§ 23.07 BATTERED WOMEN UNDER DURESS

• Jurisdiction: United States

§ 23.07. Battered Women Under Duress⁷⁷

A battered woman who kills her abusive living partner may seek to defend her actions on the basis of self-defense. Self-defense law has undergone significant change as a result of a number of battered woman self-defense cases that have made their way through the appellate courts in the past three decades.⁷⁸ Now, a new legal problem is developing: How should the law deal with a battered woman who commits a violent crime⁷⁹ or even participates in a crime spree,⁸⁰ as the result of domination by her abuser?

Battered women who wish to claim duress typically confront various legal obstacles. First, the abuser may order or simply expect the woman to commit a crime or assist him in its commission, without issuing an immediate (or any) coercive threat. The woman interprets his remarks or actions as threatening, in light of her battering experiences. Second, under ordinary duress principles, a person is not excused for committing a crime if she could have escaped the situation. Likewise, the defense is unavailable to one who is at fault in exposing herself to the coercive situation. In some of these cases, the prosecutor will argue that the battered woman had an avenue of escape from committing the crimes, yet she did not take it.

The key issue in most battered woman duress cases is whether the defendant will be permitted to introduce expert testimony regarding battered woman syndrome, or other evidence relating to the experience of being a battered person, to buttress her duress claim. The potential purposes of such testimony include: demonstrating that the battered woman subjectively feared her abuser even in the absence of an expressed threat; that fear of imminent harm was reasonable; and, in order to explain her failure to escape, the expert might testify regarding "learned helplessness," a common symptom of the syndrome, or seek to show that the woman effectively was trapped by her batterer.

Case law is still relatively slight, and the rulings on battered woman syndrome are mixed, but the trend is to admit battered woman syndrome evidence, although the proper purposes for its use vary. Courts are more likely to permit the syndrome evidence to support subjective claims by the battered woman (e.g., lack of intent to assist in a crime, or her subjective fear of imminent harm if she did not cooperate with her abuser)⁸¹ than to support the claim that her fear of imminent harm, where no threat is issued, was reasonable.⁸²

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