Manslaughter Provocation

Bob has made his wife Alice's life a living misery. He beats her, he closely monitors her movements and he effectively prevents her from living a normal life.

As he's about to beat her for the three-hundredth time, Alice suddenly grabs the ash tray and strikes him across the head. Bob dies on the way to the hospital and Alice is arrested for his murder. There is no doubt that she's done it, but wouldn't anyone else do what she did if faced with what she's gone through?

Alice's lawyers decide that Alice denies murder, but will plead guilty to manslaughter by provocation. The question is now, will the jury agree?

"Manslaughter provocation", in English law, requires actual provocation and must pass a test of whether a reasonable, sober, self-controlled person would do it. The other partial defences are diminished responsibility and suicide pacts.

In the US, it is one of the three partial defences to murder (the others being diminished and unjustified use of force in what they though was self-defence).

In both cases, the crime becomes voluntary manslaughter rather than murder, which could still carry prison time, but it's far less than actual murder charges.

This can be Truth in Television, Sadly enough.

Examples of Manslaughter Provocation include:

Literature

• Appears in the novel Two Women by Martina Cole.
• This is exactly what Billy Budd did, but it was still handled as murder. The victim only got what he deserved...

Live Action TV

• The entire plot of Criminal Justice 2, a five-part 2009 BBC mini-series starring Maxine Peake, who kills her abusive husband with a knife. She'd brought the knife to bed planning to kill herself when her husband raped her again, but turned the knife on him. The jury goes for manslaughter provocation. The judge gives her five years, though, enough for her to lose the baby she conceived with another man.
• A Law and Order UK episode involves a mother killing the man who was responsible for the death of her daughter in a botched kidnapping as he leaves his bail hearing. The CPS have to go for murder as the charge. The jury convict on manslaughter provocation and she gets a suspended sentence. She was in on the original kidnapping and they convict her on gross negligence manslaughter instead.
  • This premise was originally used in the American Law and Order.
• Waterloo Road, where a pupil kills her sexually abusive father, although it's as yet unclear if she'll get a jury to go for manslaughter provocation, as it was pre-meditated.
• Justified The antagonist's brother is killed by his wife who blows his head off with a shotgun at the dinner table. It is implied that she will plead to manslaughter. Nobody in the town seems to have a problem with what she did since the husband was an abusive drunk who beat her constantly. Even the antagonist considers her actions justified and seems more concerned with the fact that she is now single. This kind of thing appears to be a central theme of the show.

Theater

• Although played for laughs, the ladies of Chicago all plead this in "The Cell Block Tango." Nobody's buying it.

Video Games

• Silent Hill 2 has two examples:
  • Angela Oscoro, the Woobie of the game, killed her father after nearly twenty years of sexual abuse. The effects of her father's abuse have left her unable to be anywhere near others without having a mental breakdown; this can be seen when James attempts to help her and she shrieks at him and runs away instead.
  • In a far less sympathetic example, Eddie Dombroski kills five or six people (and one dog) because they made fun of him for being overweight.
    • Although from how he talks of it, he just went nuts and killed a dog and shot its owner once before running away.