Formal and informal communication in professional contexts

Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

Minnie Foster Wright is charged with murdering her husband John Wright after he killed her canary. Mrs. Wright is said to have knotted a rope around her husband's neck while he was asleep. Mrs. Wright should be acquitted for three reasons.

First, there is evidence that Mrs. Wright was an abused woman. The story does not say so directly; however, recent research on domestic violence shows that animal abuse and family violence are strongly linked. Batterers exploit the bond between women and their pets to coerce, intimidate, and control women. For Mrs. Wright and many battered women, a companion animal provides their only social support. Mrs. Wright's canary cheered her up by singing, and she loved the bird, as shown by the fact that she was going to bury it in a treasured keepsake box. She had no children either, which may have made her even more attached to her bird. She is described as the kind of woman who could be intimidated: "...kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and -- fluttery," the kind of woman men abuse.

Thus, Mr. Wright saw an ideal way to control his wife through coercion and violent action.

Secondly, Mrs. Wright cannot easily get a divorce. The story takes place before cars, when women can only get divorced if they can prove adultery. Mr. Wright "didn't drink and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man...like a raw wind that gets to the bone." Neither loveless-ness nor domestic violence was grounds for divorce because "a man's home is his castle." If she had complained that Mr. Wright killed her bird, or that he beat her, the law would do nothing about it. What a man did inside his own house was nobody else's business. Mrs. Wright was stuck with him.

Finally, the method she used to kill her husband was unique and clearly connected to the killing of her canary. The strangling of Mr. Wright followed his strangling the canary. This precipitating and shocking event led Mrs. Wright to snap and take violent action. The sequence of events does not point to murder. The most she can be guilty of is "voluntary manslaughter" not murder. Recommendation: A suspended sentence.

Breaking the Law in Order to Do "Right"

Sometimes, it is difficult to know what to do in a certain situation. The law may say one thing, but circumstances make what is legal wrong from a moral point-of-view. I have never been personally faced with making a decision to do something illegal, but a close friend of my cousin did about three years ago. His mother had terminal cancer. She had had chemotherapy, but it didn't stop the tumor from metastasis. She was suffering horribly. I only visited her once with my cousin. Her tumor was huge and oozing at that time. I couldn't stand seeing her that way, and the smell was awful, like rotting flesh. Anyhow, she asked her son to get her enough medicine to end her life. He told her to wait and think it over, but she said she was afraid she would get to the point where she couldn't administer the medicine herself. She might not be able to open the bottle or hold a glass of water to swallow the pills. And she didn't want him to help her that way -- she wanted to do it herself.