Does a woman have the right to kill a man in self-defense?
Even if he is her husband? Or her father? What if he is ‘merely’
a rapist or someone who enables a rape to take place? What
about a man who enables many rapes to take place—rapes
for which he receives money, rapes which he videos?
Despite
progress in states like Wisconsin, the answer is, overwhelmingly,
‘No.’ A mere woman does not have this right.
For
nearly two hundred years, women in the United States have
been attempting to argue in court that their use of force,
sometimes deadly force, against their rapists, abusers, and
Johns is self-defense. Mostly, their pleas have been ignored.
The
world still cares more about what happens to men than whatever
happens to women. We get to hear much more about male prisoners
than we ever do about female prisoners. Women’s lives
are so little valued that we still receive life sentences
for daring to defend our own lives from male batterers, rapists
and traffickers.
In
a sense, such killings in self-defense are treated as if they
are regicides or patricides and deserving of maximum, even
life, sentences. This harsh and heartbreaking reality is true
for all women, no matter our colour, but it may be even more
true when the woman is African- or Hispanic-or Asian-or Indian-American
and the man she’s killed, even in self-defense, is white.
Take,
for example, Chrystul Kizer, an African-American girl who
was raped and trafficked at the age of 16. The rapes were
videoed by a white man twice her age. Apparently, the police
knew what he was doing and never stopped him. She took matters
into her own hands to stop him, herself. At the age of 17,
she shot him in the head.
Kizer
has been charged with first-degree homicide and faces life
in prison, where she has been since 2018. Kizer, now 21, does
not deny that she killed the man who was molesting and pimping
her, but claims it was done in self-defense. She has never
been allowed to tell the jury or judge what her trafficker
did to her. However, on July 6, 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme
Court made a landmark ruling determining that Kizer at least
had the right to explain to a jury why she claims to have
killed her trafficker in self defense.
The
three dissenting judges are all conservatives and the fourth
judge, also a conservative, was a woman who joined the liberal
bloc. Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley noted that “They
found evidence that this 34-year old man was paying girls
for sex, using them to make child pornography, prostituting
them out to other men.” (Over the years, I have sometimes
found that on issues of violence towards women, conservative
women judges are often more sympathetic to female victims
of male violence than their male judicial counterparts).
Kizer
is certainly not the only woman, of colour or of any colour,
including white, who has languished for years in jail after
having killed her batterer, her rapist, her trafficker, or,
if prostituted, her John.
As
I was researching this very issue for the Aileen Wuornos case,
I discovered the heartbreaking story of a teenage slave girl
in Missouri named Celia. Her story had been carefully told
by historian Melton McLaurin.
In
1850, an aging widower and farmer, Robert Newsom, purchased
Celia, a fourteen-year-old child. Newsom raped Celia on the
way to her new home, and multiple times after. Still just
a teenager, she gave birth to two of Newsom’s children.
Eventually,
she had enough. Celia warned Newsom to keep away. When he
advanced upon her anyway, she killed him, burned his body
in her fireplace, crushed his bones, and hid some of the ashes.
Celia did not flee.
Boldly,
Celia denied everything. But faced with the evidence, Celia
finally confessed. Newspaper reports claimed that the murder
had been committed “without any sufficient cause.”
This lie was repeated in William Lloyd Garrison’s The
Liberator—which meant that other abolitionist newspapers
paid little attention to the story.
Celia
was tried by an all-white, all-male jury and judge. Four of
the jurors owned slaves. Although the judge remained hostile,
Celia’s highly experienced white defense attorney, John
Jameson, argued that Celia had the moral and, possibly, the
legal right to kill in defense of her honour and her life.
According to McLaurin, this argument was both “as bold
as it was brilliant.”
This
may have been the first time in American history that a lawyer
dared argue that a woman, slave or free, had such a right.
Jameson wanted Celia acquitted. The jury found her guilty
and she was sentenced to hang. On December 21st, 1855, Celia
was “marched to the gallows . . . the trap was sprung
and Celia fell to her death.”
Celia
also has many descendants. In the 1970s, three cases stand
out. They were high profile and attracted the support of feminist
and civil rights groups.
In
1972, in Washington State, in her own home, Yvonne Wanrow,
a Colville Indian, shot and killed an intoxicated white man,
William Wesler, who was also an alleged child molester. She
was found guilty and jailed, but was eventually freed by the
Supreme Court of Washington State in a landmark decision about
a woman’s right to self-defense.
During
the time in which I was privileged to work with Wanrow, I
asked: “How did you survive, what kept you together
in that first trial?” She told me: “I meditated
on the eagle above the American flag.”
In
1974, twenty-year-old African-American, Joan Little, killed
her white jailor in North Carolina after he had entered her
jail cell brandishing a pick-ax, demanding (and receiving)
oral sex. Little turned the pick-ax on her rapist and fled.
Little was not a slave, but she was imprisoned. Civil rights
activists and feminists launched a campaign on her behalf.
A jury of six whites and six African Americans found her not
guilty.
Also
in 1974, Hispanic-American, Inez Garcia, was tried for killing
the man who held her down while another man raped her. Garcia
was convicted and sentenced to five years to life. Feminist
lawyer, Susan Jordan, appealed her verdict, arguing that a
woman had the right to use deadly force against a rapist.
