Court TV

I have to admit--I love Court TV. Well, most of the time. I do have some gentle suggestions for them. Show less of Cops. It gets old. At night, rerun highlights from the daytime Best Defense and other real court scenes. There are too many of us who work during the day and miss out. I do see Best Defense when I come home for lunch. But another suggestion--let's see less of Phil Spector. The guy is a bizarre freak. Enough already. It was interesting at first, but now it is just old news. And I mean old, as in Phil. Surely there are other real live trials going on somewhere that you could interlace with old Phil. Don't ya think?

Speaking of Court TV, one of the trials they did show in between sessions of Phil was the Mary Winkler case. That was a case from Tennessee. Mary, a preacher's wife, was charged and convicted of killing her husband. She had gotten involved in one of those Nigeria email scams and had caused the family to go into financial problems. One morning she shot her husband while he lay in bed, and then she took their three daughters and headed to the beach.

Long story short: she was caught and convicted, but served hardly any time at all. I don't have the time right now to go back and list all of the details about the charge and time served. But apparently preacher Winkler had a bad temper and was mean to her. It sounds like he wasn't too nice to their children either, at least the baby. He threatened Mary many times with the shotgun that she shot him with. I don't know the defenses that her lawyer used, but it may very well have been the battered women syndrome. (Think Farah Fawcett in the movie The Burning Bed.) That defense is a viable defense now. I have heard many men comment how she got away with cold blooded murder, or joke that they will have to sleep with one eye open now that women can get away with murder. It just shows that many men really don't understand the issue of battered women. But they might have also voted the way the jurors did if they had been in the jury room and heard all of the details that the public did not hear.