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Provocative views on provocation

By G.C. Seabourne

The Times on 7th November reports the unease of Lord Phillips about the attempt to stop men attacking their wives/ partners, by changing the rules on the pleading of provocation. He is not happy that the proposals 'so diminish the significance of sexual infidelity as expressly to exclude it from even the possibility of amounting to provocation'.  Though, obviously, one's heart bleeds that a distinguished law lord should suffer a moment of unease, it is very clearly a step in the right direction to say that if you kill somebody, meaning to do it, you are a murderer, whatever mud you may fling at the person whom you have intentionally killed. Sexual infidelity is a bad thing, and a sad thing. Even the unfaithful, however, are people who deserve the full protection of law. There is no sense in which it is an acceptable or excusable reaction to the discovery of infidelity to kill a human being. And if a woman has been unfaithful to a husband who turns out to be a killer, might one not think that she might be less the 'scarlet woman' of some judicial subconscious, provoking her lovely, caring husband to strangle/ shoot/ stab her to death, and more a frightened woman taking some solace outside a relationship with an abusive man? Both interpretations would often be possible, but, since only the killer is still alive, his interpretation of events is privileged over what she might have said.

Common Law Wife

 

Full post as published by Common Lawyer on November 12, 2008 (boomark / email).