‘FEELS LIKE I’M IN HELL’
WHY ‘BATTERED WOMAN SYNDROME’ IS NOT A STRAIGHTFORWARD DEFENCE FOR WOMEN WHO KILL
‘BATTERED WOMAN SYNDROME’ IS NOT A LEGAL DEFENCE IN ITSELF, BUT RATHER IS A PSYCHIATRIC EXPLANATION OF THE MENTAL STATE OF AN ABUSED WOMAN WHICH CAN BE RELEVANT TO UNDERSTANDING A BATTERED WOMAN’S STATE OF MIND. — SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, 1998
In 2011, Helen Naslund killed her husband. In the early hours of Monday, Sept. 5, Miles Naslund was passed out drunk when Helen shot him in the back of the head two times with a .22-calibre revolver.
That weekend, Miles had, according to court documents, been ordering Helen and their son Neil around the farm, gun in hand. On the Sunday, hours before the killing, the family tractor broke down, and Miles flew into a drunken rage, hurling wrenches at Helen.
His “threatening behaviour” calmed only when he finally passed out.
The shooting, Helen’s defence lawyer said, was a “decision of last resort” following 27 years of abuse.
Six years after she hid the body near their farm in Holden, Alta., with the assistance of her son, Helen Naslund was found out, and charged with first-degree murder. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter and is now serving an 18-year prison sentence. The trial judge in her case called the killing a “callous, cowardly act on a vulnerable victim.”
This year, Helen launched an appeal to shorten her sentence, which her lawyer argues is one of the longest in a homicide committed by an abused woman. The court hasn’t issued a decision yet.
In 2019, 144 women were murdered countrywide, according to Statistics Canada. Forty-seven per cent of those — 68 women — died at their partner’s hands. That same year, 486 men were murdered, 29 of them by their partners, a data point that’s complicated because Statistics Canada doesn’t break out same-sex relationships, making it unclear how many of these men were killed by female partners.
When women do kill their partners, judges and juries are left to sift through a complex set of factors, considering whether or not these are straightforward murder cases, straightforward self-defence cases or a labyrinthine amalgam of the two.
It’s a crime that has troubled the justice system for a century, entangled by psychology and the evolving understanding of domestic abuse.
In 1911, Angelina Napolitano hacked her husband to death with an axe in their flat in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. She did so after years of abuse and to avoid being forced into prostitution.
The Sault Star wrote that Napolitano “richly deserved hanging.”
Indeed, she was sentenced to hang, but the case spurred an enormous international outcry, says a 1991 article in the Canadian Historical Review.
Louise Sommerville, of Preston, England, wrote to the Minister of Justice in July 1911, saying “the taking of a corrupt life of her wicked husband was not even murder ... it was a dreadful loathsome duty.”
“The world needs such heroines to lift it out of the foul rut in which it lies derelict
today,” Sommerville wrote.
Napolitano’s sentence was commuted to 11 years in prison.
In recent decades, the understanding of how psychological and physical abuse affects people in abusive relationships has informed much of the way the public — and the courts — approach these cases.
“Courts have looked at battered woman syndrome to say ‘Maybe self-defence goes beyond the bar brawl beyond two men,’” said Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, the equality director with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Mona Duckett, Helen Naslund’s lawyer, wrote in her appeals court filings that “evidence of the battered woman’s experience informs her moral culpability when she kills her abuser.” (In an email, Duckett declined to comment on the case, as it is before the court.)
A 2003 study using Statistics Canada data suggests that in 66 per cent of cases where a woman killed her male partner, an argument was the precipitating factor; in 65 per cent of cases, domestic violence was a prior factor; and in 41 per cent of cases, the victim — the man — was the first to use violence.
“The majority of women who kill their partners have experienced violence and abuse at the hands of that man,” said Elizabeth Sheehy, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. “Women who kill are usually pretty desperate ... and absolutely endangered.”
But Don Dutton, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British
Columbia, argues domestic abuse isn’t as common a factor as many assume.
“The whole sort of feminist view of every form of domestic violence has so permeated the way we think in this country. It’s factually incorrect but it is accepted as gospel, everywhere,” said Dutton.
One paper, using Quebec data and published in 2012, found that 26 per cent of women who had killed their partners had experienced domestic violence.
Or, in other words, a large majority had not.
“To think that every female-precipitated homicide of a male is an outshoot of battered woman syndrome is ridiculous, it’s only a small minority where there’s any evidence of prior violence,” Dutton said.
Even when domestic violence or abuse is an obvious factor, the circumstances of these killings vary.
There are cases involving children, such as in 1977, when Donnaline Caplette discovered her partner, Laszlo Vegh, had sexually assaulted one of her daughters. She confronted him, and, using Vegh’s shotgun, shot him twice, once accidentally, once on purpose.
