Women who allege that they killed violent mates face widespread disbelief and misogynist denial, an enormous lack of legal, social, and economic support for their defence, and the prospect of loss of their children for decades. Added to this is the loss of self-worth, confidence, and clarity engendered by male control and violence. Thus, women are systemically disadvantaged when charged with first degree murder in their ability to fight the charge based on self-defence, as a direct consequence of the mandatory life sentence that is tied to a murder conviction. The overwhelming trend in such cases is for the woman to agree to plead guilty to manslaughter in order to open up the possibility of judicial as opposed to mandatory sentencing.

Mandatory sentencing also produces unequal results, even if it could be called equal treatment, because it forces a judge to impose a set sentence regardless of mitigating circumstances. For women and other disempowered groups, this results in ignoring systemic oppressions that assist in creating “criminals”, and it even overrides individual responsibility. For example, some women who killed violent mates and plead guilty to manslaughter had, after Lavallee (1990) received suspended sentences and/or community sentences on the basis that they had been battered and that the battering was relevant to their moral culpability (Sheehy, 1994, 1995; Shaffer, 1997).

However, new legislation passed in 1995, Bill C- 68, requires a judge to impose a minimum sentence of incarceration in a federal institution for at least four years for offenders convicted of specific offences of violence against the person if a firearm was used. This mandatory sentence of at least four years of imprisonment will be imposed even where there are compelling mitigating circumstances such as long-term abuse of the woman who kills her mate. The legal recognition of the significance of such factors, which was achieved only after lengthy feminist struggle, has been obliterated by this new mandatory minimum sentence.

As one academic points out, the new firearms law will also impose the mandatory sentence regardless of the degree of moral fault of the offender (Dumont, 1997), such that a woman who fires a gun at her mate, in an action that is deemed not to amount to self-defence, may receive a longer sentence than the man who beats his wife to death over a period of hours. Furthermore, the mandatory minimum will apply indiscriminately to women who use firearms even though women are very rarely gun owners or collectors. In other words, in a case where a woman uses one of her husband’s guns, the fact that her husband had amassed an arsenal of weaponry and had threatened to kill her and her children could not be considered to entitle her to a suspended sentence since she must now be sentenced to at least four years imprisonment.

For offenders with cognitive and psychiatric disabilities, mandatory sentences require that judges ignore their reduced capacities, unless their condition amounts to a mental disorder that deprived them entirely of their ability to distinguish right from wrong, pursuant to s. 16 of the Criminal Code. Again this means that for some categories of offenders, mandatory sentences deliver “equality” with a vengeance.