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IIJFMT 2(3) 2004

A Critical Review of Post-phase Period of Lorena Bobbitt’s Indictment

Husain M, Rizvi SJ, Usmani JA

Department of Forensic Medicine
J.N. Medical College
Aligarh Muslim University Aligarh 202002, India

Abstract

Lorena Bobbitt, 24 year-old Ecuadorian-born, manicurist, migrated to USA from Venezuela in 198. She had been living in Virginia at the time she cut the penis of her allegedly rapist husband on 23 June 1993. Thenceforth the world was rudely awakened and came to know about her earlier battered wife status. The Bobbitt drama sizzled right from the start of the trial up to the deliverance of justice. Though it created bubbles, it failed to arouse genuine bosom commiseration for her. This became the classic case of duality in dilemma. The person John Bobbitt, her husband, an ex-marine, who should have deserved sympathy the most, got the least. Thereafter, throughout the world, the allegedly victimized women got emboldened and several penises got slashed in rapid succession in exact duplication of Bobbitt’s act. This article deals with the possible after math repetition of specific crime for which has been glorified disproportionately by the media.

Introduction

In case of crime, the representations of the criminal are fascinatingly diverse rather than unanimous. A particular type of crime may evoke abhorrence in some and admiration in others depending on the influence the instigating factors may have on the formation of public attitude towards it. Obviously, some criminals are regarded as Robinhood, while others as bandits on rampage. The former class gets the admiration, the latter the opprobrium. These contrast feelings of love and hate get a fillip if the law appears to be taking the side of the accused, though in actuality it may not be the case. Hence the law must not only provide justice, it must be seen to be doing so unambiguously eliminating the scope of doubts being raised in the minds of crooked people. Hence misinterpretation of past legal judgment by some may be contrived as precedent for an escape and similar situational configuration could be created by latent criminals to invoke the benefit of earlier judgment to get reprieve for themselves. The author contends that exactly such a thing has taken place immediately in the post-Bobbitt phase leading to a spate in the enactment of similar episodes worldwide.

Was Lorena Bobbitt at fault?

The sensational trial of Lorena Bobbitt as reported in Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service verbatim: “The sensational trial of Lorena Bobbitt ended on Friday in a widely unexpected jury verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity for maliciously wounding her husband by severing his penis. …In a little more than six hours of deliberation after seven days of testimony and summations, the jury of seven women and five men accepted the 24 year old defendant’s contentions that John Wayne Bobbitt drove his wife to dismember him in their apartment bedroom June 23 by battering and raping her, and that she was temporarily insane and acting under an “irresistible impulse” at that time. …As mandated by Virginia law, Circuit Court Judge Herman Whisenant did not free Lorena Bobbitt, instead he committed her to a state mental hospital in Petersburg, Va., for a 45 day evaluation of whether she poses a present danger to herself and others. …A conviction for malicious wounding could have led Lorena Bobbitt to prison for up to 20 years and deportation to Venezuela. She now stands in no danger of deportation, defense lawyer James Lows said” 1. It has been argued by the author that the Irresistible Impulse Rule by which Lorena was put to trial was not exactly conforming to her pre- and post-slash behavior. There were many streaks of deliberateness in her conduct and hence, the judgment was critically viewed by many 2. The mere fact that she waited for John the husband to sleep before causing him grievous hurt, and subsequently carrying the piece of flesh with her and throwing it away after some distance may not be the litmus test of her innocence. Some even argued that the judgment was gender inspired. J.M. Beattie has persuasively argued that women may have been arraigned as often as men, but they seem to have been convicted proportionately less often. “The treatment of women was substantially different from that of men, for women were more likely to be acquitted and, if convicted, to be found guilty of lesser charge than that stated in the indictment” 3.

The law is seen to draw on uncertainties about the status of an injured party. And if the injured party is man and the aggressor the woman, then a multitude of channels are open to her to claim clemency. She can ‘plead the belly’ 4 or else provoke the courts by deliberately understating the gravity of the offence, thereby ‘pious perjury’ 5. This tempering of severity towards women has been rather implausibly explained by one eminent historian as the result of ‘instinctive chivalry’ 6.