Caplette then pushed the body over a cliff. It was found two weeks later, but it wasn’t until 1993 that Caplette was actually charged with second-degree murder. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
There are cases of emotional abuse, such as in 2006, when Teresa Craig covered her drunken husband with a pillow and stabbed him four times with a butcher knife.
The court agreed there was
considerable emotional and verbal abuse, though it said there was little physical abuse in the relationship. A jury found Craig guilty of manslaughter in 2008; in 2011, the Ontario appeals court reduced her sentence to time served.
There are cases where a woman kills her partner during a fight or argument, but the claim of self-defence is not successful, such as in October 2016, when Vanessa Poucette stabbed Brennon Twoyoungmen in Morley, Alta.
She was convicted of manslaughter in 2019, and lost an appeal with the Alberta Court of Appeal in February 2021, which concluded that stabbing Twoyoungmen was not proportionate to the threat of force she faced on that night.
But in February 2021, a Nunavut judge acquitted Sandra Ameralik of manslaughter, after she stabbed Howie Aaluk, the father of her six children, to death in their Nunavut home in 2017.
Aaluk had abused her for a decade. Ameralik, who was pregnant at the time, was acquitted of manslaughter, with the judge saying her “use of force was not out of proportion to the threat of violence she was experiencing” during an argument.
In 1991, Lee Stuesser, then a law professor at the University of Manitoba, wrote that “the law recognizes that a person is justified in using force against an attacker in order to preserve him or herself from the attack.”
While that remains true, reforms to the Criminal Code in 2013 did add some nuance to how self-defence is defined. The roots of these reforms — and in particular
how they apply to women who kill — are found in a 1986 killing, when Angelique Lavallee shot her partner, Kevin Rust, in the back of the head.
At Lavallee’s trial, a psychiatrist testified she felt she would be killed if she did not fight back against Rust.
That expert testimony played a key part in her acquittal. The Crown appealed and the Manitoba Court of Appeal ordered a new trial.
In 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the initial acquittal.
In 1998, Supreme Court justices Claire L’heureuxdubé and Beverley Mclachlin clarified further.
“’Battered woman syndrome’ is not a legal defence in itself,” they wrote, “but rather is a psychiatric explanation of the mental state of an abused woman which can be relevant to understanding a battered woman’s state of mind.”
When the Criminal Code was reformed, the new self-defence section nodded to the idea that the context of a relationship is an important factor in evaluating a woman’s actions.
The Criminal Code says the actions of the accused must be “reasonable in the circumstances,” and lays out nine factors to consider when making that assessment.
Among them are the gender and physical capabilities of the parties and the relationship between the two, “including any prior use or threat of force.”
But, another critical factor remains. And it’s one that is notable in the cases of domestic homicides, particularly those like the Naslund case, or the Craig case: Is a person in immediate danger?
If one is not in immediate danger — such as killing someone who’s asleep — that makes a self-defence argument considerably more challenging.
“If you say to an abused woman ‘No, no, no you can’t strike to defend your life until his hands are, you know, throttling your throat,’ then you are sentencing her to death, essentially, because realistically, any woman who is in that situation is highly unlikely to be able to defend her own life at that point,” University of Ottawa’s Sheehy said.
(Sheehy declined to discuss the Naslund case specifically since her research is a component of Naslund’s appeal.)
Even if the court doesn’t buy the self-defence argument, there are a number of cases in Canada in which these considerations have significantly influenced sentencing.
In Naslund’s appeal, Duckett points out 13 roughly analogous cases of manslaughter where a woman killed her partner. The longest sentence listed is eight years. The Craig case was eight years, but later reduced, with the court saying “where that abuse leaves the abused individual feeling utterly trapped in the relationship and emotionally and mentally unable to cope with or escape from the relationship, the moral culpability of the individual who reacts by killing the abuser is substantially reduced.”
Still, in order to raise these issues, the accused must go to trial.
“The woman, if she wants to air self-defence, still has to go to trial and put herself in that vulnerable position of reliving a horror show,” said Sheehy.
In 1997, Ontario Court Judge Lynn Ratushny, in a review of self-defence law, wrote there are “irresistible forces” that push women who kill to plead guilty to a lesser charge, such as manslaughter, because if they were to go to trial on a firstor second-degree murder charge, they risk 25 years behind bars.
“The mandatory minimum means that the risk of trial is very serious, it’s very high,” said Mendelsohn Aviv.
As well, because of the inflexibility of a mandatory minimum in a first-degree murder case, a judge cannot actually consider the context of a woman’s individual case regarding sentencing.
“They take the discretion out of hands of judges,” said Mendelsohn Aviv.
Helen Naslund was initially indicted for first-degree murder, but she pleaded guilty to manslaughter, accepting an 18-year sentence.
Now she’s seeking to have her “unduly harsh” sentence reduced. In her filings, her lawyer called the sentence a “miscarriage of justice.”
“It feels like I’m in HELL,” Naslund wrote in a recent letter to supporters from prison, “with no way out.”