This article examines trends in the resolution of homicide cases involving battered women defendants from 2000 to 2010 in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Australia and Canada appear to have some commonalities in their treatment of such cases with higher acquittal rates and a greater reliance on plea bargaining to produce manslaughter verdicts, as compared with New Zealand. Although New Zealand’s small number of cases makes it difficult to generalise, its overall trends appear to be different from those observed in Australia and Canada, in both the high proportion of cases proceeding to trial and those resulting in conviction for murder. The authors conclude that there is a need to re-examine prosecutorial practices of proceeding to trial on murder rather than manslaughter charges even when manslaughter would be ultimately satisfactory to the prosecution, and of accepting guilty pleas to manslaughter verdicts in circumstances where the battered woman appears to have a strong self-defence case.
The author uses the premises and inquiries advanced by the literature on social inclusion to consider its potential for the re-visioning of criminal law and policy. She notes that criminal law and social inclusion are fundamentally at odds, but argues that governments and policy makers committed to inclusion in social and economic policy cannot fulfil that mandate without turning their attention to criminal law. She identifies the process of criminal law reform, the definition of crime, the enforcement of the law, and the outcomes of criminal law as areas for which social inclusion offers insights and directions.
This article uses the transcripts from an abused woman’s trial in Canada for first-degree murder of her husband to explore the expert testimony provided by Dr Evan Stark to support a potential defence of self-defence. His evidence focused on coercive control theory and provoked extreme resistance from Crown prosecutors, such that self-defence was ultimately removed from the jury’s consideration. The trial illustrates the advantages and challenges of using coercive control theory as well as its future potential.
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