imagine a battered wife dies while getting beaten by her husband in what has become a routine occurrence over the years. The man often gets manslaughter because he did not intentionally mean to kill the woman--it was not premeditated and prior actions suggests that he would have stopped.

Now imagine the same woman kills her husband fearing for her life that he would eventually kill her. She usually gets first degree, premeditated murder. She had ample time to decide how to kill him and drew first blood before a beating.

Do you think this is fair? true, "battered woman's syndrome" has been used as a defense, but rarely works.

Yeah the justice system is screwed up. Of course that works the other way around too, if a father kills his child, kills a newborn baby, then fry him, but if a MOTHER does it, oh let's not be too hard on her, it's not like she did anything wrong. Just because it was born doesn't mean it counted as a person or a life.