Mary Winkler

So, yesterday I came home and was exhausted. I had been in the Photo Lab for about 5 hours and felt hungry and tired. So, I decided before I sat down to write the Psych research paper that was due today (and that I was not nearly close to being done with), I needed to eat a bite and relax. As I ate a turkey sandwich, I flipped on the tele for company. I flipped through and found myself intensely emotionally involved in a show on Oxygen called "Snapped." This show focuses on women who, in essence, snapped and killed someone close to them. The episode I tuned into was about Mary Winkler.

If you don't remember Mary Winkler, she was the one who killed her husband, Matthew (a preacher in Tennessee) about 2 years ago. I remember being pretty interested in the story at the time, but had no idea what had happened - until yesterday. Basically, Mary was secretly setting up fake bank accounts and writing checks from these accounts - and basically, was $17,000 in debt because of these fraudulent activities. The day before she killed her husband, she had been figured out by the local bank. She then shot her husband, took her children to the beach, and was caught and arrested a day later. She claimed her husband was highly abusive and controlling and worked the emotions of the jury.

Here is the kicker - she was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter! A sentence of only 210 days in jail! For killing her husband, she only served 160 days in jail and 60 days in a mental health facility. If you ask me, this is absurd!

Now, I don't mean to say that her sufferings and the abuse she received was not sad - but it does not justify killing another person. No amount of abuse can justify voluntarily killing someone when there are so many other options for handling the situation. There were other ways to get out of her situation. Most importantly, her sentence should have been much more severe. She served in jail for less than half a year after killing her husband! How can we let people like Mary out with such an insignificant consequence for her actions. I was (and still am today) absolutely outraged by her sentence. Even Mary commented that her sentence was too short. She told Oprah, in an interview, "There's no amount of time I think you can put on something like this. I was just ready for them to lock the door and throw away the key to my batcave."

I don't know if the problem was with the jury. Or with the fact that we don't have severe enough consequences for women murderers. Or what. I recognize I don't have all the facts. But, whatever the case, I can not stop thinking about the outrageousness of this case.