NEW YORK -- A judge 'created an open season on women' by ordering probation for a Chinese immigrant who fatally beat his wife of 23 years after she admitted she had a lover, a woman's group charged Friday.
Justice Edward Pincus of Brooklyn cited cultural differences in ordering five years' probation for Dong Lu Chen, 51, who the judge convicted of manslaughter following a non-jury trial.
Chen was charged in the September 1987 death of his wife, Jian Wan, 40, who was hit in the head with a hammer at least eight times after she admitted she had a lover, according to trial testimony.
'Marriage is a sacred institution in China,' said Chen's lawyer, Stewart Orden. 'When there is this kind of situation, the attendant shame and humiliation is magnified a thousandfold.'
Pincus, in ordering probation, cited the 'cultural aspects, the effect of his wife's behavior on someone who is essentially born in China, raised in China and took all his Chinese culture with him to the United States.'
'This sentence has created an open season on women,' said Francoise Jacobsohn, president of New York Chapter of the National Organization For Women.
'Well, we've declared open season on judges who consistently let their prejudices and biases against women permeate their judgments,' Jacobsohn said, announcing her group is filing a bias complaint against the judge.
Prosecutor Kenneth Rigby, who had asked for the maximum penalty of five to 15 years in prison, said the sentence 'sends a message that you could go out and kill your wife and get away with probation.'
Doris Koo, executive director of the Asian Americans for Equality, an advocacy group in New York's Chinatown, also was outraged.
'This kind of sentence brings injustice not only to the person who was murdered but to a whole culture,' she said. 'It does set back the women's fight for equality in Chinese culture.'
Orden noted cultural differences in his defense of Chen, who immigrated to the United States from Canton in 1986, lived in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn and worked in a factory in Chinatown.
'The basis of the defense was not that it's acceptable to kill your wife in China. The basis of the defense is the emotional strain based on cultural differences and the state of the defendant's mind,' Orden said.
