Of course, not everyone champions gender neutrality when it comes to crime and punishment. Some find the fair sex to be justified in getting unfair treatment. "Women and men do occupy separate places in the collective psyche of society, " Jonathan Last wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard shortly after Tucker's execution. "Because society has a low tolerance for seeing them harmed, women -- even criminals -- have traditionally been treated differently by the justice system. Differently, but still, at least possibly, with justice. The loss of that difference is part of what makes [the] destruction of Karla Faye Tucker so disturbing."

This sort of paternalism -- which, as Last explicitly stated, also provides the justification for keeping women out of combat forces -- seems precisely the sort of sugar-and-spice rationalization that feminists ought to oppose. Yet they have remained largely silent on the subject, for several reasons. One is that when feminism becomes a movement for the advantage of women (rather than for equal treatment), complaining about favoritism toward women doesn't make a lot of sense.

Many also find it hard to admit the basic fact that in Western societies in the modern era, patriarchal norms have revolved less around the subjugation of women through violence -- one of the feminists' favorite themes -- than around less protectiveness toward women.

Far from denouncing double standards, many feminists have contributed to the excuse-making. When Betty Lou Beets, 62, was facing execution in Texas in February for the murder of her fifth husband, Jimmy Don Beets, battered women's advocates rallied to her defense, portraying her as a victim of years of domestic abuse. Beets had been convicted of shooting and wounding her second husband, Bill Lane, and had been charged but never tried in the 1981 death of husband No. 4, Doyle Barker. Beets had never claimed to have been battered during her trial, and had tried to blame the slaying on her two children.

Even when the death penalty is not at issue and even when there are no allegations of physical abuse, murderous women can still qualify for lifesaving prizes in the victim sweepstakes.

Some years ago, Betty Broderick, the California housewife who killed her wealthy ex-husband and his young new wife -- and claimed that the divorce and the alimony payments of $16,000 a month amounted to "white-collar domestic violence" -- became the subject of sympathetic profiles in Ladies Home Journal and Mirabella.

An essay in a feminist anthology on women and violence, "No Angels" (1996), lamented that support for battered women who fight back had not extended to "fighting back against an emotionally abusive husband" and denounced a TV movie portraying Broderick in a negative light as "misogynist."

Contrary to all the evidence, feminists also have asserted that it's women who are treated with extra harshness by the system. In her 1996 book "Still Unequal: The Shameful Truth About Women and Justice in America," Lorraine Dusky asserts that women receive "more severe sentences" for stereotypically male crimes, though she cites no evidence to support this. But according to a 1989 Bureau of Justice Statistics study, male violent offenders were more than twice as likely as women charged with similar crimes to be incarcerated for more than a year.

Other research has found that, even when factors such as severity of the offense and prior criminal record are taken into account, women are more likely to have charges dismissed or to receive a light sentence.

Advocates for battered women also have claimed that a woman who kills her mate is sentenced to an average of 15 to 20 years in prison, while a man gets two to six years. This appalling factoid seems to be pure fiction. A Justice Department study of domestic homicides paints a very different picture: Husbands who killed their wives received an average of 16.5 years in prison; wives who killed husbands got six years. While some of the disparity was due to the fact that more women had been "provoked" -- assaulted or threatened -- before the slaying, the study noted that "the average prison sentence for unprovoked wife defendants was seven years, or 10 years shorter than the average 17 years for the unprovoked husband defendants."

If one truly believes in the full equality of the sexes, it's not difficult to see that protectiveness toward women, whether motivated by chivalry or feminism, keeps us from acheiving a legitimate goal. As Patricia Pearson argues in her 1997 book "When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence," making excuses for women's violence ultimately strips them of moral agency and accountability. What does it say about women's ability to function in society, to be workers and leaders, if they are seen as more vulnerable to pressure and more easily forgiven for failing to cope with their emotional problems?

If women are to be treated as adults, we cannot recoil from the execution of a woman the way we do from the execution of a juvenile. The debate about capital punishment should focus on humanity, not womanhood. To demand equality -- yet ask for a special right to clemency -- just won't do.

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