StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...
Free

Battered woman Syndrome - Essay Example

Cite this document
Summary
However, there is the potential for misuse of this defense. Two cases will be examined to show the pro and cons of the Battered-women Syndrome/Battered-women Defense. The first case is…
Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER98.2% of users find it useful
Battered woman Syndrome
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "Battered woman Syndrome"

Battered-women Syndrome/Battered-women Defense The Battered-women Syndrome/Battered-women can be a good thing when used appropriately. However, there is the potential for misuse of this defense. Two cases will be examined to show the pro and cons of the Battered-women Syndrome/Battered-women Defense. The first case is Francine Hughes. If any case deserved a Battered-women Defense, the Francine Hughes case did. The second case is the Betty Broderick case. Betty Broderick portrayed herself as a battered woman, but was in reality a cold-blooded killer.

Both cases will show how the Battered-women Defense should or should not be used. Francine Hughes was married to an abusive man for thirteen years. She tried to leave, even divorcing her husband. However, her ex-husband moved back in. When Francine tried to go to school, her ex-husband would rip up her books. Francine would try to go back home, to the Department of Human Services, and even the police. No one could or would help. Finally, after her ex-husband raped her, Francine set his bed on fire.

Francine was not verbally abused, but beaten, raped, and put in the hospital over and over for thirteen years. When she went to trial her defense was the Battered-woman Defense. A jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. Francines case generated much interest in the United States, with the focus on domestic violence (Westervelt, 102). The book and movie The Burning Bed caused Americans to stop and think about abused women for the first time. This story happened in the late 1970s, with the book coming out in the early 1980s.

At that time battered women needed a defense for protecting themselves from abusive spouses. Yet, as the 1980s wore on, the Battered-woman Defense started to be misused. Betty Broderick definitely misused this defense. Betty Broderick was not a battered woman, but a scorned one. It began when her husband, Dan, began an affair with his secretary. Betty felt that the deception was mental abuse. Finally, Bettys husband left her for his secretary. After a nasty legal battle, wherein she felt ganged up on, because Dan was an attorney, Betty was left with nothing.

She had left her four children on Dans doorstep, so he could understand how she felt. It backfired. Dan kept the children. However, the courts did order him to pay $16,000 a month, plus insurance and other bills. Betty in the meantime started breaking into Dans home and vandalizing it. The final straw was when Dan married his secretary. Betty stole her daughters keys, let herself into Dans house, and killed him and his wife, Linda. Upon Bettys arrest, she used the Battered-women Defense.

She was allowed to use this defense, though no one ever saw Dan hit Betty. She even admitted that he did not physically abuse her. Betty was the one who threw things at Dan. She was the one who rammed her Suburban into his home. Betty was the one who broke in to his home and vandalized things. Yet at trial she was able to use the Battered-wife Defense. It almost worked. The first jury was hung. She finally was convicted of murder and sent to jail. The travesty was by using the Battered-wife Defense, Betty drug Dan and Lindas names through the mud.

This case should never have been tried under this defense. In the second trial, the judge did limit the amount of testimony for Battered-wife Defense. She should have never been able to claim to be battered, when she clearly was not. The Battered-wife Defense is good for truly abused women. Women that have tried every avenue of escape, with murder as their last option. This defense should be allowed by women who are seeking revenge, money, or to get rid of their spouse. It all depends on how this defense is used.

ReferencesMcNulty, F. (1989). The Burning Bed. USA: Avon Books.Taubman, B. (2004). Hell Hath No Fury: A True Story of Wealth and Passion, Love and Envy, and a Woman Driven to the Ultimate Revenge. USA: St. Martins True Crime. Westervelt, S. D. (1999). Shifting the Blame: How Victimization Became a Criminal Defense. USA: Rutgers University Press.

