Undefining Crimes of Passion

An unfocused, meandering New York Times op-ed that struggles to find a point opens with a bizarre anecdotal paragraph.

On a cold October morning, Colin Canham and his wife, Sara Emerick, were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. Mr. Canham was found lying near a firearm outside the couple’s home. Ms. Emerick was inside. A detective told me that it seemed that Mr. Canham had committed a crime of passion — a legal term that implies a lack of premeditation, an act supposedly born out of love or devotion.

The link for “legal term” provides a relatively accurate definition of “crime of passion.”

In criminal law, a crime of passion is a crime committed in the “heat of passion” or in response to provocation, as opposed to a crime that was premeditated or deliberated. Provocation serves as a partial defense to a charge of murder because while it does not completely excuse the defendant of the killing, it can downgrade the degree of the crime, and therefore the associated punishment. For example, successfully showing that a killing occurred in the heat of passion may lower a murder charge to a manslaughter charge.

As should be obvious, nowhere in there is there anything to imply “a lack of premeditation, an act supposedly born out of love or devotion,” a phrase slipped in without any basis whatsoever and which serves as a focal point of the grievance. Granted, the writer, Julia Cooke, who is primarily a travel writer, uses the word “implies” to excuse the gaping hole between what the phrase means and what she says it means, but that doesn’t change the fact that the phrase means absolutely nothing of the sort. Passion could be love or rage. Passion is emotion rather than thought. But that doesn’t work with Cooke’s narrative, so she makes up a meaning that does.

Word choice has a profound effect on what we think of ourselves and one another. Terms like “crime of passion” can imply that violence is a consequence of love, and talking around violence can make you doubt that it will happen or that it will happen again. Silence reinforces the old-fashioned implication that a victim is, at least in some part, to blame for her own abuse, that a mother should have seen her daughter’s murder coming.

Corruption of words has a profound effect on people thinking nonsense because the meaning of words have been twisted from meaningful to nonsensical. It’s a game passionate people play to rationalize their feelings when the facts fail to work well. Cooke’s op-ed begins with the requisite anecdote about a man with whom she was friends who killed his wife in a murder-suicide. The cops called it a crime of passion, a murder that wasn’t premeditated. What we don’t know, and she doesn’t know, is what precipitated the crime and what role conduct occurred between husband and wife.

Certainly, domestic violence is bad, as if all criminal violence. And while the statistics show the victim is more likely the woman than the man, men are often then victims as well.

Intimate Partner Violence

• About 1 in 3 men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime.
• Nearly 56% of men who were victims of contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner first experienced these or other forms of violence by that partner before age 25.

In no way does this mean that violence committed by men against women is any less violent or criminal, although call this an epidemic is about as well-grounded as claiming there is a rape epidemic, when “rape” is stripped of definition and means any conduct that a survey responded feels is rapish. But such violence shouldn’t happen at all, and shouldn’t happen to anyone, regardless of sex.

What makes Cooke’s story worthy of retelling isn’t her simplistic recitation of domestic violence tropes or her childish effort to redefine crime of passion into some sort of male gaslighting of brutish men murdering helpless damsels.

The person we knew all those years ago did not seem to be violent. Yet to talk around the violence that we now know of, and its consequences, wrests some final measure of control from Ms. Emerick and her family. A friend said that both deserved our grief. I wondered if the friend feared that looking straight at what transpired would complicate grief beyond recognition.

Is this the information available, or Cooke’s passionate imaginings run amok? There is no argument to be made that the murder was justified, but does she know what gave rise to the act? Does she know what caused the rage, the frustration, the fear and loathing? Not only does Cooke care nothing about writing from a place of abject ignorance, filled in by her vivid delusions of how her once-close friend had turned into an murderous animal and was now only worthy of her hatred and derision, but she is shameless about trying to turn anyone who recognizes that the truth of what happened behind closed doors between husband and wife into an evil victim-blamer. Sometimes, the victim bears some blame. We don’t know either way.

In a tribute online, a friend of Ms. Emerick noted that in 2020 she expressed concern about her husband. Two days before she was killed, she called the police. He was drunk and trying to get into the house, she said. She didn’t pursue a restraining order, the detective told me — she was filing for divorce. No decorous words disguise the fact that her life was taken before she had the chance to leave.

No decorous words were uttered, despite Cooke’s desperate desire to pretend otherwise. A crime of passion is just the facts, ma’am, that it wasn’t pre-meditated. Otherwise, what happened remains unknown, but since both husband and wife are dead, there is nothing more to be done about it.