Agreed, though with a distinction between a crime of self-defense and a crime of passion, since the former is what I’d call justifiable homicide, whereas the later may be merely be unjustified homicide where I’d have some sympathy if the person had killed their abuser. (Acknowledging that the formal legal definitions may not always agree.) Add in the lack of comprehensive systemic protections for abuse victims and it’s not always easy to tell one from the other.
But to your previous point, it got me wondering if murderers are less likely to murder more than once because the justice system takes murder seriously (albeit grossly unevenly in terms of class, race, gender and so forth), whereas miscarriages of justice such as in the case of Brock “The Dumpster Rapist” Turner are commonplace. I’m still pretty skeptical that anyone wakes up able to deliberately kill someone and then loses that ability (though that may simply be due to my lack of imagination and ability to get into the mind of murderers), but I could certainly see how the likelihood of consequences provide the deterrent not faced by rapists. This would also seem to be at least a partial explanation for the regularity of murder-by-cops, shielded as they are by the abomination that is qualified immunity. Though of course a job where people get to commit wanton violence is geared to attract a certain type of person, so nothing is so simple.
