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.

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.

Mandatory minimum sentences also contribute to systemic discrimination by putting pressure on lawyers to resort to extraordinary measures to avoid conviction and the mandatory sentence for their clients. Many of the problems that have been associated with the defences of self-defence and provocation are in fact distortions caused by the existence of a mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment for murder. Accused persons, lawyers, and judges are pressured to resort to constructs such as “Battered Woman Syndrome”, “Homosexual Advance”, “Homosexual Panic”, “Cultural Defences”, and “Rage” in order to avoid this sentence, even when such uses carry negative social policy consequences and in fact violate the rights of the deceased victims and social groups such as women, lesbians and gays, and racialized people. The more appropriate response is to rid the law of the mandatory minimum sentence of life for murder.