Read More
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(“Battered woman Syndrome Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words”, n.d.)
Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/miscellaneous/1542709-battered-woman-syndrome
(Battered Woman Syndrome Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 Words)
https://studentshare.org/miscellaneous/1542709-battered-woman-syndrome.
“Battered Woman Syndrome Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 Words”, n.d. https://studentshare.org/miscellaneous/1542709-battered-woman-syndrome.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF Battered woman Syndrome

Female Juvenile Delinquents

Most psychologists have drawn an analogy of female delinquency to the condition of Battered woman Syndrome that is manifested among married women (Paludi, 2011).... Law Name: Course: Tutor: College: Date: Female Juvenile Delinquents Recently, the girl child has garnered a lot of criminal study, as opposed to the past time when the statistics mainly paid attention to the male child only....
3 Pages (750 words) Term Paper

Battered Woman Syndrome

Name Professor English Date Battered woman Syndrome What I Assume In the recent past, instances of women beating up men in a domestic setting have increased, and it is not a rare case to hear instances when women have killed their own husbands.... English Battered woman Syndrome What I Assume In the recent past, instances of women beating up men in a domestic setting have increased, and it is not a rare case to hear instances when women have killed their own husbands....
3 Pages (750 words) Essay

Battered Woman Syndrome and the U.S. Court System

Battered woman Syndrome (BWS) is a variation of the self-defense claim in assault and murder cases where a woman asserts an affirmative defense based on her psychological state as the result of a pattern of abuse by her batterer.... BWS seeks to justify a woman's criminal conduct as excusable due to a diminished mental capacity combined with an understandably urgent need to end the abuse.... No reasonable person wants to punish a woman who has endured physical abuse over the course of months or years just because she chose to end that abuse by assaulting her attacker when he was asleep, for example, and not posing an immediate danger to her at the moment....
3 Pages (750 words) Essay

Challenging Attitudes Toward the Abused Woman

The cycle of abuse and the adverse affects on battered women is one that has been misinterpreted and sometimes not approached by psychologists and others who have looked into this field.... Walker has gained the title of being the mother of battered women because of her significant contributions and developments in the field of psychology, specifically which intertwine with the concepts of abuse.... Her prestige in the field of battered women has earned her the title of Diplomat in Clinical and Family Psychology....
12 Pages (3000 words) Essay

Defending your case

t is not an effective defense because the Battered woman Syndrome is not exactly seen as a legal defense but the counsel can cite Violence Against Women Law.... The Battered woman Syndrome is also not a full-blown disease, but only a variant of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.... For me, the Battered woman Syndrome/Defense is quite effective because it shows reality that a person can actually turn into something unexpected when push comes to shove....
2 Pages (500 words) Essay

The Cycle of Violence Theory

The Battered woman Syndrome.... Lenore Walker, a researcher and feminist, first introduced it in the 1970.... She based this theory on interviews carried out with women who had survived violent relationships.... The Cycle of Violence was aimed at describing and… Walker singled out three phases that these relationships seemed to cycle through (Walker, 2009). Violent relationships often begin here....
1 Pages (250 words) Essay

Violence and Property Crime Issues

Crime is a term used to describe all activities that violate the political and moral norms of a society, especially when it comes to standards that are backed by legal sanction of the state.... Criminal perpetrators of the good are called criminals.... Fighting crime is one of the… tasks of the state apparatus, and it is implemented through its prevention that is usually in charge of the police, or the punishment of the perpetrators who carried out the judiciary. Violent crime indicates the relationship between the two parties in which one party or using Under this crime, there is murder, rape, robbery and assault....
7 Pages (1750 words) Research Paper

Once Were Warriors

Once Were Warriors contains many dynamics or traits of domestic violence such as the cycle of violence, power and control methods, PTSD, male privilege, and Battered woman Syndrome.... The anger of the batterer is escalated in spite of several attempts to control it in the tension building phase, afterward, there is an acute battering incident phase where the victim is battered or sexually abused and finally, there is the love contrition phase where the batterer is apologetic or loving towards the victim....
5 Pages (1250 words) Movie Review
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us