A Texas jury earlier this year convicted Clara Harris of killing her husband after she caught him with another woman. Harris repeatedly drove over her husband with her car.
In a short article about the trial and conviction, Cathy Young noted that during a segment about the case on The O’Reilly Factor some women wrote in via e-mail to express their support for Harris. But, to my knowledge, no prominent feminists took the absurd route of defending Harris.
Not so, however, for those nutty right wingers at WorldNetDaily.Com where Editor and CEO Joseph Farah devoted an entire column to singing Harris’ praise and saying that, if there were any justice in the world, Harris would be set free. Farah wrote,
I say: Free Clara Harris. We need more women like her. Live like her.
. . .
People are no longer accountable to anyone. They don’t believe they are accountable to God. They don’t believe they are accountable to their spouses. And they don’t believe they are accountable to their children. They are not accountable to the state, as no-fault divorce laws have made certain.
. . .
If I were on that jury, I would find Clara Harris not guilty. After she was sprung, I’d give her a medal. She did the world a favor. She may have acted emotionally. She may be sorry for what she has done. But, frankly, she did the right thing. That creep deserved what he got.
In Harris’ case, fortunately, no one on the jury shared Farah’s views, but Young notes a Texas case where the jury did buy into this sort of ridiculous argument. In 1999 a jury convicted Jimmy Dean Watkins of murder after he shot and killed his estranged wife in front of his 10-year old son. But the jury sentenced him to just 10 years of parole after buying into his claim that he was acting on a sudden passion (even though Watkins had fled the scene after his gun jammed, then returned to fire the fatal shot after restoring his weapon to working condition).
Apparently a world in which men and women run around killing their philandering spouses without any sort of consequence may appeal to Farah, but Young is correct in noting that as much as we might sympathize with someone who commits a crime of passion, we should never allow that sympathy to be used as a justification for murder,
A certain measure of sympathy for people who commit crimes of passion is understandable. Many feminists have attributed this sympathy to the underlying belief that men “own” women; but they are wrong. Most of us can relate to feelings of anger, loss and betrayal caused by infidelity or rejection?in a way we cannot relate to the cold-blooded motives of someone who kills for greed. But we should never allow this emotional understanding to overshadow the horror of what happened to the victims.
Sources:
Free Clara Harris! Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily.Com, January 30, 2003.
She Done Him Wrong: Cowboy law, sexism mix in wronged wife’s trial. Cathy Young, Reason, February 4, 2003.