Intimate Partner Homicides and the Criminal Justice System
When a battered woman kills her batterer, the pub- lic reaction at first seems hard to fathom: A signifi- cant part of the victims’ rights movement is deeply concerned about the plight of these “murderers.” For decades, the movement has raised money to pay the fees of defense attorneys, packed court- rooms to demonstrate solidarity with the accused, and held rallies outside prison gates demanding new trials, parole, pardons, or clemency for some of the killers within (Schechter, 1982; Johann and Osanka, 1989; and Gross, 1992).
From the standpoint of the law, the dead man is the victim, and the woman who took his life is the offender. But from the perspective of groups advancing the interests of battered women, the offi- cial designations of offender and victim are mislead- ing. The female convicts behind bars are not really criminals and don’t deserve confinement. The mor- tally wounded husbands or boyfriends are not bona fide victims but actually are dead aggressors. The battered women who ended these vicious men’s lives are the genuine victims, not offenders.
Victim-blaming and victim-defending view- points lead to opposite conclusions regarding the tragic endings of these tortured love affairs.
Arguments Stressing That the Brutal Man Did Not Deserve to Die
Victim defending means siding with the dead man and arguing that his provocations, outrageous as they might have been, were not sufficient to justify the woman’s overreaction, and that what she did cannot be condoned. Victim defending leads to offender blaming: She must be punished for the terrible crime she committed.
Victim-defending arguments on behalf of the deceased are put forward most directly by the
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detective who arrests the battered woman and by the prosecutor who presses charges against her. Their reasoning goes as follows: His fits of temper and violent outbursts were wrong, even criminal in nature, but so was her escalation of the level of conflict. She went too far, using criminal violence to halt criminal violence. She did not explore and exhaust all other options open to her before she chose to resort to deadly force. In particular, she should have fled their home, escaped his clutches, and dissolved their relationship. The battered woman did not fulfill her legal duty to retreat (and flee) but instead stood her ground and engaged in mutual combat. Cases in which brutal men were shot while asleep or unconscious from too much drinking were clearly acts of vengeance, motivated more by fury than fear. Such actions in retaliation for alleged wrongs cannot be stretched to fit an expanded definition of self-defense predicated upon standards of a reasonable response to an immi- nent threat. In the final confrontation that ended their stormy relationship, the battered woman retal- iated in kind, getting even with her husband for past abuses. She struck back to settle old scores and to punish her husband for tormenting her. Such attempts by a woman to be the judge, jury, and executioner of an abusive husband, by taking the law into her own hands to deliver a dose of vigilante justice, cannot be permitted. His death must not go unpunished, and she must not get away with murder (see Rittenmeyer, 1981; and Dershowitz, 1988).
Victim defending asserts that the truth about their relationship will never be known. The dead man’s side of the story cannot be told, and the woman’s version of the events stands largely unchal- lenged. Her account of what happened between them over the years is self-serving: He is depicted as uncontrollably, irrationally, chronically, and sav- agely violent. In her view, the couple’s problems were entirely his fault. This impression is reinforced by her use of the terms batterer, initiator, and aggressor to describe him, and target, object, and victim to refer to herself. The explanations of the survivor unrealis- tically place the burden of responsibility solely on the deceased party (see Neidig, 1984).
Victim defending concludes with several obser- vations. First of all, courtroom testimony should focus on the woman who did the killing. The deceased whose reputation is being vilified is not on trial and cannot counter the negative portrait she is painting. Second, there must be better ways for a decent society to express its outrage at the brutality some women are forced to endure than to symbolically condone revenge killings and excuse lethal preemptive strikes. Not prosecuting wrongdoers, or acquitting defen- dants who clearly broke laws to retaliate for past beat- ings, or granting clemency to convicts only encourages others to pursue these same drastic courses of action (see Caplan, 1991; Bannister, 1992; Frum, 1993; and Gibbs, 1993b).