Gender Discrimination in Sentencing

In The Death Penalty and Gender Discrimination, written in 1991 by Elizabeth

Rapaport, it is reported that 2 percent of men and one tenth of a percent of women convicted of murder as sentenced to the death penalty. The odds of the death penalty being a sentence is already incredibly low, but it is more likely for man to be given the sentence rather than a woman. This is because it is believed that women are seen as less of a risk than men are, people believe that men are more likely to commit that same crime again whereas people believe that a woman is more likely to be able to learn from her mistake and be better. They believe that if the woman just settles down and gets married, has child, gets a job ,and gets her stuff together, she will not commit a crime again. Yet people also believe that that's not a possibility for most men, for whatever reason society does not believe in that rehabilitation for men so that's why they're more likely to be sentenced with the death penalty or a harsher punishment of this sort.

Samantha Jeffries, Garth Fletcher, and Greg Newbold published a study on March 7th of 2006 where they examined the difference in sentencing outcomes of 194 men and 194 women. They found that judges gave considerable leniency towards women in their sentencing, giving women less time incarcerated or less harsh of punishments then the ones that men were given. (Jeffries, Fletcher & Newbold, 2003). This happens quite often within cases especially with ones that are almost the exact same the only difference being whether it was a man that committed the crime or a woman.

There was a woman in her mid-thirties standing in a parking lot on the side of the road with a friend. She waved down a man who was driving down the street, and him thinking this woman was needing help, he pulled off into the parking lot to

ask if she was alright. This woman and her friend proceeded to pull this man out

of his car and stab him multiple times in the back. They then held him at gunpoint

and proceeded to rob the man of his car and wallet. The woman had an extensive

criminal record before this crime, she had been in and out of prison starting

around the age of 20. For this specific crime she was charged with a first-degree

felony of robbery and spent 2 years incarcerated. Around the same time, a male in

his mid-twenties had entered a store where he hit the clerk over the head with a

blunt instrument. He then proceeded to steal $55 from the register. This man also

had a criminal record and had been in prison a few times since his late teens. He

was also charged with a first-degree felony of robbery but was given 10 years of

incarceration. 8 years more than the woman who was charged with the exact same crime.