Proving the rule that pastors and/or their wives get one free murder.

Dr. Helen notes that Mary Winkler received custody of her victim's children:

Killer Mary Winkler gets her kids back. I have no words to describe how unfair the justice system is towards men who are slaughtered by their wives.

According to Glenn Sacks:

Mary Winkler--who shot her husband in the back and then refused to aid him or call 911 as he slowly bled to death for 20 minutes--walked away a free woman last year after serving a farcically brief "sentence" for her crimes.... Mary Winkler was granted supervised visits with her daughters last year. Now, sadly, she has gained back custody of the three girls....

Mary Winkler’s claims of abuse were largely uncorroborated during the trial. According to the testimony from Matthew Winkler's oldest daughter, Patricia, the dead father--who as he lay dying looked at his wife and asked "why?"--was a good man and did not abuse her mother.

Vox Day remarks

It won't surprise me in the least if one or more of those girls eventually elects to avenge her father's murder. The situation certainly seems to cry out for that sort of remorseless Greek nemesis. And why shouldn't the girls feel free to take justice into their own hands, when being female grants a license to kill in Tennessee?

This was an outrageous case, but I don't think that we can factor out the sympathy Winkler got as a pastor's wife. I have in mind the Hurth case in Fresno, where a Baptist pastor and police chaplain was acquitted of murder for handcuffing and killing the husband of his lover and then cleaning up the evidence. I suspect that in some communities there is a buried assumption that such people really can't be murderers.