In 1977, the California Court of Appeal overturned the verdict
and freed Garcia.
Some
feminists view prostitution as a crime against womankind,
a crime so great that any action, even committed at a later
date, is justified and can be considered a form of self-defense.
Other
feminists view male violence against women in general, as
crimes against female humanity and consider murder/self-defense
at any point, justified.
In
1982, the Dutch filmmaker, Marlene Gorris, premiered her powerful
feminist classic: A Question of Silence. Can women
protest the injustice of their lives? What kind of justice
might women who fight back/protest their fate deserve?
Gorris
presents a surreal but challenging portrait of three ordinary
women (a housewife, a waitress, a secretary), strangers to
each other, who are shopping in a boutique. One tries to shoplift
a dress, the male owner catches her—and all hell breaks
loose when these women brutally murder him. It is a shocking
and completely unexpected act.
After
they are all arrested, a prison psychiatrist, a woman, is
asked to determine whether they are sane or not. No one will
speak about why they committed this crime, although all three
women describe lives of “quiet, (subordinate) desperation.”
Unexpectedly, the psychiatrist identifies with them—and
she joins them.
We
are given to understand that these women, like all women,
live in a permanent, patriarchal war-zone, a place in which
atrocities against women are endemic and normalized. The psychiatrist
tries to explain that during a war, atrocities are committed
by all sides; she views these women as sane, given the injustice,
contempt and danger with which they are faced every minute.
I
threw myself into the Wuornos case on the grounds that, by
definition, a prostitute experiences repeated rapes, gang-rapes,
death-threats and extreme violence, so much so that it is
likely that she’d not only be highly traumatized, but
that she’d find herself in a battle for her life. I
believe this applied in Wuornos’s first murder. What
happened thereafter, may have been something else, which I
address in Requiem
for a Female Serial Killer.
Wuornos
is not the first prostitute to have killed a John or a pimp.
There is a history of prostitutes killing Johns or pimps—but
only one John, not a series of them.
For
example, in 1843, in New Jersey, Amelia Norman, a virgin,
was seduced by Henry Ballard who impregnated her and another
woman and set them both up in a brothel. He refused to pay
any child support and, when Norman insisted, Ballard tried
to have her arrested for prostitution. Norman stabbed Ballard
(who lived); she was supported by abolitionist Lydia Maria
Child and feminist Margaret Fuller. Author, Ann Jones, in
Women Who Kill, wrote:
When
Amelia Norman stuck a knife into Henry Ballard, she ripped
the familiar script to pieces. She did not take laudanum
or slink off to die painfully in a whorehouse as seduced
and abandoned maidens were supposed to do.
In
1871, Susan B. Anthony defended a many-times-married prostitute
named Laura Fair who’d killed her pimp, a John, or her
lover—the record isn’t clear. According to feminist
author Kathy Barry in Susan B. Anthony: A Biography, Anthony
visited Fair in jail and came away convinced that Fair had
killed in self-defense. That same night, Anthony told 1,200
people that Fair had a right to “protect herself.”
The audience hissed, booed, stamped their feet, and advanced
on Anthony—all in an effort to silence her. Anthony
stood her ground.
Newspapers
nationwide branded Anthony a heretic. Within days, she’d
lost most of her speaking engagements. Anthony said she felt
“raked over,” and “so cut down.”
But
that extraordinary woman, that Mother of Us All, only blamed
herself for not having been strong enough. “Defending
Laura Fair without speaking of what prostitution does to women,”
she said, “was like going into the South and failing
to illustrate human oppression by Negro slavery.”
Men
are expected to be violent and to treat women as their property.
Women are not expected to protest, fight back, get even, or
get away.
Crystul
Kizer is hardly the only woman, of colour, or white who has
been punished for saving her own life.
In
2010, Marissa Alexander, confronted by her former batterer,
fired a single warning shot with a gun she was licensed to
own. Her batterer did not die. But, for this, Alexander was
sentenced to twenty years. Unlike so many men are, Alexander
was not allowed to invoke a ‘stand your ground’
defense.
Cyntoia
Brown (Long) was 16 years old when a 43-year-old man paid
her for sex. She killed him and spent a long time in jail
for the crime.
In
2020, Maddesyn George, a Colville Indian, killed her rapist—and
has been jailed ever since.
White
women are also punished when they kill rapists in self-defense—consider
the cases of Brittany Smith in Alabama and Tracey Grissom,
also in Alabama, who was sentenced to twenty-five years for
killing her batterer/ex-husband when he raped, sodomized and
tried to kill her.
Wisconsin’s
new ruling enabling victims to argue self-defense is important
progress (built on many decades of feminists fighting to create
precedent), but it is not enough. Women across the country
are still sitting in prison cells for defending themselves
from rape, abuse and prostitution. None of these women are
wealthy, well educated, or well-connected. On their own, they
lack the resources to fight for justice.
Only
if We, the People take up their cause, raise funding for their
cases, do they have a shadow of a chance of at least being
able to tell their stories to a jury.
Let’s
do just that.
