Expanding Justifiable Homicide for abused people (mostly women)

Great Debates
41
  1. The threat is always immanent for battered women.
  2. I don’t think you understand the kind of fear that these women live under. They are told over and over (and have every reason to believe) that the batterer will kill them if they try to call the cops, or worse, kill their children, parents, etc. Law enforcement is not going to be able to protect them forever.
  3. TRO’s can be challenged and overturned if there is insufficient evidence that the person is a threat. The other person can also get them too. It wouldn’t make sense to do it any other way than to grant them immediately, though. They’re easy enough to have dismissed if there’s nothing to them. A buddy of mine had one dismissed quite easily.

You also shouldn’t necessarily take your friend’s side of the story as Gospel. People are always going to present things in the most self-serving way, and batterers have a way of turning themselves into the victim and making other people believe them. Not that I’m saying your friend is a batterer, just that batterers can fool people. They can present very differently to the outside world than they do behind closed doors

42

So what is the better option? To say with an abusive husband for 15 years and expose yourself and your kids to daily threats? You owe it to yourself and your kids to get out of that situation by whatever means necessary.

43

As long as the present situation is bearable–even if it’s utter hell–I can see how it would be better to bide your time than risk making a move that could push the situation into disaster and tragedy. I mean, if every day there is a 1% chance of death and making a proactive step carries a 50% of death, say, wouldn’t it make sense to try to wait it out and hope that something would happen that would tilt the odds in your favor? You wouldn’t think “I’ll live like this forever”, you’d think “maybe tomorrow I’ll get a better chance”.

Furthermore, there’s a psychological issue: if you are enduring and he snaps and kills your kids, that’s his fault. If you call the cops, he overhears you, snaps and kills your kids, that’s your fault. That may not be the most logical approach, but I can see how it would feel like that.

44

I’ve known too many people who stayed in abusive relationships. Some people are hardwired that way, whether they be man or woman. I don’t know the entire facts of the case, but if you’re being held hostage in a domestic setting for TWENTY YEARS, there will be a window of opportunity somewhere to run. She chose not to run. She chose not to contact the police and instead exacted her own revenge. While I understand her motive, I do not condone it.

45

She didn’t choose anything. That’s the thing that people don’t get about battered woman’s syndrome. Their own personal will is gone.

46

So what are you saying? Do you think she had no other choice, that she was ‘hardwired’?

47

Pretty much. It was justifiable self-defense. If someone is holding you hostage, and threatening the lives of you and your children, you don’t have to be namby pamby about how you get away. Kill the prick. God approves.

48

Diogenes, usually I agree with your logic. Not here. It was pre-meditated, she knew what she was doing, and she had twenty years to run.

49

It’s not true that she had prior opportunity to run. That’s what you’re missing. These women are terrified of trying to run. The guys promise them constantly, and with utter sincerity, that they will hunt them down and kill them, kill their children, kill anyone they love if they run. They make good on these promises too. Restraining orders have no effect on a guy who is already set on murder/suicide.

50

Ok, I know this may sound wierd… but it does connect with your last post: do you consider alchoholism a disease?

51

Addiction is a disease, yes, or maybe “syndrome” would be a better word. In any case, it has a genetic, physiological cause, not a behavioral one.

52

“He needed killing,” was why God invented trial by jury.

53

It’s not killing to punish, it’s killing in self-defense.

54

Fair enough. I wasn’t there, so I can’t verify what happened. However it is true that when the police showed up, she was arrested and he was not arrested. However, the local domestic violence group visited her (the alleged aggressor) in jail and offered their services. She went before a magistrate and he issued a temporary restraining order ex parte. My friend was at home the entire time. No reason that a phone call couldn’t have been given to him to allow him to at least present his side of the story. But that is beyond this thread.

I think it is terribly dangerous to say that because a woman is battered in a general sense that she has a right, at a time of her choosing, to use lethal force against her alleged batterer. First, what constitutes abuse? If I slapped my wife when I was 22 years old, but never did it again, does she live her entire life with a “Get out of Jail Free” card if she decided to shoot me?

Another thought. If this “disease” is so powerful that it makes a battered woman not able to pick up the phone to call the cops, walk out the door, or to use the massive amount of law enforcement that is on her side even if she is lying, then that person is mentally unfit to be outside of a hospital, let alone be given the key to be judge, jury, and executioner of her husband. I think that this attitude that women are so fragile that they are almost childlike in their rational decision making process goes against everything that the feminist movement has tried to accomplish.

55

It’s not judgement or punishment. It’s self-defense. Even people with diseases are allowed to defend themselves.

56

So she phones the police and says “I murdered my hsband” and the operator’s response is to look for an excuse?

57

A significant problem with changing the law in cases such as this is that the law, in a practical sense, has to be written in gender neutral terms. The most obvious reasons for this are to cover gay relationships, abuse by females, etc. There is also a temptation to try to expand the concept of abuse to psychological abuse and threats - the learning in the field is that woman can be intimidated and terrified by that just as they can by actual physical abuse.

The stereotype of abusive relationships where the woman never fights back is also overstated - frequently women do fight back, albeit sporadically and ineffectively, and albeit less frequently than they are abused.

