Sunday, January 22, 2006

Injustice

What kind of punishment do you think a guy should get if he pours gasoline on his wife, who is recovering from knee surgery, and throws a lit newspaper on her, killing her by burning her alive? What if he said that the reason he did it was because of years of emotional and physical abuse, a claim that her relatives say is just plain not true?

Death? Life in prison? How about only 25 years in jail?

Well, to my knowledge, that's a purely hypothetical situation. But with the genders reversed, it's not. A woman in Missouri who did just that to her husband was sentenced to 25 years in jail.

Now, I'm not saying that her gender has anything to do with her sentence, but 25 years for killing a person by dousing them in gas and setting them on fire? That's just not right.