Penises slashed – in the aftermath

To set the record straight the following cases are cited, picked up at random from newspapers and reporting magazines.

  1. “Woman repeats Bobbitt act”, screamed the headline in one newspaper. A woman residing in southeastern part of Bangla Desh, as reported originally in Bengali daily, Bhorer Kagoj, slashed off her husband’s penis 7.
  2. On August 2, 1994, in Bogota, Columbia, women’s wrath descended on a man and half of his penis was slashed off. He was drugged prior losing his penis by eating a piece of chewing gum laced with scopolamine 8. Scopolamine or Burundanga, as called in the vernacular is a substance that induces zombie-like state in the victim.
  3. A woman, 32 years of age, slashed the penis of her husband, aged 28 years, who later died. She was dubbed as “Panama’s Lorena Bobbitt”, after the name of the city in which the incident took place 9.
  4. A 28-year-old woman in Beijing cut the penis of her husband with scissors accusing him of philandering, and physical abuse 10.
  5. Hilarious analogy was established by serious editorial of a serious newspaper in which the writer claimed clemency for Mrs. Phoolan Devi, the Indian ex-bandit queen, who later became Member of Parliament and who was alleged to have been physically involved in the massacre of 18 “Thakurs” (a high caste Hindu).  To quote the editorial, “(if) Mrs. Bobbitt could obtain a near acquittal after having done the unthinkable to her husband, why must one hold it against Phoolan Devi even if she had chopped a few Thakur heads in her heady days?” 11
  6. In another incident “Bobbittised punishment” was inflicted by a Combodian wife to her newly married husband for being an over-sexed mate 12. This happened in Phnom Penh, the Combodian capital, and was reported in Khymer-language Rasmei Kampuchea newspaper.
  7. In yet another incident captioned in the newspaper as “Taking revenge Bobbitt style”, a woman in Fairfield, USA, seduced a man who she believed killed her boy friend and then sliced of his penis along with the testicles. Doctors were unable to re-attach Halls’ organ 13.
  8. As late as September 2004, a man has accused a doctor of a famous nursing home in New Delhi, of cutting his penis while he was treated there. No reason was given for this act. However, the press was quick in recalling this event as “bobbitttising”. 14

The name Bobbitt became synonymous to cutting the penis. The term “Bobbittised punishment” gained social acceptance if not legal dictum.

These are some of the cases, which were reported from different parts of the world. Apart from the commonality in the repetitive performance of the Bobbitt act, all these criminal acts took place in the after math of the Bobbitt slashing the genital, and herself getting glorified in the process. A women’s group went to the extent of deifying her; made her the heroin of valiancy, denounced the men folk, and rallied women trapped in violent marriages to perpetrate the ‘model myth’ by lending credence to the bizarre behavior 15.

Why was such a reaction possible emanating from far-flung areas that were geographically, historically, and culturally cut-off from one another? Stanley Cohen has hit the target as he explains: “A crucial dimension for understanding the reaction to deviance by the public as a whole is the nature of the information that is received about the behavior in question 16.

Adoration of an antisocial act

Throughout the world, the Bobbitt episode made majestic entry into the drawing rooms and held the conversation veered to it for months together. The mutilated victim aroused little sympathy. The attacker was given the credit for acting boldly. The law itself gave her the benefit of ‘momentary insanity’. The media contributed in its own way and the people were gently persuaded to adore this antisocial act. The fan mail to Bobbitt included cheques, cash, get-well cards, and one fan sent here a plastic meat cleaver as souvenir 17. Others capitalized on the growing and pervading notoriety and business boomed. Chocolate replica penises for USD 7.95 were put on sale in America. Slogan– carrying T-shirts made brisk sale. One radio station was reported to be giving away cans of juice, a fizzy drink and Frankfurters to sympathizers 18. The ‘Bobbitt Belt’ 19 promised to protect the chastity of women, and thus indirectly preserve the sanctity of sex. What a way! by mixing the sacred and the profane.

