WOMEN’S ARMED DEFENSE

You’d think that when a woman uses deadly force against a violently attacking man, society would be sympathetic. Not necessarily.

I recently finished the eminently readable 2023 book The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice by Elizabeth Flock. 

She writes, “In her seminal 1989 book, Justifiable Homicide, women’s rights advocate Cynthia Gillespie argued that, as a result of its origins, self-defense law evolved based on masculine assumptions – that the fight is between people of ‘roughly equal size, strength and fighting ability’ and that it’s ‘never acceptable to kill an unarmed adversary.’ Both assumptions have made it difficult for women to win self-defense cases because women and men are often different sizes and strengths, and women are more likely to defend themselves with guns or knives, while men more often use hands and fists…”

She adds, “Gillespie also wrote that, of the two hundred cases she reviewed of women who killed men in self-defense, the outcomes were ‘depressingly similar’: the women were arrested, charged with murder, pled guilty to murder or manslaughter, and went to prison. (She did not review men’s cases.)”

One of the biggest elements in play here is something that has bothered me for years: I’ve met practicing attorneys who got through three years of law school and passed a bar exam without learning that the concept of “disparity of force” has long existed in our law. It means that if the ostensibly unarmed opponent has such a great physical advantage over you that if his violent attack on you is allowed to continue you are likely to be killed or severely injured, that advantage is equivalent to a deadly weapon and authorizes the innocent defender to resort to a lethal weapon to stop the assault.

And a defense attorney who has not yet been educated on disparity of force themselves cannot possibly educate a jury on the same topic.

Read my book Deadly Force, or listen to the audio version. Or, go to a well-stocked legal library and read the classic authoritative text Warren on Homicide. They will explain the legal principle of disparity of force the way it needs to be explained to the triers of the facts.