During the 80s and 90s there was a feminist frenzy surrounding the treatment of men and women convicted of homicide. It surrounded the idea that men supposedly got off easily for killing their spouses, and women got harsh sentences for doing so. Most of the controversy surrounds the defence of provocation.

Under law, one can get a charge of murder reduced to manslaughter if it is believed that the killing occurred “in the heat of passion” or after “a sudden, temporary loss of control” that might occur to any reasonable person given the circumstances. That is, if the person was provoked. The law exists to distinguish between planned, premeditated killings and those that were caused by the person losing control in the heat of the moment.

They argued that it was harder for women to invoke the defence of provocation, thus leading to them being treated harsher when they killed their spouses.

Articles from the time period inevitably handpick a handful of irregular cases that don't prove an overall trend. It's always very easy to cherrypick a few specific cases that support one's viewpoint and claim this shows bias when it really doesn't. This is a particularly irritating tactic that feminists use a lot when they have a point to prove and the data doesn't align with their ideology.

People tend to forget that these two things can simultaneously be true:

  1. Individual women can be treated unusually harshly and individual men can be treated unusually leniently.
  2. On the whole, male offenders are treated equally as harshly or more harshly than female offenders.

Citing specific cases of women being treated unusually harshly and men being treated unusually leniently doesn't prove anything about the entire picture.

Stats from the 80s and 90s paint a picture which is a bit different from the narrative.

To start with, here's a paper out of the UK from the Home Office Research and Statistics Department. While it pushes the well-trodden myth that "women are SO much more in danger of domestic homicide than men" (which is somewhat questionable given the statistics show a much smaller gender gap than is usually assumed), it has some very detailed information on how men and women are treated in the criminal justice system.

It asserts that "differences do exist in the way men and women are treated in the criminal justice system, but ... these differences largely favour women." It finds that "despite recent claims to the contrary, women are at less risk of imprisonment than men even in cases of domestic homicide. An analysis of cases dealt with between 1984 and 1992 shows that shows that 23% of females compared with only 4% of males indicted for homicide were acquitted on all charges. Of those found guilty, 80% of the women compared with 61% of the men were found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter, and more than two-thirds of the men convicted of manslaughter received a prison sentence compared with less than half the women."

And here's the data about provocation:

"Much of the controversy around recent cases has surrounded the use of the provocation defence, which is said to be less easy for women to deploy. Information on recent cases shows that 36% of the women convicted of manslaughter used this defence, and under a third (32%) of the men. By combining the percentages employing the provocation defence with the percentages of men and women convicted for manslaughter, we can infer that a defence of provocation was accepted in about 29% of cases involving female defendants compared with about 20% of cases involving men."

Simple calculations can confirm the accuracy of their numbers.

Female defendants: 36% of 80% = 28.8% (rounded up: 29%)

Male defendants: 32% of 61% = 19.5% (rounded up: 20%)

So as a proportion of all defendants who were found guilty, 29% of female defendants were successful in deploying the defence to get their charges lowered to that of manslaughter, whereas only 20% of male defendants were successful.

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Some additional notes: For the sake of pedantry I'd like to point out that while the source I cited does provide evidence in support of the idea that women were treated more leniently and were more successful in using the defence of provocation, there's certain data that's missing from it that could be important.

We don't have the data about how many women and men in total attempted to invoke the defence of provocation. We only have data about the proportion of those who were successful at it. As a demonstration of how this is relevant and how it could affect the way we interpret the numbers presented in the paper, take this example: If the defence was used in 49% of cases involving female defendants, then female defendants were only successful 59% (29/49*100) of the time when they used it. If the defence was used in 21% of cases involving male defendants, then male defendants were successful 95% (20/21*100) of the time when they used it. Such a result would seem to indicate that women were in fact less likely to succeed than men when using the defence of provocation, but as a greater proportion of women were provoked or at least used the defence of provocation there was a greater proportion of women who succeeded at it.

So it's still possible that women might have been treated more harshly when they tried to deploy the defence. It's also possible that men might have been treated more harshly. However, we don't have the data to say, and the existing information we have doesn't indicate any clear bias against women. If anything, it shows the opposite.