ITEM Colorado. Lory Foster’s husband had returned from Vietnam and was going through mood swrvgs both from posttraumatic stress syndrome and from diabetes.*8 They had gotten mto a fight and he had abused her. So she killed him. Yet even the prosecutor did not ask for a jail term. Why not? So Lory could care for the children.. .
Lory was given counseling and vocational training at state expense. In essence, then, the state paid for her to get the help she needed after she broke the law but didn’t pay to give him the help he needed after he obeyed the law.
What*t really going on here?
Josephine Mesa, Paula Sims, and Lory Foster were all mothers who killed and who were freed. The most frequent justification for freeing mothers who kill children is that their children need them. But Josephine Mesa was freed even though she killed her only son. And when Paula Sims killed her first child, her freedom allowed her to kill her next child. Moreover, if mothers were freed because children were the first priority, then fathers would be freed just as often. But they are not. Even when no mother is available. Is the children need their mother defense a rationalization to free women, not a prioritization to love children?
Should a man be allowed to kill an abusive wife and be freed because he’s a dad?
To my knowledge, no man has ever gone free after the premeditated murder of his wife because the "children need their father." Even if he had proof she intended to kill him. Remember Dan Broderick (above), who had plenty of evidence that his ex-wife, Elizabeth, intended to kill him but could do nothing legal to stop her (although he was one of San Diego’s best attorneys)? Even after Elizabeth drove a pickup truck through the front of his house and endangered both his own life and his children’s lives (Dan had sole custody of the children), Dan could not use a father defense to kill Elizabeth. Nor could he use self-defense. Why not? Because when courts consider the application of self-defense fora man, they require that he be responding to an immediate and imminent danger to his life with no method of escape,’9 and Dan couldn’t prove his life was in immediate physical danger until he was dead
S/xiuld Dan Broderick have been allowed to legally kill Elizabeth based on her threats to both his and the children’s lives? No. The law can only encourage people like Dan to prosecute for breaking and entering, child endangerment, and attempted murder Similarly, it must encourage a woman who is abused to report the abuse Neither sex should be allowed to kill first and report later