Til Death Do Us Part,

¶ … Til Death Do Us Part, Nancy Gibbs highlights the plight of victims of domestic abuse who finally resort to murder to save themselves from a life of slow but sure self-destruction. By doing so, Gibbs effectively raises the issue of whether justice is being served when such women are convicted for their crimes.

Gibbs makes several valid arguments in her attempt to elicit sympathy for women who suffer from domestic violence. Indeed, the statistics she presents are, by themselves, sufficient to establish that this should be an issue of increasing social concern. However, Gibbs seems to imply that one solution to the problem may lie in a more sympathetic legal system, while simultaneously acknowledging that juries need to find a way to express outrage at the brutality without accepting murder as a reasonable response. On this point, it appears that Gibbs may be pursuing a line of fallacious thinking on the grounds that the law has always made room for killers in the form of, for example, soldiers. Gibbs's logic, here, is fallacious because she seems to overlook the fact that the examples she cites are of cases where killing takes place to protect society as a whole. Whereas the legal system cannot introduce laws that are tantamount, as Court Judge Lillian Stevens rightly points out, to authorizing preventive murder sanctioned by the judgment of a lone individual.