A Law of Her Own: The Reasonable Woman as a Measure of Man

11 When Battered Women Kill

When Battered Women Kill Husband and wife, in the language of the law, are styled baron and feme. . . . If the feme kills her baron, it is regarded by the laws as a[n] atrocious crime, as she not only breaks through the restraints of humanity and conjugal affection, but throws off all subjection to the authority of her husband. . . . The law denominates her crime [of killing her husband] a species of treason, and condemns her to the same punishment as if she had killed the king. And for every species of treason . . . the sentence of women was to be drawn and burnt alive. —William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England American law derives almost entirely from the law of England in the eighteenth century. As this quote from Blackstone shows clearly, that legal paradigm did not recognize self-defense by a woman against her “lord and master,” father or husband. Men ruled the kingdoms of their homes: even the poorest peasant could go home and beat or kill his wife, and only rarely would the law intervene. If a wife (or daughter) attempted to defend herself, it was she who was culpable. Self-defense simply did not apply to women within the private, domestic realm; instead, killing a husband was tantamount to treason, regardless of the circumstances. Although this underlying rationale is now unacknowledged, in many ways the law still equates husband-killing with treason: such killing is presumed unreasonable, and the woman is seen as morally responsible for the man’s violence against her. The law of self-defense is framed in terms of how men “reasonably” respond to the violence of other men; women killing men isn’t part of the picture. The basic terms are skewed so that women who kill their batterers rarely fit the maledefined standard of a justifiable killing. And because at a subterranean 11 197 level the law equates husband killing with treason, women are held to a higher standard for asserting self-defense than a man would be in the same circumstances. Consider the case of Commonwealth v. Stonehouse. Carol Stonehouse , a police cadet, had a brief affair with William Welsh, a married police officer. Big mistake. After she finally succeeded in breaking up with him, he stalked and threatened her relentlessly for years. She changed her locks, called the police, went to court, changed her behavior so as not to “antagonize” him, moved—but she could not stop him from stalking and assaulting her. Welsh repeatedly broke into her home and trashed her belongings, breaking things and cutting up and urinating on her clothes and furniture. Almost daily Welsh let the air out of her car tires and followed her. He burglarized her home, beat her, and threatened to kill her if she didn’t return to him. He broke into her car, hid in the backseat, and then sprang on her, holding a knife to her throat, threatening to kill her—then saying he wouldn’t kill her, yet. Finally, Welsh appeared in Stonehouse’s kitchen pointing a .357 Magnum at her head. They struggled and he knocked her down, beating her head against the floor, screaming that he would kill her. When she managed to grab her own gun, he ran away. As Stonehouse watched from the porch, she saw him turn back. Believing Welsh was turning to shoot her, she shot and killed him. This is an almost textbook case of self-defense: anyone, male or female , in such circumstances would have felt in reasonable fear of severe bodily harm or death. However, Stonehouse encountered the inverse of the domestic discount—we’ll call it the domestic mark up: she was convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to seven to fourteen years in prison. Even the court that reversed her conviction saw Stonehouse as blameworthy for having been involved in a brief sexual relationship with Welsh. In a well-intentioned but essentially irrational analysis, the court trotted out the battered woman syndrome to explain why she didn’t leave and why she overreacted to the threat he posed. In short, because she had an affair with Welsh, killing him could only have been a result of “learned helplessness,” which would explain her subjective belief that she had to kill him, even though the risk was not objectively reasonable. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this case consists in the divergent views of the majority, the concurring opinion, and the short but vicious dissent. These three views...