Understanding the Battered Reality : Abuse: California’s Evidence Code needs to acknowledge that for women, self-defense is not a genteel schoolboy battle.

On Dec. 17, 1988, Robin Elson, a woman who had been severely battered and threatened with death by her husband, decided that she had no choice but to kill him to save her life. After he fell asleep in a chair, setting down the gun with which he had threatened her and their children, she picked it up and shot him in the back of the head.

Eleven months later, a Long Beach jury found her not guilty of murder. They decided that she had reasonably believed she could not flee and had to kill him to protect her own life. What made the Elson jurors unusual was that they were allowed to hear extensive evidence on “battered women’s syndrome,” which led them to decide that any reasonable person would have reached the same conclusion as Elson.

Victims of battered women’s syndrome are systematically beaten and controlled by threats of more violence. They come to believe that they can never escape. Indeed, most battered women and their advocates will tell you that the abusers are obsessed with maintaining control over their victims, even to the all-too-frequent conclusion of killing them.

Until now, the real lives of women have not been reflected in the interpretation of California’s law of self-defense. The law has generally been interpreted only from the male experience, which gives no basis for understanding how any decent, sane person would stay with an abuser. This interpretation of the law conceives of self-defense as a kind of schoolboy battle in which people of equal strength are matched, gun for gun and fist for fist. It believes that if you kill in self-defense, you must do it in the heat of the moment, face to face. But battered women cannot defend their lives in this manner. Even though they know they are in constant danger of losing their lives, they are outmatched and beaten down.

Nor can they simply flee. Studies that led to the discovery of battered women’s syndrome show that, like prisoners of war, many of these abused women believe that there is simply no way out of their situation. They exist in a state of “learned helplessness.” Even though they appear to survive competently from day to day--caring for children, going to work, appeasing their abusers--these women perceive that they cannot escape the control of their batterers.

Some California courts have refused to allow testimony on battered women’s syndrome, saying that juries don’t need an expert to explain a women’s mental state. Elson’s public defender, Lynda Vitale, spent a day and a half persuading the judge in the case that this evidence was necessary for a fair jury assessment. As it turned out, thanks to the good sense of Superior Court Judge G. William Dunn, admission of this evidence was critical to the jury’s understanding of Elson’s situation.

Jurors generally assume that most people think the way they do, so they need to understand that reality is very different for battered women. This is why several battered women advocates have proposed an addition to the California Evidence Code that would make evidence about physical and sexual abuse and the effects of such abuse, including testimony about battered women’s syndrome, admissible in any case in California, if relevant.

Of course, the law and the courts will still find ways to deny the relevance of the battered woman’s experiences, just as they have refused to recognize the experience of rape victims and victims of child abuse. In a decision appealing the conviction of a battered woman who killed her abuser in Riverside, the California appellate court held that testimony regarding battered women’s syndrome would not have made a difference.

Even though such testimony might have helped the jury understand that a battered defendant believes that she had to kill to save her life, the court said that testimony about battered women’s syndrome would not have been relevant to whether she was actually in imminent danger. That court would have found that Elson was not in “imminent danger,” because her abuser had fallen asleep. This ignores the reality of a battered woman’s existence. She knows that once the man wakes up, the abuse starts over and she will be unable, at that point, to keep him from killing her.

Elson’s jury understood because they were allowed to hear evidence about battered women’s syndrome. Clearly, after searching their own hearts, they concluded that they, as reasonable people, would, like Robin Elson, have believed they were in imminent danger of death, were unable to escape and had no choice but to shoot this batterer while he was asleep.

Battered women’s syndrome is the best explanation that we have of what life is like for women controlled through violence, and it is extremely important that it be admitted in cases like Elson’s.

In this way, the real, lived-out experiences of women, not generally found in assumptions made by American law, may be taken into account, that they may be fairly judged and punished, or, having been heard and understood, vindicated.