Elizabeth A. Sheehy

Battered women charged with homicide in Australia, Canada and New Zealand: How do they fare?

This article examines trends in the resolution of homicide cases involving battered women defendants from 2000 to 2010 in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Australia and Canada appear to have some commonalities in their treatment of such cases with higher acquittal rates and a greater reliance on plea bargaining to produce manslaughter verdicts, as compared with New Zealand. Although New Zealand’s small number of cases makes it difficult to generalise, its overall trends appear to be different from those observed in Australia and Canada, in both the high proportion of cases proceeding to trial and those resulting in conviction for murder. The authors conclude that there is a need to re-examine prosecutorial practices of proceeding to trial on murder rather than manslaughter charges even when manslaughter would be ultimately satisfactory to the prosecution, and of accepting guilty pleas to manslaughter verdicts in circumstances where the battered woman appears to have a strong self-defence case.

Canadian Feminist Perspectives on Law

This paper provides an overview of Canadian feminist literature on law, starting with a brief chronology of the development of the scholarship from the time of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1970). The authors break the literature down into the five substantive areas most often written about: criminal law, family law, income redistribution, employment law, and legal education/legal profession. They also examine the major theoretical frameworks that feminists use: liberal (rule equality) feminism; result-equality/integrative feminism; radical feminism; and socialist feminism. In addition to providing an extensive bibliography of existing Canadian feminist legal scholarship, the authors identify significant themes and characteristics of the literature and illustrate how feminist scholarship can be differentiated from non-feminist scholarship. The authors conclude that Canadian feminist scholarship on law is gaining rapidly in abundance, depth, and diversity. They also conclude that it is innovative in developing feminist theoretical perspectives that recognize the significance of law and theories of equality that acknowledge womens specificities. Feminists writing on law are urged to utilize theoretical perspectives to a greater degree in order to facilitate the development of short term and long term strategies, and to explain apparent contradictions in the ways in that the legal system affects women.

Expert evidence on coercive control in support of self-defence: The trial of Teresa Craig:

This article uses the transcripts from an abused woman’s trial in Canada for first-degree murder of her husband to explore the expert testimony provided by Dr Evan Stark to support a potential defence of self-defence. His evidence focused on coercive control theory and provoked extreme resistance from Crown prosecutors, such that self-defence was ultimately removed from the jury’s consideration. The trial illustrates the advantages and challenges of using coercive control theory as well as its future potential.

A Feminist Reflection on Domestic Violence Death Reviews

This reflection argues that we cannot measure the success of Domestic Violence Death Review Committees (DVDRCs), or the optimal forms and rules to govern them, without resort to feminist knowledge and practice around male violence against women and intimate femicide. An independent, feminist antiviolence movement is critical to the work of DVDRCs: “it is difficult for insiders to take on social change issues without the political support of broader mobilization” (Htun and Weldon 2012: 553). The work of DVDRCs is overwhelmingly focused on the deaths of women, since women account for the vast majority of domestic violence deaths—84% of such deaths in Canada (Statistics Canada 2015: Table A-05). Institutions, individuals, and the public cannot make the changes needed to promote women’s safety and freedom by using official knowledge, gender neutrality, and governmental organs that are neither transparent nor accountable to the real experts—women who work on the frontline.

Regulatory crimes and the charter:R. v. Wholesale Travel Inc.

In R. v. Wholesale Travel Group Inc., I the Supreme Court of Canada has upheld the doctrine of strict liability against a Charter challenge, 2 but has struck down the statutory defence to false advertising 3 on the basis that it amounts to absolute liability. Strict liability and absolute liability are legal concepts for the prosecution of those offences which underpin most regulation of the activities of corporations. These legal concepts relieve the prosecution of the burden it would otherwise bear of proving the mental or fault element of the offence, thus facilitating conviction. The decision in Wholesale Travel is significant because a range of regulatory crimes 4 which employ strict and absolute liability, including workplace safety violations resulting in death or maiming, s had been invalidated in a series of lower court cases decided prior to Wholesale Travel.