Intimacy, homicide, and punishment: Examining court outcomes over three decades
| Author | Myrna Dawson |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0004865812456850 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
45(3) 400–422
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865812456850
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Article
Intimacy, homicide, and
punishment: Examining court
outcomes over three decades
Myrna Dawson
University of Guelph, Canada
Abstract
Little is known about changing patterns in official responses to crime over time despite
changes in recent decades in how the law treats various types of violent crime. Drawing
from data documenting court outcomes in homicides in one Canadian urban jurisdiction from
1974 to 2002, this study examines the role played by intimacy in law during several distinct
social and public policy periods in one country. The central hypothesis is that the accused in
intimate partner homicides will be subject to ‘less law’ than those in non-intimate partner
homicides. However, given social and policy transformations, it is further hypothesized that
evidence of differential treatment should be less in recent years and, specifically, post-Bill
C-41 which was meant to change the way intimacy was considered at sentencing. In examin-
ing multiple decision points, results show that while differential treatment of intimate partner
and non-intimate homicide was evident at some stages, it was not always in the direction
hypothesized. Further, while patterns in treatment did change over time with ‘more law’
evident in cases involving intimate partners in more recent years, plea resolutions remained
more common for intimate partner killers than for those who killed victims with whom they
shared more distant relationships.
Keywords
court, guilty pleas, homicide, intimacy, punishment
Introduction
The problem of intimate partner violence and how our systems of formal social control
respond to this type of violence has been the focus of much national and international
debate over the past few decades. This concern has led to an enormous growth in the
amount of public and professional attention directed at violence within the family, and
in particular, violence against women by their male partners. Various legislative and
policy changes have been implemented in the past several decades in an attempt to
respond more effectively to this problem. As part of this move, in 1996, the Canadian
federal government passed Bill C-41 that includes a statutory statement stipulating that
Corresponding author:
Myrna Dawson, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada.
Email: mdawson@uoguelph.ca
an offender who abuses a spouse or child may be subject to harsher penalties.
1
Judges
should now consider the existence of a spousal or parental relationship between an
offender and their victim as an aggravating factor at sentencing. This is a significant
change in Canada given that, at one time, penal laws made no mention of the relation-
ship between a victim and an accused or what that relationship should mean, if anything,
in criminal law (Grant et al., 1998).
Various similar changes in criminal justice responses have occurred in other countries
in an attempt to correct what many have argued to be different, and often more lenient
treatment, of intimate partner violence, particularly against women by men. For exam-
ple, provocation or partial defences, particularly relevant to intimate partner homicide,
have been the focus of international criticism and debate, leading to recent reforms that
have seen it abolished in various Australian states (e.g. Tasmania, Victoria, and Western
Australia), New Zealand as well as England and Wales (Fitz-Gibbons and Pickering,
2012). To date, though, few studies have examined the impact of these changing
responses to this type of violence over a significant period of time.
This paper begins to fill this gap by examining outcomes in homicide cases at various
stages of the criminal justice process from 1974 to 2002 in one Canadian urban juris-
diction. Given the lack of data on courts in this country, there is little information on
how cases are treated at any stage of the criminal justice system, not just at the senten-
cing stage. Therefore, the goal of the current study is to compare the overall treatment of
defendants who killed intimate partners to the treatment received by defendants who
killed victims with whom they shared more distant relationships. The central hypothesis
to be tested is that defendants in cases of intimate partner homicide will be subject to
‘less law’ than defendants in non-intimate partner homicide cases (Black, 1976, 1993),
holding constant factors that distinguish these types of killings. Being subject to ‘less
law’ means, for example, that those who killed intimate partners will have been charged
and convicted of less serious offences and to have received shorter terms of imprison-
ment compared to those who killed other types of victims. However, given the social and
legal transformations of the past few decades that were meant to change the way intim-
ate violence was treated in society and in law, it is further hypothesized that evidence of
differential treatment for these two types of defendants will be less evident in recent years
and, in particular, post-Bill C-41 (see Section 718.2 of the Criminal Code of Canada).
2
Below, what research has demonstrated about the role of intimacy in law is first
summarized.
Prior research on victim-defendant relationship and cour t outcomes
Using victim–defendant relationship as the best available proxy for intimacy, criminal
justice research has shown that the association between intimacy and law varies by the
type of analysis conducted as well as the stage of the criminal process which is examined.
For instance, bivariate analyses have almost consistently shown that criminal justice
officials respond to intimate partner violence with less law than violence that occurs
between strangers (Easteal, 1994; Ferraro and Boychuk, 1992; Hickman, 1995;
Lundsgaarde, 1977; Palmer, 1999; Rapaport, 1994; Vera Institute of Justice, 1977; but
see Auerhahn, 2007). In contrast, the effect of victim–defendant relationships on court
outcomes is less clear in more rigorous multivariate analyses that control for the effects
Dawson 401
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