- Bishop Hill blog

The news today is that there is to be an overhaul of the law on homicide, with the partial defence of provocation being done away with. In its place will come two new partial defences:

killing in response to a fear of serious violence
in exceptional circumstances only, killing in response to words and conduct which caused the defendant to have a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged.

The spin that's being put on this is that it's all to do with domestic violence, and I've no reason to believe that this isn't the thinking behind the legislation. What is interesting is the effect this may have on the intruder in the house scenarios about which I've posted recently.

The scenario of a woman faced with an abusive partner who returns home drunk and threatening is, in many ways, rather similar to that of the homeowner faced with an intruder. While the battered wife knows her partner, she can't know how he will behave at that moment. The homeowner, of course, knows nothing of his opponent at all. With this information deficit, they both might end up killing their attacker.

In the past, as was noted in the Law Commission report which preceded these proposals, battered wives who kill their abusive husbands have been faced with a dilemma:

[D]efendants sometimes plead guilty to manslaughter for fear that a plea of self-defence might fail and leave them with a murder conviction.

If you follow the "audit trail" behind this claim, its source is evidence presented by a group called Justice for Women, which calls for law reform in support of battered wives. However, students of the case law around dealing with intruders in the home may well have come across the case of Brett Osborn, who stabbed a deranged intruder, and later admitted manslaughter for fear that the jury would reject a plea of self-defence. Assuming the facts of the case are as they seem, he appears to have had exactly the same issues to deal with as a battered wife.

This being the case, it looks very much as though the partial defence that will save the battered wife, might also save the homeowner. This new law could be rather interesting because it offers something to both left and right. The left will tend to support the battered wife, the right, the homeowner. One wonders what arguments are going to be put forward to try to limit the new law to one rather than the other.

(By way of an aside, there was a chap from Civitas on the telly today, arguing that the reform was not needed, because a battered wife could run away. But why should she, any more than the homeowner threatened by an intruder? )