Wives killing husbands forensic psychiatric aspects of abused women

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the legal implications related to the state of mind of the wife involved one condition. This condition is a proven emotional and/or physical abuse of that woman. In the west it is less likely for a wife to kill her husband if they were found with a lover because the legal channels of obtaining a divorce for women in the Western culture are relatively easy. That leaves abuse as probably the most common reason for a Western woman to kill her husband. When the motive of killing is related to issues other than abuse there is little role for forensic psychiatry to play discounting insanity plead. Battered Woman Syndrome involves a woman who has been physically, sexually, or seriously psychologically abused by a man in an intimate relationship in order to coerce her into what he wants her to do. They see the abuser is after them wherever they go. Escaping would only provoke the abuser to inflict more harm. Trauma-induced psychiatric syndromes may be used to support the defense of justification. BWS may be utilized to explain two components of self-defense claims. Those are 1- the defendant's subjective fear of serious injury or death, 2- the reasonableness of that belief. Judging from what has been published in the lay media many cases of women who killed their husbands were tried. Going through many search engines in Arabic and English has not returned any case as yet which has been defended on the BWS type of defense. What is being proposed in this paper is that Islamic jurisprudence carries no prohibition against making this kind of defense. In fact Islamic jurisprudence is more flexible in accepting this kind of defense than the secular laws. Islamic jurisprudence gives more respect to the integrity of the person. It gives him or her the right to kill in order to protect their property even in the face of nonlethal threats. Islamic jurisprudence is also not so restrictive in the definition of insanity for legal purposes: