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Testing The Assumptions Of The Provocation Doctrine, Carlton J. Patrick

Open Access Theses

The provocation doctrine, which mitigates the punishment for killings made “in the heat of passion,” is a longstanding and often criticized area of United States law. At the crux of these criticisms is the doctrine’s imprecision: courts and lawmakers continue to struggle to both delineate specific standards for its application and to offer a satisfying rationale for its continued existence. Here, we use an evolutionary-computational model of anger and intimate partner violence to inform these problems. Using the archetypal case of provocation—a male discovering his partner’s infidelity—we surveyed 1,939 males to address and test two of the doctrine’s core assumptions: …