Kelly Hennessy
93 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 934
Intimate partner violence affects over ten million people across the United States each year. The primary societal response to this violence has been the criminal legal system, which has had the unintended consequence of creating a subset of accused persons, referred to in this Note as criminalized survivors, who are incarcerated for crimes committed against their abusive partners in response to their abuse. The criminal legal system’s conception of intimate partner violence, consisting of discrete violent incidents, creates issues for criminalized survivors trying to explain the reasonableness of their responsive force when claiming self-defense. “Battered woman syndrome” and its progeny, “battering-and-its-effects” evidence, which purportedly describe psychological and behavioral symptoms of someone who has suffered persistent intimate partner violence, are the chief adaptations to address these challenges. But they have numerous limitations that make them ill-suited to assessing criminalized survivors’ self-defense claims.
This Note argues that practitioners defending criminalized survivors charged with murder should adopt an expansive “social entrapment” framework, which considers the coercive control exercised by the abusive partner and the ways in which institutional indifference and structural inequalities support that control when arguing criminalized survivor’s self-defense claims. Such a framework will enable factfinders to better assess the circumstances as the criminalized survivor believed them to be when they engaged in defensive force, allowing factfinders to more accurately assess the reasonableness of the criminalized survivor’s actions.
