Does anyone know about the "Battered Woman" defense and when/if a defendant is entitled to a jury instruction regarding this?

I noticed you had alot of views and no posts. I personally have not encountered this argument. You're not being ignored; we just don't know.

My argument would go as follows:

A jury instruction is a statement of the law.

Without a codification of this creative argument, there is no justification for an instruction on the topic.

The burden of proof should lay on the party choosing to assert the affirmative defense.

I'd ask the defense to show whether or not the following defenses apply: 8.05 Duress, 9.22 Necessity, and 9.31 Self-Defense. (depending on your facts)

[This message was edited by Philip D Ray on 01-29-07 at .]

There is no Battered Woman Syndrome defense to speak of.
However, it comes up as a component of Self Defense, sometimes a duress defense, or perhaps on an issue of Voluntary Manslaughter.

Check out Fielder v. State,756 sw2d 309, it's the big case in this area.

Also, to a lesser degree, Maestras v. State, 963 SW2d 151

You can also have the "defense" arise in a couple of different ways. You may have it come up as a straight self-defense, i.e., she reasonably feared the use of force by the victim because she'd been battered in the past. I've also had it come up in a post-traumatic stress mode, where the victim was not the batterer, but the defendant claimed that the situation she found herself in with the victim resulted in a flashback which caused her to attack the victim even though he had never done anything which would justify it. The first is a more typical defense, the second plays better as a punishment issue, in my opinion, although the defendant in my case attempted to get a self-defense instruction out of it, as I recall.

If my memory is working today, I think I remember concluding that BWS can work to raise self-defense, but not duress. For an explanation on why it shouldn't work with duress, see US v. Willis, 38 F.3d 170 (5th Cir. 1994). I know that the federal duress defense is not exactly like our statute, but they have in common a requirement that the compulsion be such that it would render a person of "reasonable firmness" incapable of resisting; and the whole idea of BWS is built on establishing why the BW is not a person of reasonable firmness.