John Wayne Bobbitt without whose sacrificial loss of organ, this episode would have been non-existent was given the ‘star’ status and inducted for acting in ‘John Wayne Bobbitt–Uncensored” – a porno graphical film 20. He too received numerous fan mails mostly from women, who sympathized less in his misery and were more interested in his truncated penis. Few even challenged him to perform the sexual act with a stump.

Democratic Senator Mr. Robert Wexler proposed a bill to castrate rapists. He proposed in the bill imprisonment for first offence, castration by testosterone for the second offence, and electric chair for the third time offender 21. The press was quick in dubbing the bill a ‘Lorena Bobbitt Bill’, again a misplaced acknowledgement of the heroicalness of the Bobbitt act.

The question is: why did people, despite knowing the barbarity of the act, placed Lorena Bobbitt on a pedestal overlooking other lowly criminals? Perhaps the answer was provided by Faucault when he said that “these true stories of everyday history were received so avidly, if they formed part of the basic reading of the lower classes, it was because people found in them not only memories, but also precedents; the interest of ‘curiosity’ is also a political interest. Thus, these texts may be read on two sided discourses, in the facts that they relate, in the effects they give to these facts and in the glory they confer on these ‘ illustrious criminals’” 22. If this was the case then it becomes virtually impossible to find the consensus that would allow easy speculation about a general or universal attitude towards crime. Thus it is logical that law must be ‘seen to be serving the interest of the broader community in a fair manner it had indeed be doing so’ 23.

Conclusion

Lorena Bobbitt’s episode was dramatized and publicized to an extent it did not deserve. The natural corollary to such media loud speaking suppressed factual denominations and inflated unjustified passions. On a wider scale it gave rise to similar acts of crime elsewhere. It therefore, does not need be emphasized that aggressive and deviant behavior must be curbed firmly to prevent duplicated multiplication of such acts, may be with more refinement.

 
References

1. Martin K. Jury acquits Lorena Bobbitt. LA Times-Washington Post News     Service. The Hindustan Times, 23 January 1994.

2. Husain M, Usmani JA. Lorena Bobbitt – a case in point. J Ind Med Assoc 1996; 94:452.

3. Beattie JM. Crime and the courts in England 1660 – 1800. Oxford 1986; 438.

4. Elton GR. Crime and the Historian. In : Cockburn JS (ed) Crime in England 1550 – 1800. London 1977; 13.

5. Ibid

6. Ibid

7. PTI. Woman repeats Bobbitt’s act. The Hindustan Times, New Delhi. 7 March 1994.

8. Women’s wrath. The Times of India, New Delhi, 26 August 1994.

9. This Bobbitt is not so lucky. The Times of India, New Delhi, 5 September 1994.

10. The Times of India, 13 January 1998 .

11. The Hindustan Times, Editorial, 21 February 1994.

12. Woman cuts off husband’s penis. The Times of India, New Delhi, 2 November 1994.

13. The Times of India, 12 December 1997.

14. PTI. Man accuses Delhi doctor of bobbittising. The Times of India, 27 September       2004.

15. Usborne D. When she said ‘no’ she really meant it. In Independent, London. Quoted in the Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 14 January 1994.

16. Cohen S. Folks, devils and moral panics. London, 1972; p16.

17. Fan mail for Lorena Bobbitt. The Hindustan Times, New Delhi 18 February 1994.

18. Ibid

19. Reuter. ‘Bobbitt Belt’: the work of art in Rome. The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 10 March 1994.

20. Ibid

21. AFP. Bill moved to castrate rapists. The Hindustan Times, New Delhi 20 February 1994.

22. Faucault M. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (1975), trans A. Sheridian, London, 1977; 67-68.

23.  Beattie, J.M.: Crime and the courts in England 1660-1800. Oxford, 1986: 622

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