A consequence of this is that gender neutral laws with wide definitions of abuse can put a powerful weapon into the hands of abusive husbands. If he eventually kills her after years of abuse, the only person left alive to tell the tale is often him. And he can portray himself as the victim of physical and psychological abuse (IME, the vast majority of abusive husbands typically think of themselves as the hard-done-by victim of a shrewish wife).

Not saying that the husband’s interpretation of any of this is valid. But there are hearsay rules and (in the US) 6th Amendment rules about confronting accusers, making it relatively easy for the husband’s perspective to dominate and distort what happened.

But the point of all this is that there is a serious risk of arming the wrong person with a defence. Tinkering with the law to cover hard cases often triggers the Law of Unintended Consequences coming to bite you in the freckle.

58

The practical application of the laws surrounding domestic disputes, restraining orders, domestic violence, etc. are a fucking train wreck. The central problem here, imo, is a lingering, very sexist approach to presumptions about who can and cannot commit domestic “violence” (abuse, battery, etc.). Most human beings will still presume that the “weak” female is the victim, whereas the “strong” male is the aggressor - it takes a lot of direct evidence to counter this.

Procedurally, as well, as has been noted upthread, there is an extremely intangible presumption that the “first-to-file/complain/call spouse” is the victim. This is primarily because the perceived costs of an erroneously finding in favor of the filer is minimal - oh, ok, the abuser has to go live at a friend’s place and they get a court record - when compared to the perceived costs of erroneously finding against the finder (they wind up dead).

Adjudicators (cops and judges) will view the “victim’s” evidence with both wide-angle and narrow focused lenses; if the particular incident doesn’t give meet the definition of “abuse”, most people will fill it in with the back story. If the particular incident meets the definition of abuse, then no amount of back story can ever explain or justify the incident (and I’m not talking about physical threats here - verbal sparring back-and-forth can easily form the basis for many restraining orders).

Unfortunately, this is a reality that has been crafted from years of experience - in most of the cases dealing with domestic abuse/violence, the “sexist” paradigm holds true, and in most of these cases, the victim is telling the truth, even without trial-level evidence to prove their point.

But, to answer the op: I am not in favor of an expansion of affording an expanded basis for justifiable homicide based upon “battered women’s syndrome” - there is no imminent danger that needs to be met with a legal right of self-defense. Some posters have analogized to hostage takers; I would seriously question the applicability of the affirmative defense of self-defense if you were in a hostage situation where you could successfully flee without drawing the attention of the hostage-taker and you decided to go and “kill the bastard” just because he wrought harm on you in the past.

Self-defense as a legal concept ought not to sanction vigilantism masked as a type of “yeah, well I really need to make sure I can get away” justification.

59

:rolleyes:

No. Asking what happened. When a woman calls 911 and says I just bashed in my husband’s head with a hammer, she’s not likely to be reporting that she elected to do that to collect the insurance money, on a whim. She’s probably reporting it because something led to it, and most often that’s going to be a threat or attack from the husband.

None of which is “looking for an excuse”.

60

Till you have gone through the hell of domestic violence I do not belive you should be able to warrant a response. In Wendy Moldonado’s case, leaving was not an option. This man was insane. Legally. He tortured her and her sons. You CANNOT escape those types of people. I thank God everyday that I was not in her shoes. I was a victim of domestic violence only seven months ago, and my family is in law enforcent and luckily, with their help I was able to obtain proper documents to get buy me time to get out. But restraining order do just that and only that- BUY YOU TIME! They are not a permanent fix to your situation. If somebody is willing to knock you around and talk down to you every day, a piece of court-ordered paper will not do a damn thing. I do not think you fully understand what it is like to see the man you love turn into a monster. Often several women stay in loveless relationships because they have children, what makes you honestly think they could escape a crazy, abusive husband as well. It takes more than just the will to leave, especially when involving children. You have to be 100% sure that your children will survive if you leave. Moldonado did not live in a large town, nor was she financially able to pick up and move far enough from him. After twenty years with that SOB she had had enough, the police did indeed come to her house that night(the entire time her husband was inside with the other three children and made sure to remind her that he was in fact with them and to “make the cops go away or else”) the police left, even when the nieghbors flagged them down. That was the night she killed him. And while I do not condone killing someone I can see how that was her only option. And in my opinion justifiable homicide laws do need to be expanded when dealing with domestic violence cases. As regards to whoever posted " so if i slapped my wife once, does that give her the right to shoot me?" You should really look up the definition of domestic violence. I promise you one single incident is deffinately not the definition of abuse. This is a reoccuring abuse that takes place for a stint of time, it is not a one time, in the heat of the moment slap. This is numerous broken ribs, thousands of bruises, spousal rape, torture for years that leads up to these type of rare incidents. Be mindful that whatever hell Moldonado endured was one of the most sever cases of domestic violence anyone has ever heard of being reported. Most domestic violence survivors, like myself, saw only a glimpse of what she did, and I still cannot get over my “hell” She would rather spend 10 years in prison than one more year with him, and she knows her children are safe, it is sad she is even in prison but do to the laws and the restraints of those present laws that is the outcome, remember her “freedom” before jail was not freedom at all. She was living in worse conditions than any jail could present to her.