Hastings Women’s Law Journal Volume 22 Article 5 Number 1 Winter 2011 1-1-2011 Evil Women and Innocent Victims: The ffecE t of Gender on California Sentences for Domestic Homicide Ryan Elias Newby Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hwlj Part of the Law and Gender Commons Recommended Citation Ryan Elias Newby, Evil Women and Innocent Victims: The Effect of Gender on California Sentences for Domestic Homicide, 22 Hastings Women's L.J. 113 (2011). Available at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hwlj/vol22/iss1/5 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Hastings Women’s Law Journal by an authorized editor of UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Evil Women and Innocent Victims: The Effect of Gender on California Sentences for Domestic Homicide Ryan Elias Newby* I. INTRODUCTION Karen Provencio is serving fifty years to life in prison for killing her husband in their Temecula home in December of 1998.' She insisted his death was an accident, caused by a gun going off in her hand when she removed it from their bed for safekeeping.2 She and her husband fought the night he died, and their children reported he was crying afterwards, before they went to bed. That night, she shot him in the head while he was sleeping.4 While she told friends shortly before the killing that he was mean to her, Provencio said she could not leave because she did not want to share custody of their children.' Several times over the two years preceding the murder, Provencio told her neighbor that she wanted him * Ryan Newby, Executive Articles Editor, Hastings Women's Law Journal, 2010- 2011, J.D.