When Etta Ann Urdiales was murdered in Colorado, two completely
different juries convicted two different people of the crime.
Both juries believed there was only one murderer. One convicted
Bobbie Hogan, a woman. The other convicted Jess Jacobs, a man.
She got 10 years in prison. He was put to death.
This case is just one example of the rampant discrimination men
face in criminal courts throughout the United States.
According to Pradeep Ramanathan, vice president of the
National
Coalition of Free Men (NCFM), a volunteer, non-profit
organization that has explored and addressed men's issues since
1976, "All the research clearly demonstrates that gender is the
most significant biasing factor in determining whether or not
someone will be charged, prosecuted, indicted and sentenced, as
well as determining the severity of the sentence."
And Ramanathan is right.
Department of Justice figures show that being male increases a
murderer's chance of receiving a death sentence by more than 20
times. And the data repeatedly confirms that men receive higher
sentences than women for the exact same crime.
One study, published in Justice Quarterly in 1986, examined
181,197 felonies in California and found that, for the same
crime, being male increased the chance of incarceration by 165
percent. Being black, in comparison, increased the chance of
incarceration by 19 percent.
Another study, published in Crime & Delinquency in 1989,
examined non-accomplice crimes and factored together the number
of charges, convicted offenses, prior felony convictions, as
well as the race, age, work history and family situation of the
accused and found that "gender differences, favoring women, are
more often found than race differences, favoring whites."
In yet another study, published in the International Journal of
the Sociology of Law, researchers Mathew Zingraff and Randall
Thomson found that being male increases sentence lengths more
than any other discriminatory variable.
The bias applies to victims as well as the accused. When Edward
Glaeser of Harvard University and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth
College examined 2,800 homicide cases randomly drawn from 33
urban counties by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, they found
that killing a female instead of a male increased sentences by
40.6 percent. Killing a white instead of a black, in comparison,
increased sentences by 26.8 percent.
Even when the exact same type of crime is accounted for, the
disparities still persist. For example, a drunk driver who kills
a black male receives an average sentence of two years. A drunk
driver who kills a white male, four years. A drunk driver who
kills a white female, six years.
To those who recognize the problem, gender stereotypes are a
major culprit. In a 1991 NCFM report titled "Gender and
Injustice," researchers John Ryan and Ian Wilson suggest the
problem stems from stereotypes about women being more innocent,
more reformable and less dangerous than men. Barbara Swartz,
former Director of New York's Women's Prison Project, called it
the "chivalry factor" and says, "If there were more women
judges, more women would go to jail."
Others attribute the problem to the devaluing of male lives.
But addressing the causes does little good when the public does
not even recognize the problem. One reason we don't is that the
task forces we appoint to investigate the problem are just as
biased as the legal system they are supposed to monitor, so a
full picture of the bias never gets drawn.
In 1980, the National Organization for Women and the National
Association of Women Judges formed the National Judicial
Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the
Courts (NJEP). In 1986, they wrote "Operating a Task Force on
Gender Bias in the Courts: A Manual for Action," which became
the manual used by gender bias task forces nationwide. The
manual opens by stating that gender bias operates more
frequently against women and that it is not a contradiction for
task forces to focus primarily on bias against women in courts.
As one might guess, this is exactly what the task forces do.
"None of (the commissions) study bias against men," said
Ramanathan.
For example, even though men are more likely to get prison and
women to get probation for the same crime, a New York task force
claimed that it is women who were discriminated against because
- get this - they receive longer probation periods.
One commission recently justified giving women shorter sentences
because women are often custodial parents. But the sentencing
disparities persisted in the above studies that took family
situations into account. So even if custodial parenthood
justifies a shorter sentence, courts are giving men longer
sentences than women even when neither (or both) are custodial
parents. Needless to say, when a father commits a crime, the
courts have no trouble calling him an unfit parent and removing
him from his kids.
The gender bias in our courts and in our gender bias task forces
is not just an injustice to the victims; it is a tragic betrayal
of public trust. In fact, as embarrassing as it sounds, we may
need to create task forces to investigate the gender bias of the
task forces that we created to investigate gender bias in the
first place.
This article first appeared in the Los Angeles
Daily Journal (8/1/01).
Marc Angelucci is a public interest attorney in
Los Angeles and is the Los Angeles Chapter president of the
National Coalition of Free
Men.
