Mary Winkler is free after serving 67 days, most of that in a prison hospital. (She was sentenced to 210 days and given credit for some 140+ days in jail before posting bail.) Her crime? She shot her husband in the back while he was sleeping. Her defense? She was an abused wife.
Winkler admitting shooting her minister husband, Matthew, with a 12-gauge shotgun on the night of March 22, 2006, in their parsonage home in Selmer, Tenn. She then drove to Alabama with her three young daughters, ages 8, 6 and 1, where she was taken into custody the following day.
She was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder, but on April 19, after eight hours of deliberation, the jury found her guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
There has been a lot of buzz about whether Mary Winkler got away with murder. The questions being asked are:
- “Was justice satisfied?”
- “Was her sentence too easy?”
- “Did she play the abuse card?”
The facts were presented, the jury deliberated, and the judge handed down a sentence that has been served. I wasn’t there and don’t pretend to know all the facts. I would just like to ask the bigger questions it raises for society:
- How can we stop someone from using the system to get away with murder?
- Can we tell the difference between a person who has been emotionally abused and a person with anger problems or not enough self-confidence?
- Can we punish someone for emotional abuse or is it the victim’s responsibility to seek help, walk away, or stand up to the situation?
- Should verbal or emotional abuse even enter into the equation in a case like this? Hitting someone is illegal, threatening someone with harm is usually illegal, but is yelling at them illegal? Is controlling them emotionally illegal? Even if you’re married to them? Should it be illegal or is that person suppose to take charge of their own situation and do whatever it takes to change that situation?
- Why does a victim stay so long that this level of control and helplessness takes over?
- How can professionals tell if these attributes still exist in Mary Winkler and will be rerun again in she gets involved with another man of similar personality?
- Unless medically unable, is a person ultimately responsible for their own care? Including not tolerating abuse of any kind – physical or emotional?
Controlling people tend to seek out relationships with people who can be controlled. That’s human nature.
Trying to punish someone and label someone as emotionally abusive is a slippery slope. If no threats are made, what is the basis for believing you are in danger? Is it your own assumptions? If so, is that fair to the “abuser”? Maybe all you have to do is speak up and things will change. Maybe all you have to do is leave and he will learn his lesson. Without any kind of documented threats, cases like these come down to choices.
Relationships are complicated for sure and I don’t know how the jury came to their conclusion, but it’s kind of scary to me.
Off the top of my head, it seems that in our “educate the public” world, we should focus more attention on educating young girls and women to recognize abusive signs or tendencies early in a relationship. We need to teach them that if there’s something going on in their relationship that just doesn’t “feel” right, there’s probably something wrong. We need to teach them to take corrective action long before threats begin or the beaten-down attitude takes hold. We should teach young girls and women to tell someone, just like we teach our children to tell someone if they’ve been abused, and keep telling until someone listens!
This website has some simple assessments or quizzes to help anyone - women, men, young, or old - learn to recognize an signs of an abusive relationship…
At the risk of sounding like a misogynist, I have to admit that the thing that ticks me off most about this case is that were it a man shot-gunning his wife in cold blood he’d be spending the rest of his years in prison or on death row. This seems like a straightforward case of murder in cold blood to me. I don’t care how “abused” Mary Winkler felt, she obviously never properly confronted her so-called abuser or tried to seek help (marriage counseling, support groups, etc)…
I find her claims of “sexual perversion” to be a bit far-fetched. Ok, so her husband wants her to “dress slutty” – not that he should be able to make her do that – but what’s the big deal? It certainly doesn’t justify her killing the man in cold blood.
No one besides Mrs. Mary Winkler and members of her family (who are obviously biased) seem to be able to corroborate her story about a long-term abusive relationship, and I just don’t believe that a person who stays in an abusive relationship has the right to “snap” and take another person’s life. Just because she “put up” with all this supposed abuse doesn’t give her the right to kill her husband. I’m sorry, call me an insensitive pig, but I just don’t believe murder was justified in this case.