CCCJ seminar: 'Defending abused women charged with murdering their abusive partners: Thinking differently in order to see more accurately'

The Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice is delighted to announce that Professor Julia Tolmie will be speaking on:

Defending abused women charged with murdering their abusive partners: Thinking differently in order to see more accurately

Abstract: Defending abused women who are charged with murder for killing their abusive partners presents some common and seemingly intractable problems, despite the fact that knowledge about intimate partner violence has advanced considerably in the last couple of decades. In this talk it is suggested that part of the issue lies not in the law which gives shape to the legal defences but the “interpretative schema” that is used by decision makers in the trial process to understand facts involving intimate partner violence: This is the “bad relationship with incidents of violence” paradigm. A recent murder trial, The State of Western Australia v Liyanage, is used to demonstrate how understanding intimate partner violence as a form of “social entrapment” allows us to see a larger and more accurate picture of facts involving intimate partner violence for the purposes of assessing whether a woman who was being abused by her partner was acting in reasonable self-defence when she used lethal self-help against him.