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.

However, new gun legislation passed in 1995, 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 since the new firearms law will impose the mandatory sentence regardless of the degree of moral fault of the offender. As a result, 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.

Long prison terms may have more devastating effects upon prisoners who are racialized or who experience cognitive or psychiatric disabilities, whose prospects of employment will be further crushed by a record of imprisonment. In the case of women, they are more likely to be the primary, often sole parent of children and therefore more likely to experience the loss of their children and the anxiety related to concerns about their well-being. Further, the conditions of women’s imprisonment have often been condemned for their failure to provide appropriate services for women.