This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Maoist Internationalist Movement

1998 MIM Congress

Why biological wimmin escape death penalty usually

Florida has not executed a womyn in 150 years. This we learn as one is planned for the electric chair as we go to press--Judy Buenoano.

The public attitude toward wimmin is that they do not and are not capable of committing murder. For this reason, the USA Today was only able to find 72 victims of death row wimmin total.(1)

This absurdly low number is the product of a judicial system that puts the romance culture above any consistent idea of justice. According to this culture, wimmin are dainty creatures that should be available for sex. When it comes time to seeing the violence of wimmin, the culture looks away or fails to believe.

As we showed in MT#13 and contrary to popular myth, the average sentence for a womyn convicted of the same crime as a man is lower. In some areas, most notably drug use, wimmin seem scarcely patrolled by the state, judging by their relative arrest and conviction rates. Thus the real inequities are not in the sentences for the same crimes, but the fact that the same crimes are called different things or that suspicions against wimmin rarely add up as quickly as they do for men.

Since the death penalty came back 22 years ago, only one womyn has been executed. No persyn in Texas has ever gotten out of the death penalty, but Christian born-again television-evangelist Pat Robertson asked Governor George Bush to commute the death sentence of a confessed womyn murderer who found God in prison--Karla Faye Tucker. She was executed anyway, but the point remains that few wimmin are executed and it is controversial for the reactionaries.(2)

One in 8 people arrested for murder are wimmin, but only one in 70 people on death row are wimmin. That shows that the courts regularly find reasons not to convict wimmin.

Texas executed 37 men last year, but it has not executed a womyn in 135 years.

This fact demonstrates what MIM has said before, that gender oppression is not strictly additive to class and nation oppression. Many calling themselves "Marxist" and "feminist" believe that there is a simple matter of "triple oppression."

When it comes to the bourgeois state, wimmin are more likely to have illusions about it, because of a relative lack of prison and military experience. If the United $tates policed everyone the way it polices wimmin, we would no longer be close to being the world's number one police state. This reveals the political bankruptcy that goes into decisions of justice in this country. As we show elsewhere, the state has admitted that the death penalty is applied in a racist manner, but it still supports having the death penalty. Likewise, there is irrationality when it comes to gender, as our sick system is not capable of any consistent justice.

In a similar matter, in Massachusetts in mid-March, the courts had to deem a womyn insane for stealing a wallet. The womyn was a famous convict--a member of the Framingham 8 released early for killing their batterers by then Governor Bill Weld. Since her release she has gained notoriety for entering another battering relationship and for stealing the wallet and getting caught.

Black womyn Shannon Booker had served less than 5 years for the murder, (how much less is not clear from the Boston Globe article). Rather than face that this womyn might actually be aggressive, might actually have bought into Amerikan consumerism that said she should steal for her boyfriend's Lexus payments and might actually be the batterer herself, the judge decided she must be temporarily insane.

Judge Herbert Hershfang decided that the "battered woman's syndrome" defense was not applicable, but he deemed Booker insane anyway.(3) As MIM has explained before in MT2/3, the means of social control for wimmin are different than those for men. Wimmin are targeted with psychology by the state. They are not directly confronted with armed power nearly as often as men, because they are viewed as non-threatening and valuable outside prison. Besides which, the abuse of repression might spoil their hair and lipstick.

Another side benefit to the patriarchy of its policy is that it gives oppressed nation wimmin a reason to opt for pseudo-feminism. Pseudo-feminists loudly advocate that even serving one year in prison is too much for womyn, because they only kill their batterers. Shannon Booker is an example of a Black womyn benefiting from an alliance of pseudo-feminist liberals and paternalist Republicans who released her from prison to promote a certain view of wimmin.

All across the country the message is the same: conservative Republicans will make exceptions to their "crackdown" on crime for wimmin. New Hampshire conservative Governor Stephen Merrill also pardoned a womyn named June Briand for killing her husband while he slept. She served eight years, (4) while other murderers receive life without parole or the death penalty.

If gender oppression were additive or if wimmin were the vanguard activists against the state, we would expect to find more wimmin in prison than men. That is not the case, and although reality is surprising and dialectical, it is wrong to see gender oppression as completely parallel to class and national oppression but dialectically obscure.

The real gender oppressed people of the imperialist countries are children, the forcibly sterilized as in Puerto Rico, those who have sex-related pharmaceuticals tested on them like guinea pigs in the Third World, prisoners and anyone of whatever genitalia murdered in the name of the romance culture. The pseudo-feminists never speak for these groups and instead focus on the rights of the gender aristocracy--adult white wimmin.

Pseudo-feminism is a crucial prop of the patriarchy. While saying that even more men should go to prison for battering and rape, pseudo-feminists also hold the romance culture as so important that wimmin should have the right to shoot men in their sleep.

For MIM this is all sickness. Judges and pseudo-feminists have decided in advance that some must die or serve long prison sentences, so that the rest of us may continue to believe that romance is worth it. The rest of us must continue to believe that romance is worth risking life and limb for or it would not be very exciting.

When it comes to inhaling second-hand smoke, opposing increased highway deaths from higher speed limits or banning boxing because it causes death, there are critics available to say it would be better to change the rules than to tolerate more deaths. When it comes to gender though, what we see is the patriarchy encouraging more deaths in order to purify the romance culture of evil. There is no way to link this fact to an economist view. If men are more economically valued through discrimination, then why does the state let wimmin kill them in their sleep and serve less time than men? Clearly there is nothing economic to this logic.

The real logic behind patriarchy and battering is that adult biological wimmin receive real power in the romance-related world. They still win nearly all court custody battles against men. They can earn money from divorce as the ex-wife of Donald Trump proves; they earn more money in prostitution and modeling than men do and they can even legally kill some portion of men for getting out of line in romance life. These are not phony privileges: they are real power restricted to a certain sphere, as if calculated to interest wimmin only in that sphere. It reflects the interest of the patriarchy to keep wimmin focussed on romance culture as a life-and-death matter worth sacrificing prison terms and murders for. These are not economic powers granted wimmin. They are powers to govern leisure-time.

In the class situation, imperialists want the loyal troops and peaceful political homefront and hence they appreciate settlers. When it comes to gender, the patriarchy wants adult biological wimmin to be fully focussed on providing pleasure; hence, the patriarchy grants adult wimmin, especially white wimmin, certain privileges, the degree of which indicate the rank or level of sexual privilege of these wimmin.

For the same reason that imperialists ally with settlers, the patriarchy of men allies with the gender aristocracy receiving the above-mentioned powers. The ruling men believe they receive even more pleasure in their leisure-time by keeping wimmin focussed on romance. In fact, the patriarchy is willing to tolerate imprisonment and death of a certain percentage of men, especially lower-class and oppressed nationality men to pay the price for the ruling men's extremes of romance pleasure.

Notes:
1. USA Today 23March98, pp. 1-2.
2. Charles Zewe, "Texas Prepares to Execute Woman," CNN, Jan. 15, 1998. http://cnn.com/US/9801/15/texas.execution/index.html
3. Boston Globe 20March98, pp. 1, 16.
4. http://www.mnsinc.com/petrus/wanderer/week2.htm Alternatively, see January 27, 1997 issue of the Wanderer, a national Catholic weekly. For a positive mention of the celebrated case of the Framingham 8 turned into heroes, see http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/artmuseum/orig_visions.html

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