Judge Blames Wife's Adultery For Man's Abusive Act

A judge in Portugal has ruled that a woman’s sexual immorality justified her husband kidnapping and beating her. He used the Bible to justify his ruling, and let the man off the hook.

The Portuguese man conspired with his ex-wife’s former lover to kidnap her and beat her with a nail-spiked club. He has escaped jail time.

The judge cited the Bible while letting the man go. “Adultery by a woman is a very serious attack on a man’s honour and dignity,” the judges wrote in their ruling earlier this month. “In the Bible, we can read that the adulterous woman should be punished with death … society has always strongly condemned adultery by a woman and therefore sees the violence by a betrayed, vexed and humiliated man with some understanding,” they said.

The judge said that the woman's disloyalty pushed the ex-husband into depression which then led to the act of violence. The judge, Neto de Moura, has made similar judgements in the past. Last year, he overturned a prison conviction because the woman had cheated

The ruling has been met with outrage. Amnesty International Portugal has said that the ruling is a manifest violation of the church and state. A women’s union is planning to protest in downtown Lisbon. Even religious authorities condemned the decision. Rev. Manuel Barbosa said that nobody should justify any kind of violence, even in the case of adultery. He said that the judge had incorrectly referred to scriptures in his ruling.

The woman had filed charges after the incident in June 2015. Her ex-husband was given a 15-month suspended sentence and a fine of $2,000. The prosecutor wanted a harsher sentence for him and asked the appeals court in Porto to give him a prison time of 3 years and 6 months.

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