55% of murdered women in U.S. are killed by ‘intimate partners’

About 11 percent of victims had experienced violence involving their intimate partner in the month preceding their death, according to CDC data.

PolitiFact

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wants state lawmakers to pass a bill he believes would prevent more women from being murdered by people close to them.

The bill would remove guns from people convicted on misdemeanor domestic-violence charges. Guns are currently only taken away if someone has a felony conviction for domestic violence.

New York state already has one of the lowest rates of gun- caused death in the country, but Cuomo believes the proposal could drive that number lower.

Is he right that half of women murdered in the U.S. are killed by their intimate partners?

Cuomo’s claim comes from data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2017. The agency looked at the homicides of 10,018 adult

PolitiFact “Half of the American women who are murdered are killed by their intimate partners.”

The Georgia Senate on Friday approved a record $26 billion budget for the upcoming year, setting up negotiations with the House in the final days of the 2018 session aimed at coming up with a final spending plan.

Under state law, the General Assembly must pass a budget for fiscal 2019, which begins July 1, by the time the session ends Thursday.

The House, which passed its version of the budget a few weeks ago, and the Senate both pour much of the projected $1 billion in new state spending into familiar areas: schools, public health pro- grams and construction projects.

There will be plenty of room for negotiations with the House. The Senate, as expected, trimmed and added money to various proposals to aid rural Georgia, an area near and dear to small-town lawmakers in both chambers.

The Senate rejected the House’s proposal to give retirees from state government employment a one-time bonus of up to $900. The Senate also added $3 million to provide grants to counties and cities to boost local police pay. Local law enforcement officials have complained about pay inequities since 2016, when Gov. Nathan Deal proposed a 20 percent salary boost for state troopers and law enforcement.

women in 13 states from 2003 to 2014. The relationship between the victim and the suspect was known in 8,028 of the cases.

Of those, 4,442 homi- cides, or 55.3 p ercent, involved an intimate part- ner, defined as a current, former, or unspecified spouse or romantic partner. Women killed while intervening in an incident of intimate-partner vio- lence, such as a friend or family member, were also counted in this category.

Almost 80 percent of inti- mate-partner homicides involved a current intimate partner.

About 11 percent of vic- tims had experienced violence involving their intimate partner in the month preceding their death.

An argument preceded the victim’s death in about a third of intimate-partner homicides, the report found.

The report d oes not include data on the criminal history of the suspects, so it’s not known how many had a history of domestic violence. But the agency did collect information on the type of weapon used in each homicide.

A firearm was used in 5,234 of the total homicides, or almost 54 percent.

That’s more than double the number of victims killed with a sharp instru- ment, the next most-doc- umented weapon.

A report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found an estimated 45 percent of female homicide victims were killed by an intimate partner in 2007.

Numbers in New York state mirror national data. About 48 percent of female domestic homicides in New York state involved an intimate partner in 2016, according to a report from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. A firearm was used in about a third of all domestic homicides in New York state.

The state data does not include homicides where there was no known relationship between the suspect and victim.

Our ruling

Data collected by the CDC supports Cuomo’s claim. More than half of the female homicides the agency studied involved an intimate partner when the relationship was known.

We rate his claim True.