MANDATORY INJUSTICE: TOUGH SENTENCE UNFAIR

Woman Abused Twice - First by Spouse, Then by the Legal System

A few words on behalf of Dixie Shanahan.

Granted, some might consider her a less-than-sympathetic figure. After all,
two years ago, Shanahan, a 36-year-old from Defiance, Iowa, killed her
husband with a shotgun blast to the head. She left his body decomposing on
the bed for a year.

But there is, as you might expect, more to the story.

Shanahan, backed up by friends, police reports and photographs of her own
blackened eyes, testified that her husband Scott beat her repeatedly for
years. She said he threw her down stairs, slammed her into walls, chained
her in the basement for days at a time, shoved her face in the toilet and
once hit her over the head with a plate because his mashed potatoes were runny.

The day she killed him was especially awful. He had been beating her for
three days, she said, angry that she was pregnant with their third child.
She says her husband had demanded that she get an abortion. When she
refused, he vowed to beat the baby out of her, hammering her repeatedly in
the stomach.

Shanahan fled the house. Her husband knocked her down and dragged her back
inside by her hair. Shanahan says he pointed a shotgun and said, "This day
is not over. I am going to kill you." Then he unplugged the telephones and
took them into the bedroom.

What happened next is in dispute. Shanahan says she went into the room to
call police. She says Scott made a threatening move and she grabbed the
shotgun. Prosecutors say Scott was actually asleep when his wife shot him
in the back of the head.

They offered a plea bargain that would have freed her in as little as four
years. Shanahan turned it down, gambling that she could avoid a conviction.
She could not. On Monday, she was sentenced to 50 years in prison. The
sentence was non-negotiable under Iowa's mandatory sentencing laws. It'll
be 35 years before she's eligible for parole.

Many observers are horrified. As one put it, the sentence "may be legal,
but it is wrong." This was Charles Smith, the judge in the case. The
sentence, said Shanahan's attorney, was like one last beating.

Could she have found a legal way to escape her husband? Yes. But the
judgment of battered people is often unsound.

Should she have taken the plea bargain? Definitely. But you know what they
say about the accuracy of hindsight.

The point is, even if you accept the prosecution's theory of the crime,
this sentence is not justice. Not even close.

But then, justice has become a rarer commodity since the "get tough on
crime" movement swept the nation during the Reagan years. Declaring the
courts too soft on crime, state legislators around the country decided that
judgment was too important to be left to judges. They enacted mandatory
sentencing guidelines that were supposed to produce tougher and more
uniform sentences.

Instead, those guidelines produce travesties. Consider the Connecticut
college student who was peripherally involved in her boyfriend's drug ring
- -- never sold drugs, never used them, had never been in trouble before.

Twenty-five years.

Then there's the Iowa man who kicked a door in.

Another 25 years.

And let us not forget the California man who stole a slice of pepperoni pizza.

Twenty-five to life.

Like the zero tolerance school policies they resemble, mandatory sentencing
guidelines leave no room for compassion or common sense. And you have to
wonder how many more of these tragic absurdities it will take before
legislators concede the obvious: these are awful laws.

While we await that attack of courage, Dixie Shanahan is filing her appeal
and beginning her sentence.

Anyone who thinks that's justice doesn't know the meaning of the word.