“A CULTURE of misogyny in the justice system” is leading to men being given more lenient sentences for killing their female partners, domestic-abuse commissioner Nicole Jacobs and victims commissioner Dame Vera Baird QC have said. 

In a letter to Home Secretary Priti Patel, Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland, and Attorney General Michael Ellis, the commissioners said it was “difficult to understand the discrepancy” between domestic homicide cases. 

They pointed to the case of Anthony Williams, who was sentenced last month to five years for the manslaughter of his wife on grounds of diminished responsibility.

Mr Williams had claimed that he had “snapped” and strangled his wife Ruth after he complained that lockdown had been “really hard” and she had told him to “get over it.” 

The commissioners compared this with the case of Sally Challen, 65, who was given a lifetime jail sentence in 2011 for killing her abusive husband Richard, 61, with a hammer. 

The life sentence was eventually quashed and reduced from a murder to a manslaughter charge with a 14-year jail term. 

 “When compared to the five-year sentence handed down to Anthony Williams for killing his wife Ruth, it is difficult to understand the discrepancy,” the commissioners state in the letter, made public today. 

The two say that sentences received by men for such crimes “do not reflect the seriousness of domestic abuse, nor do they reflect the fact that these homicides often follow a period of prolonged abuse.

“We have seen the effects of a culture of misogyny throughout the criminal-justice system, to the detriment of women across England and Wales,” the commissioners say. “This is evidenced by falling criminal-justice outcomes for crimes that disproportionately affect women, particularly rape.”

They add that “this is clearly demonstrated in the response to domestic homicides.”

Rape prosecutions and convictions have fallen to their lowest level on record, leading to claims by campaigners that this amounts to an “effective decriminalisation of rape” in England and Wales. 

The commissioners are calling for every domestic homicide to be subject to an independent review and they want to see every such review scrutinised by an independent national oversight system that could be handled within the domestic-abuse commissioner’s office.