It's well past time to comment on this case, but with everything going on it kinda got pushed back. If you haven't paid attention (and for some reason want to now) here's a recap.
The verdict of voluntary manslaughter by 10 women and 2 men is in the books, but from my vantage point it seems a slight miscarriage of justice. Slight because Mrs. Winkler didn't deserve the chair or life in my opinion, but she also didn't deserve to be eligible to leave prison after one year.
The defense put Matthew Winkler on trial, which was no surprise since they had no other choice. They painted him as mean and sexually perverted, darn near responsible for murdering himself. Since dead men can't defend themselves the jury was charged with either believing her story or not. Apparently they bought enough of it to establish the necessary mitigating circumstances to drop murder to manslaughter.
Did the jury make-up (10 women) have any affect on the outcome? Hard to say, but since this is the kind of story that tends to split men and women depending on their experiences with the opposite sex, it's possible. Did the fact Mr. Winkler was a preacher affect anything? Did the societal stereotypes about stuffy, uptight men of the cloth come into play? Does this mean anything? Hard to say. Maybe Mrs. Winkler just got disenchanted with the Christian life. But there were so many other options besides a shotgun, and there's no evidence she feared for her life.
The evidence was that Mrs. Winkler was sneaking around town kiting checks after having fallen for one of those Nigerian scams on the internet. She had plunged their family far into debt without her husband knowing. Who knows if she ever told him the entire truth before pulling the trigger, but his last word to her was "why?".
By their partial nullification this jury sent another crappy message to society (we've seen so many this week) that murder is not really so bad if you can paint the deceased as the villain--like that Earl guy from the Dixie Chicks song.
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