Is it true that in England until the 19th century if a married women commited a crime her husband could be punished for it? What about Norway during the same time period?
Why post this in Cafe Society? 
This is meant for GQ, so off it goes!
Whoops! :o Sorry, this should have been in GQ.
Google fails me on this (or rather I cannot phrase my query correctly) but I would be surprised if a husband could go to jail for a crime his wife committed at anytime in history. Seems too subject to abuse. Don’t like your husband? Kill his friend and off he goes.
At a guess I wouldn’t be surprised if a husband was financially liable for wrongs his family did and perhaps by extension if he couldn’t pay he’d go to jail but beyond that not sure it makes sense.
Umm, I have a distant relative that was jailed when her husband was caught stealing from his employer. Didn’t matter that she didn’t know he was doing it or never saw the money. Had no money to get bailed out, etc. So she copped a plea, divorced him and is now married to a cop. (Trying the other extreme I guess.)
While the guy was also arrested, etc., he magically had the means to make sure he got off light. So she ended up suffering more for the crime than he did.
There have also been a lot of cases over the years in the US where one spouse racks up a lot of unpaid taxes (even after a separation and such), skips out, then the other spouse is the only one the IRS can find. Guess what happens then.
Please keep in mind, that there is a huge gulf between the idealized version of US law and how things work in practice.
What was she charged with? Receiving stolen property? Or did they accuse her of plotting with him to steal?
I’d be very curious to know how that worked. I have never heard of a spouse in this day and age in the US getting pinched for crimes the other spouse commmitted unless they were somehow part of the crime. If you find out your spouse comitted a crime do you have to turn them in or be guilty of a crime yourself? I didn’t think so but I do not really know. (Is anyone guilty of a crime for not reporting anyone else they know who commits a crime?)
Historically, there have been periods where the authorities have hesitated to put a pregnant woman in jail. (Possibly kindness, possibly just the extra hassle to the jail of having to deal with a child, also.) So if the wife was pregnant, they might have sent the husband to jail instead. Especially if the husband benefited from the crime, like the stolen goods being in his house, or the stolen money went toward his food, clothing, etc. (For capital crimes, there was an even stronger feeling that a pregnant woman should not be executed. So they would wait till she gave birth, then carry out the sentence.)
Currently, in the USA, married couples often file taxes jointly, and both people sign the return. Therefore the IRS can go after either or both if the return is false. (But the IRS is pragmatic. I know of cases where, post-divorce, one spouse reported that their joint return way under-reported income (and provided documents to prove it). The IRS only went after the other spouse for this. They even said the reporting spouse would get the 10% reward if they won the case.)
And there are various other offenses one spouse could be charged with, after the other spouses’ crime, as mentioned:
- receiving stolen property.
- concealing stolen property.
- aiding & abetting (hiding) a criminal.
- accessory after the fact.
But these wouldn’t involve one spouse going to jail instead of the other; these are separate crimes the person could be charged with. It’s possible for one spouse to be convicted on and ‘accessory’ crime, while the other spouse is not convicted on the original charge. Like they aren’t able to prove that the husband stole the property, but can prove that it was found in the wifes’ possession.
What about Turkey within the past 50 years?
FatBaldGuy and Whack-a-Mole asked for more info about my relatives case.
Yeah, she was charged with receiving stolen property (cash she didn’t know existed), accessory and who knows what else. Note that as a spouse she could not be “forced” to testify against her husband. So what prosecutors can do in such a case against a poor person (without any real evidence) is just throw a lot of charges at the innocent spouse, put them in jail knowing that can’t raise bail, and offer a deal to testify. Of course, in this particular case, she had nothing to testify about so she was screwed. As far as the prosecutor was concerned, she was impeding the investigation so she deserved to sit and rot. The role of most public defenders in a lot of places is to negotiate the plea bargain. Actual guilt/innocence is not usually an issue. They got a lot of cases to handle and hardly any time to spend on each one.
Ideally, this would never happen the the US. In practice it’s another world.
It’s true that most PDs are woefully overtaxed with cases. But I still object to the idea that most or even many PDs execute their roles simply by negotiating a plea. The reason they negotiate so many pleas is that typically the cases they are facing are strong. But most PDs would balk at advising someone to plead into a weak case.
Wikipedia has this to say in the article Coverture
And also