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University Distinguished Lecture
Moral and Criminal Law Reflections on Battered Women
Who Kill Sleeping Abusers: Convict or Acquit and Why
Abstract
In recent years, happily, lawmakers, domestic violence activists, and
scholars have focused on the right of battered women to be protected
from their abusive partners. As part of this trend, some courts have
held that a battered woman, especially one who suffers from "battered
woman syndrome," who kills her abusive partner while he is asleep, is
justified in doing so under the doctrine of self-defense.
But, should the law justify such a killing? As sympathetic as the
battered woman's claim is, I will argue that the law should not treat
such a killing as proper. To do so requires an expansion of the law
of self-defense in a direction we will ultimately regret; and the
moral argument that it is right to kill a sleeping man is a morally
coarsening principle we should reject.
This does not mean that a battered woman who kills her sleeping abuser
should necessarily be convicted of a crime. I will seek to defend the
position that, although such homicides are morally and legally wrong,
a woman who kills in such circumstances should be allowed to assert a
legal excuse--a claim that her conduct is wrong, but that she is not
morally to blame. In the past, lawyers who took this position sought
to argue that battered women were insane, but I will suggest a defense
that lawyers have ignored, which permits the law to protect the
sanctity of human life (even that of the abuser), does not treat the
battered woman as "crazy," but which also recognizes a potential basis
for legal exculpation for the woman, without sending the wrong moral
message. And, throughout this Lecture, I will also try to show why we
ought to care what moral message we send through the criminal law.
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