Sentencing challenge in 'battered woman' cases

Lawyers representing a woman who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for killing her abusive partner intend to launch a constitutional challenge to sentencing laws. They claim the laws do not take into account mitigating factors, including ‘battered woman syndrome’. A GroundUp report says the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) has taken up the case of the woman – identified only as MN – who was convicted of murdering her partner and sentenced in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court in 2022. The woman, with the assistance of CALS, has applied for leave to appeal both conviction and sentence. CALS said its intended constitutional challenge is a compelling reason why leave to appeal should be granted. MN was found guilty of murdering her abusive partner during an incident of domestic violence. Evidence before the court – which was not challenged by the state – was that before her arrest in November 2018, she had been beaten regularly for a year, once so severely that she suffered a miscarriage. On the night of her arrest, she had been held against her will and raped – not for the first time. However, the presiding magistrate rejected MN’s ‘self-defence’ plea.

CALS claims the constitutional challenge is aimed at the mandatory minimum sentences regime and the Criminal Law Amendment Act, says the GroundUp report. CALS will argue that these laws are unconstitutional as they fail to take into account psychological trauma suffered as a result of GBV, especially intimate partner violence which leads to ‘battered woman syndrome’. CALS said current trends in sentencing show a pattern of courts giving little weight to expert evidence and witness testimonies in cases where women are accused of killing their abusers. Presiding officers make assumptions about what is considered ‘reasonable’ and take a harsh approach in sentencing, failing to understand the psychology of abuse. In its written application for leave to appeal, CALS said in MN’s case, the magistrate had treated her rape experience as an attempt to ‘escape liability’. The magistrate had also disregarded expert evidence detailing how women who have been victims of abuse and ultimately kill their partners suffer from psychological effects which motivate the crime directly or indirectly. The magistrate had also not taken into account the expert evidence given about ‘battered woman syndrome’ – which explains why women often stay in abusive relationships – and ‘slow burn reaction’, which explains that abused women tend not to react instantly to abuse for psychological reasons and because of the physical mismatch between the abuser and the victim. ‘The learned magistrate conceded in her judgment that MN was a victim of abuse and accepted that various incidents of abuse had occurred in the past,’ CALS said.