Funny how people are willing to protest against certain sentences said in a TV show, but they won’t be moved by the blatant gender discrimination in Jordanian law and legal proceedings:

Woman handed death sentence for killing her husband

By Rana Husseini

AMMAN - The Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced a 30-year-old woman to death after convicting her of stabbing her husband to death on April 20, 2007.

The tribunal declared the woman, a mother of four, guilty of the premeditated murder of her husband at their home in Irbid and handed her the maximum punishment.

Court papers said the defendant was involved in extramarital affairs and her husband of 11 years discovered them and threatened to tell her family.

Fearing a scandal, the defendant decided to kill her husband and secured a knife for this purpose, according to the court verdict.

On the day of the murder, the woman wore gloves and stabbed her husband several times in the neck while he slept, the court said, adding that she then called the police and her brother-in-law, claiming that a burglar killed her husband while attempting to rob their house.

The court did not mention how investigators determined she was the main suspect in the case.

A government autopsy indicated the victim was fatally stabbed three times in the neck and pathologists also detected defence marks on his arms, according to the court verdict.

Shortly after the murder was committed, officials had told The Jordan Times that the defendant told investigators she murdered her husband because she heard he was planning to take a second wife.

But on Tuesday, a judicial source told The Jordan Times that the woman “confessed in front of the criminal prosecutor under oath to murdering her husband to prevent him from exposing her illegitimate affairs”.

The tribunal comprised judges Omar Khleifat, Mohammad Abu Dalbouh and Hayel Amr.

The verdict will automatically be reviewed by the Court of Cassation within the next 30 days.

I say fine, if the woman is guilty then she should be punished accordingly. But I say it is NOT fine that the Jordanian law looks so superficially interested in achieving justice when the contradictions in its folds are so manifest. The men who kill their wives or female relatives when they SUSPECT them of having ‘inappropriate’ relationships are ALWAYS semi-pardoned to the extent of serving a meager three months in jail.

How many men in Jordan are involved in ‘inappropriate’ relationships? And do we really trust that the infamous article 98 will treat women killers of unfaithful men with the same leniency it treats the men? Like I argued before, it seems that Jordanians’ understanding of the word ‘honor’ is synonymous with a woman’s vagina, which is why a man does not have much honor to speak of, per se, unless he controls his female relatives ‘vaginal honors.’

Think about it. What would a woman who kills her husband upon catching him in an adulterous situation say in her self defense? ‘I killed him to protect my honor and my family’s honor’? The fact remains that the discrepancies between the theoretical and the practical in Jordan, both legally and socially, are so vast as to prevent justice from setting in this country.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Jordan, Opinion, Wonder Woman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.