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Battered Women, Straw Men, and Expert Testimony - A Comment on State v Kelly

NCJ Number
97488
Journal
Criminal Law Bulletin Volume: 21 Issue: 2 Dated: (March-April 1985) Pages: 125-155
Author(s)
J R Acker; H Toch
Date Published
1985
Length
31 pages
Annotation
The battered wife syndrome is yet another new defense competing for the attention of criminal law specialists. This defense seeks to explain the violence of wives directed at their husbands as the product of prior batterings.
Abstract
Often the reaction of the battered wife is delayed and occurs at an uncommonly serene moment. At other times -- as in the case analyzed here -- the prior beatings are offered to explain the wife's perception of the husband's seemingly innocuous (or certainly nonlife threatening) behavior as creating imminent danger. Should expert testimony be allowed to explain those perceptions? To explain why the battered wife stayed so long with the perpetrator of the beatings? (Publisher abstract)

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