Posted by
Glamour Girl on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 5:24:48 PM
To refresh some of your minds, Mary Winkler is the widow of a preacher named Matthew whom she shot dead in their home. Ms. Winkler was convicted of said 2006 slaying for voluntary manslaughter. She was originally charged with first degree murder but the jurors convicted her of a lesser charge after she testified using the famed word that I'd like to term "the victim". Ms. Winkler testified that her husband abused her and demanded sex that she deemed unnatural. WInkler was then sentenced to 3 years in prison but only had to serve 67 days :12- in jail and the remaining days in a mental facility. The remainder of her term will be served out via probation.
Now for my opine.
Ms. Winkler again brings to light the systems inability to actually rid of the people who are harmful. It seems to me we allow the perpetrator to get off and never really give in to the actual victim. Okay so thats one point. But what really bursts my bubble is when the perpetrator, in this case the murderer, uses the victim excuse to get off. If Ms. Winkler really gave two craps about her husband, she never would have pulled the trigger. Okay so lets say for the sake of argument that he did abuse her. Then I would feel sorry for her if she never committed the murder to begin with and just divorced the man. The key thing here is that this woman never truly felt sorry for her crime. If I loved a man and then killed him, I would at least expressed some guilt. This woman never showed any. For that reason alone she should be behind bars to contemplate her decisions. But of course she was relieved when she murdered him, not empathetic. She could have cared less about him. To me that shows a person did not commit this crime voluntarily but in fact willing and knowingly. Not in the heat of passion, not because she was confused or hurt, but because she wanted to get rid of the problem. Which of course she did when she killed him So there really is no purpose of a mental facility. There is nothing mentally ill about this woman. She knew what she was doing. She just did not care.