Do women look guiltier than men?

Although it is undoubtedly congenial to feminists to believe that a woman was badly treated because she was a woman, I don't think it is established  that such bias was the problem in this case.  What IS clearly established as a cause of the miscarriage of justice that occurred in this case is the disgraceful withholding of evidence by the prosecution.  I note that the accusations of bias against women come from "Mother Jones", a far-Left publication sympathetic to feminism

WHEN Kristine Bunch woke up on the sofa in the early hours of June 30, 1995, a fire was raging through her house, and her three-year-old son, Anthony, was screaming for her from the bedroom.

She couldn’t reach him through the flames, so she ran outside and tried to break the window with a tricycle. The next minute, the room was engulfed in fire, and Anthony was dead.

It’s a mother’s worst nightmare, but things were about to get far worse for Kristine.

Investigators concluded that the fire had been arson, and the 21-year-old mother had killed her only child.

Kristine, by then 22 and pregnant again, was sentenced by an Indiana court to concurrent prison terms of 60 years for murder and 50 years for arson. And that might have been the end of her story, had her case not come to the attention of the Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC).

They found that, contrary to the trial testimony of an analyst from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, no petroleum had been found in the bedroom. Kerosene had only been found in the living room, where the family had used a refillable heater. The documents proving that fact had been withheld from her defence lawyers.

On August 8, 2012, Kristine was released from jail, 17 years after her conviction, and eight days before Christmas, the prosecution dropped all charges against her.

Her exoneration was partly due to the discovery of the new evidence, and partly down to advancements in fire science, but the lawyers who worked on her case say her greatest crime was being a woman.

Of the 1635 names on the National Registry of Exonerations, only 148 are female. That’s not just because women commit fewer serious crimes.

Eleven per cent of people convicted of violent crimes are women, yet they make up just 6 per cent of those exonerated, non-profit news outlet Mother Jones reported.

Lawyers at the CWC had represented just four women, and they were struck by the similarities between their cases. They decided to set up Northwestern Law’s Women’s Project, focused exclusively on freeing innocent women, discovering a number of reasons why proving a woman’s innocence can be far harder than proving that of a man.

All of the women CWC had represented were single mothers charged with murdering their children and none had any apparent motive to kill her child. Yet one had falsely confessed under duress, and the others had made statements that police and prosecutors misconstrued as incriminating.

In Kristine’s case, she made contradictory statements about her nightgown being on fire, whether she saw smoke and the precise height and location of the flames, Indianapolis Monthly reported.

“I was in shock,” she said after her release. “So it’s really hard to articulate what I felt, where I was. I think everybody feels kind of like you’re in a dream and you just can’t believe it’s happening, until you wake up and realise, it’s happened.”

Like Kristine, more than half of exonerated women have been convicted of harming or killing a loved one. They are often dealing with deep personal losses, which makes them very vulnerable to high-pressure interrogation tactics that can lead to damning statements or false confessions.

Their apparent crimes against family members also make them “particularly reviled by society” (and therefore the police, jury and prosecutors), says the Women’s Project, because women are “traditionally viewed as nurturers and protectors”.

At Kristine’s sentencing, Mother Jones reported, the judge said: “I understand that you have arranged to have yourself impregnated. You thought it would work to your advantage somehow in this process. It will not. You will not raise that child.”

Sexist stereotypes also emerged in other Women’s Project’s cases. During Julie Harper’s trial for the murder of her 10-year-old son, prosecutors presented several pieces of “gender-biased emotional, prejudicial, and irrelevant evidence”, including testimony by her ex-husband that she had considered aborting her pregnancy with Joel, which was not only prejudicial, but false.

She was exonerated in 2006, after six years in jail.

Domestic cases can be the hardest to solve, because there are often no witnesses and only circumstantial evidence. Many modern-day innocence projects rely on DNA evidence to discover the truth, but in a domestic case, the accused’s DNA footprint is likely to be all over the scene even if they didn’t commit the crime.

Exoneration projects also rely on other traditional crime-solving techniques, Mother Jones observed — finding alibis, witnesses and alternative suspects. But in 64 per cent of exonerated women’s cases, no crime had occurred at all, while that was only true for 21 per cent of the men.

With science constantly evolving, explaining technical evidence to juries’ satisfaction can be difficult. For many women, proving their innocence involves controversial and contested science relating to fire, shaken-baby syndrome, toxicology or rare medical conditions.

Kristine is now trying to rebuild her relationship with her second son, who is 19, but her absence for most of his life is making that difficult. She’s volunteering with the Women’s Project and hopes to attend law school one day, to save others from the heartache she endured.

Original report here


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