In plea bargaining with a married couple, often we say, “Well, let’s get the man." We re satisfied with getting the husband to plead guilty and dropping the charges against the woman. Of course, then he has a criminal record, she doesn’t. If they both repeat the crime, he can "legitimately" receive a longer sentence.
Assistant Prosecutor J Dennis Kohler11
ITEM A husband and wife run an illegal drug busness out of their home — both of them packaging drugs on their kitchen table. After their tnal. the husband is labeled the kingpn and put n pnson. The wife goes free on probation. A defense lawyer for drug dealers calls this double standard the "drug dealer pattem."’2
The drug dealer pattern and the plea bargain as female bargain violate the Fourteenth Amendment s guarantee against discrimination according to sex. If prosecutors systematically told only the white man that charges would be dropped against him if he testified against the black man, we would have a racial crisis.
In the case of a man and a woman, both will often agree to the man taking the rap — despite the man being more likely to receive a longer sentence and more likely to be raped in prison. If blacks were agreeing to do that for whites, the black community would be smart enough to call that "learned subservience."
When men ore In charge, men do more time; when women are In charge, men do more time. . . how’s that?
When a man and woman jointly commit a crime, but the man is in charge, the woman gets a much shorter sentence or no sentence because she is said to be brainwashed, powerless, and an unwilling follower. When a woman is in charge and a man works for her, does his claim to be brainwashed earn any weight? In the McMartin Preschool case, Peggy McMartin was the school’s director and had hired her 19-year-old grandson — a college dropout.13 After working for five years under his grandmother’s direction, he and his grandmother were both indicted on fifty-two counts of child molestation. His grandmother’s bail was one third of his14 and he spent nearly five years in jail before the jury finally ruled that the two were nut guilty. She — the director — spent less than two years in jail.
Had a male school director hired his 19-year-old granddaughter, would the granddaughter have been put in jail for five years prior to the verdict? Would we have tolerated the longest trial in U. S. criminal history while a girl found not guilty nevertheless spent half her twenties in prison for allegedly touching children?