Sexism In The Criminal Justice System

Do Women Get a Break When Stopped by Police?

Sexism In The Criminal Justice System

women have it a little easier when they see the flashing lights in the rear view mirror.

From running stop signs to minor equipment problems, women were typically less likely to receive a ticket than men stopped for the same violation.

The disparity was fairly slight for many moving violations, but the gap widened for offenses in which police generally have more discretion.

For example, running a red light led to a ticket for 29 percent of men stopped, but only 26 percent of women. For an improper tail light, the discrepancy was far larger: 9 percent of men ended up with a ticket, compared to 4 percent of women.

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Monday, October 24, 2016

Vol XCIII, No. 311

"Why bother fighting for custody? The mother always wins."

What is the Judicial System?

Does The Justice System Discriminate against men?

One of the main reasons for this was that courts across the country followed a line of reasoning known as the "Tender Years Doctrine." This doctrine was developed by psychiatrists decades ago. The basic premise was that mothers were better care givers of children than fathers, especially for young children.

The Judicial System or court system is the system of courts that interprets and applies the law in the name of the state. The court system also provides a mechanism for the resolution of disputes.

Men experience less well known disadvantages, particularly those men who come in contact with the justice system.

"If you're a convicted criminal the best thing you can have going for you might be your gender."

Sex Profiling

It starts with sexual discrimination by the police in "stop and search" events When police search members of the public on suspicion of carrying some illegal substance, police are strongly biased towards searching males.

Age and sex profiling are essentially universal. Police rarely stop women or old men; young males are favored. The same argument is sometimes advanced for racial profiling. Police tend to stop African American drivers or airline passengers of a Arab background more frequently than whites or asians.

A new study by Sonja Starr, an assistant law professor at the University of Michigan, found that men are given much higher sentences than woman convicted of the same crime in federal court.

The study found that men receive sentences that are 63 percent higher, on average, than their female counterparts.

Starr also found that females arrested for a crime are also remarkably more likely to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.

Who Do You Think Gets Away With Most, When It Comes To The Law?

Female offenders have always been treated differently from male offenders in the death penalty system. Sometimes for reasons that are easily justifiable but too often simply because of sex bias.

-Victor Streib

Death Row

"Playing The Victim"

Are Custody Decisions Biased In Favor of

Mothers

Do Women get off easy?

In custody decisions, mothers are more likely to receive primary residential custody than fathers. Across a wide range of jurisdictions the estimates are that mothers receive primary custody 68-88% of the time. While fathers receive primary custody 8-14%, and equal residential custody is awarded in only 2-6% of the cases according to The Huffington Post.

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A trend appears to continue since the 1990s. Andrew Ashworths "sentencing and criminal justice" shows that 22% of adult women received discharges for indictable offense in 2006 compared with only 12% adult men.

Sexism comes from the assumptions that women who kill are more likely than man who kill to have been acting under emotional disturbance or under domination of their co-felon.

Sexism, then, is a double-edge sword, robbing male criminals of the excuses common to females: that they committed a crime to help their family or under some terrible emotional distress.

Almost all women have the greater ability to manifest their emotional side than men in court, helping defense teams to present female killers as victims of emotional disturbance.

A 2010 report by Victor Streib at Ohio University, pointed out that women make up a disproportionately low number of death row inmates.

Since 1632 there are only 569 recorded executions of females in the U.S. out of around 20,000 total executions.