Law Commons^™

Battered But Not Beaten: Women Who Kill In Self Defence, Ian D. Leader-Elliott Professor

Ian D Leader-Elliott Professor

This essay commences with a critical evaluation of the battered woman syndrome. It continues with an illustrative biographical fragment, before discussing the polemics of excuse and justification in American criminal law. The concluding section provides an account of the law of self defence and provocation in their application to defensive homicides against attack by an intimate aggressor. The argument of the essay is that Australian common law is capable of discriminating and compassionate justice, in cases of self defence against intimate aggressors and provocation by intimate aggressors. Recourse to the dubious theory that the victims of domestic violence are characterised …