By: Chelsea Hall
According to Professor Thane Rosenbaum, the legal system should be
focused on satisfying the emotional needs of people who have been
wronged. Those who deal in the language of revenge understand that,
while those who believe only in legal retribution do not. Revenge is
one way for a victim to feel vindicated and alive once again after
being shamed, dehumanized, or spiritually assaulted. As human beings,
we tend to root for and empathize with the person who takes revenge.
However, the only way the legal system can account for justified
revenge is by calling the avenger “crazy” or “insane.” The insanity
defense is an illustration of how legal system generally does not
allow for emotion, while also recognizing that revenge is sometimes
not such a terrible thing.
An analogy can be made to “battered woman syndrome” (BWS), which was
introduced in the late 1970’s to help jurors understand the cycle of
abuse that many domestic abuse victims suffer from. The only way to
get domestic violence cases to the jury was to use scientific
evidence, since the legal system is all about the physical, material,
and tangible. In trials of women who have killed their batterers,
experts began to testify in order to help juries assess the
reasonableness of the belief that deadly force was necessary (in
arguing self-defense). In many of these cases, it was difficult for
attorneys to show that the woman (or man) was threatened by “imminent
harm,” which is the legal standard for the justification of
self-defense. BWS allows jurors to understand the cycle of violence
and its psychological effects, as well as the relational history
between the victim and the batterer.
What is problematic about employing experts to explain BWS, however,
is that women who kill their batterers are deemed more insane than
rational. By calling this cycle of violence and the psychological
effects on women a “syndrome,” the victims are pathologized – they
stay in relationships with abusers because they have something
psychologically and quantifiably wrong with them. Accordingly, BWS is
similar to temporary insanity in that those who choose to take revenge
and take justice in their own hands are excused for not being in their
right mind at the time the incident occurred. In reality, at the
moment a woman who has been physically, sexually, or emotionally
abused for ten years picks up a gun and shoots her abuser, she might
actually be seeing clearly for the first time in her life.
While testimony about BWS might help to reduce the charge against a
person who has killed or attempted to kill his/her batterer, it
certainly does not invite storytelling or truth-seeking. Once a
victim is determined to have BWS, and an express is enabled to testify
on the behalf of the victim, that is the end of the story. Victims
who choose to take revenge and end the abuse are essentially denied
the right to tell their narratives. The judge does not ask the victim
to give a detailed account of what makes his/her history of abuse
unique or particularly atrocious. A judge might listen to victim
testimony regarding circumstances surrounding the particular incident
at hand, but certainly will not want to hear the victim discuss the
moral, subjective, and intangible spiritual crimes that the batterer
committed over time.
