The Study Of The Mitigation Of Non-Adversarial Battered Women’s Husband Murder Cases

Domestic violence is still one of the serious social problems in the current social scenario.According to the data released by the All-China Women’s Federation in November2020,30% of women in 270 million families in China have been subjected to domestic violence.Approximately 157,000 women die by suicide each year,and 60% of these suicides can be attributed to domestic violence.The small spatial area of the family instead confines women to a perpetual and inescapable cycle of violence.Trapped in this environment,battered women eventually choose to fight back by killing their abusive husbands in the extreme form of "violence against violence".The frequency of such battered women killing their husbands has attracted attention and battered women killing their husbands is becoming a special type of case.The term "non-confrontational battered woman’s homicide" mostly refers to women’s counterattack killings in non-immediate domestic violence.The key feature is that domestic violence and resistance do not occur at the same time,and women usually choose to kill their victims when they do not know how to resist or cannot resist,such as when they are sick,sleeping,drunk or taking sleeping pills.Compared with ordinary murderers,battered women are relatively less dangerous and socially dangerous,and their danger may even be considered to have disappeared after the death of the perpetrator of the violence.At the same time,such cases have special characteristics in terms of causes,circumstances and facts.If the above-mentioned elements are ignored and such cases are treated as general intentional homicide,the battered women will still face the severe sanction of the law after escaping from the mire of violence,which will be unfair to the battered women and will easily raise long-standing public conflicts about such verdict.Therefore,it is in line with the humanistic spirit of Chinese criminal law and the principle of our criminal policy of leniency and severity that we should concentrate on and study the cases of battered women killing their husbands.Based on that,this thesis adopts an empirical research method and selects 25 cases of battered women killing husbands decided by courts of intermediate level or above in the last five years(since 2018)on the Judgment Document Online for detailed analysis,in order to explore the real situation of criminal responsibility determination and possible controversies or problems of such cases.Based on the analysis of the samples in judicial practice,this thesis will analyze the feasibility and the pros and cons of of some theoretical bases about applying lighter penalties one by one,and try to put forward corresponding suggestions and countermeasures for the problems in practice under the guidance of theoretical doctrines,with a view to helping battered women avoid heavy penalties and make punishments appropriate for their crime.