the knife up and stabbed him in the chest, a deep wound that penetrated his heart,” Mr Zarifeh told the jury of seven women and five men.

Louis was woken by her “almost scary” shrieking. He found his father lying “limply on his back with blood coming out”. Mrs Scollay was apologising to her husband and pleading with him to stay alive.

The court heard that Mr Scollay was an intelligent man, with an honours degree in history. But his mental health issues never allowed him to realise his potential. He was on anti-depressant medication, a methadone programme, suffered from anxiety attacks, and left the house rarely; only to go grocery shopping, to the chemist, or a local second-hand bookstore.

Watching her “obviously quite brilliant husband” deteriorate over 20 years resulted in “pressure building up … to a point where she simply broke”, Mr Glover said.
She denied meaning to murder him that night and had denied a single charge of murder.

Now, if this had been a man, then it would have been murder — which itself was a reduction: after the restoration killing your master or husband was petty treason, and attracted the same penalty. If there had been a question of her state of mind, there should have been the question of an insanity defence — except that intoxication is not a defense.

Now, I spend 20 odd hours a week working with those who have psychiatric illnesses. I do this in part because I’m fairly good at my job, and in part because the most courageous people I have ever had the privilege of knowing are mad. They are walking through a living hell every day. I would not want to experience what they experience. For some, it is the consequence of their lifestyle when younger (I will not go into my rant about how alcohol, methamphetamines or THC agonists can ruin your life). For some it is the consequences of being beaten and abused. For some it is that madness came when they were a teenager and it has never left.

But saying the deterioration is sufficient to turn murder to manslaughter? May it not be. May we not account the inconvenient or difficult as subhuman. I do not: for when I see the mad I see myself, but for the grace of God.

But the law will assume that you are guilty because penis. We need to acknowledge the research — which backs up observation: it is not only men who hit, but it is men who get charged. There are two solutions, the first is shunning.

Not being said here is one obvious thing. That’s that if ONCE an adult (or near-adult, say, 14+) ever ONCE commits unprovoked violence upon you or yours, you instantly put them out of your life, forever. Consider them dead to you. There are billions of people on this planet; why spend a second avoidably interacting with those who have nothing net to offer you?

The second is the destruction of the liberal democratic state, with the associated removal of all socialists (feminist subset included) from any position of responsibility. That will take either a revival or a revolution.

If I was you, I’d pray for a revival.