Crimes of ‘passion’ and the reason why jurors — including women — are so soft on wife killers

Wait, is this texas? texas, the state where condign punishment for murder is implacably carried out? Where, since 2000, no fewer than 388 felons have been executed?

these questions are prompted by the result of a trial of a wife killer in texas, which last week resulted in the murderer getting a sentence of ten years — and eligible for parole after just five years.

it was the jury which opted for that short sentence, duly passed by an apparently ‘shocked’ judge on 60yearold Carey Birmingham, who had blasted his wife Patricia with a shotgun three times outside their home.

the recording of the murder captures the killer saying: ‘all right, goodbye. You’re going to meet Jesus. i hope it was worth it.’

the ‘it’ referred to an alleged affair Patricia Birmingham had been having. Chalk up another victory for the defence claiming a ‘crime of passion’, carried out ‘in the heat of the moment’.

Demons

it is all nonsense, however much it might appeal to juries. and in the case of that texan jury, one composed entirely of women.

Yet women can be the harshest judges of their own sex — and the nature of such cases is that it is the dead woman who is being judged as much her killer.

in this country, the more a jury can be persuaded that the victim had provoked their killer beyond endurance, the likelier they are to find that manslaughter — on grounds of diminished responsibility — rather than murder is the proper verdict.

in recent weeks, we have seen two such cases examined at length in television series. Channel 4’s the trial set up two different ‘juries’ to reexamine, in a mock trial, a case based on one in which thomas Crompton was found guilty of manslaughter, rather than murder, for the killing of his wife angela in 2012.

He had strangled her until she turned blue. He then fetched a lump hammer and hit her skull with such ferocity that scraps of flesh were found on it.

One of the tV juries ‘found’ that this was murder. the other — like the real life jury — went for manslaughter.

thomas Crompton is now a free man. His sentence was seven and half years, but with parole half way through: three years and nine months, in other words.

the real jury seems to have been persuaded by the defence lawyer, who painted a picture of angela as no angel but a woman with ‘demons’, who enjoyed ‘provoking’ her husband.

after the verdict, angela’s family, which included three children of her own, declared: ‘During the case, it felt that angela herself was on trial; and in many ways that was the hardest part of it.’

Meanwhile, itV recently broadcast an investigation into the killing of Joanna Simpson in 2010 by her husband, a British airways pilot called Robert Brown. He, too, had been found guilty only of manslaughter, rather than murder, and became eligible for parole in November last year.

During the trial, it was claimed he was ‘suffering from adjustment disorder’ because of the divorce sought by his estranged wife. He sobbed, telling the jury: ‘i just lost it. i blew up and the next thing i was standing over Jo and blood was all over the place.’

in fact, and as the jury was told, he had not just battered her to death with a hammer while the couple’s children were in the house: he had already prepared a grave for her, which he had dug in nearby countryside and where he deposited her body.

Brown’s sobbing in the trial was in stark contrast to the recordings of his interviews with the police.

Grief

there, as we saw in the remarkable itV documentary, he remained calm throughout, not showing a flicker of emotion even when the officers played him a video of one of his little children howling with grief while describing the experience of hearing their mother being battered to death.

i’d recommend anyone interested in such cases read in Control: Dangerous Relationships and How they End in Murder, by the criminologist and former police officer Jane Monckton Smith.

it shows how such killings only appear to be the sudden, uncontrolled explosion of rage at some ‘provocation’; in fact, they are the concluding act in a lengthy process of increasing resentment and hatred.

Or as Olivia, the daughter of Carey and Patricia Birmingham, said of her father’s claim about the murder of her mother: ‘i don’t know, sudden passion? You have to have made that decision within you for a while.’