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Introduction Erotic asphyxiation is a sexual phenomenon in which one partner reduces the other person's brain oxygen level through strangulation. This study analyzes deaths caused by sexually-motivated strangulation to cases of homicidal choking — summarizing criminal penalties for defendants, depending on the presence of drugs, or alcohol intoxication. Methods The mode of analysis involves three sources of data. First, a retrospective chart review of our clinics' two recent cases. Second, a meta-analysis of these materials in relationship to forensic reports obtained from prosecutor's office. Third, we examine the prevalence of death due to strangulation in erotic and non-erotic cases using central court database. Lastly, we provide the summary of interviews involving the country's only forensic unit, which investigates criminal cases involving voluntary and involuntary strangulation. Results In total, we analyzed 15 cases of sexual asphyxiation — 2 of our own; 5 reported in prosecutor's archives; 8 control cases ruled as a non-sexual homicide. The two of our clinical cases describe two victims of voluntary erotic asphyxiation, involving complex sexual environment in which a sexual partner accidentally strangulated the other one during sex. The first case describes a 30 years-old female, who required all of her past sexual partners to choke her with hands in order to reach orgasm. The second case is that of a 41 years-old homosexual male, who was still a novice to kinky play and succumbed to death as a result of being tied with a set of ropes around his neck and body. By combining findings from the analysis of our clinic's cases with 5 files obtained from prosecutor's office — we are able to compare results of these cases to controls (involving homicidal suffocation using the plastic bag). In our cases, the defendants who avoid serving prison time for strangulating in course of erotic play typically exhibit these characteristics — at the time of the killing, they were not under influence of drugs; the deceased had documented (based on witness interview, review of personal items, or medical documentation) long-standing paraphilic disorder. In controls, the likelihood of being convicted of voluntary manslaughter was lower for people who acted under the influence of drugs but higher for those under the influence of alcohol. Conclusions These findings show that documented presence of paraphilic tendencies in the deceased might serve as grounds for not sentencing their sex partners for prison time if they acted to satisfy someone else's kinky needs.

This article examines the operation of the reformed English diminished responsibility plea in mercy killer cases. In particular, it makes three claims. First, it predicts that—like its predecessor—the revised doctrine will be stretched, where necessary, to accommodate these offenders. This is because (i) normative arguments remain for convicting them of manslaughter instead of murder and (ii) other partial defence routes will usually be unavailable. Secondly, it contends that such pragmatism will now be facilitated by a disconnect between (i) the defence’s post-reform narrowing and (ii) its ongoing interpretive flexibility. Thirdly, given that disconnect, it suggests that this pragmatism will be problematic. Notably, it will (i) compromise the plea’s newfound coherence and (ii) exacerbate unfair labelling of mercy killers. Ultimately, and more broadly, these difficulties reinforce recent calls for further homicide law reform.

Psychological research has long found that anger may lead to aggression, sometimes even fatal one. The provocation doctrine corresponds to this finding by providing that murder charges may be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter if evidence establishes that the defendant acted under the influence of a “sudden heat of passion”, resulting from “adequate provocation”. The modern rationale underlying provocation doctrine rests on the idea that defendant’s intense emotion of anger had resulted in loss of self-control, therefore he or she ought to be partially excused. Case law demonstrates that defendants sometimes kill out of fear of serious physical violence threatened by the deceased. For example, victims of long-term physical abuse by the deceased may kill their abusers out of fear of future violence, even if at the moment of the killing the deceased was not posing an imminent threat to life. In circumstances where defendants are unable to satisfy the requirements of self-defense, provocation might be the only viable defense that would mitigate a murder conviction to voluntary manslaughter. Yet, existing provocation doctrine is unfit to capture the distinct features characterizing the reaction of fearful defendants. Commonly perceived as an anger-centric defense, the defense’s elements mostly accommodate typical the responses of defendants who acted quickly, immediately following a single and sudden triggering incident, before any lapse of time allowed them to regain control. The article offers three major contributions to challenge existing view of provocation: first, it considers psychological research that had found that fear, similarly to anger, may also significantly interfere with individuals’ decision-making processes by disturbing rational judgement, therefore sometimes leading to lethal aggression. Second, drawing on this research, the article’s key argument is that provocation doctrine should be reconstructed to also include a fear-based prong. Third, recognizing fear-based provocation calls for rejecting the “anger-loss of control” paradigm that currently dominates judges and jurors’ perception of the defense. In its place, the article advocates an alternative framework that would focus on the fearful defendant’s fear of violence threatened by the victim that caused a significant impairment in the defendant’s thought processes, resulting in obscured judgment and reasoning. The reconstructed defense would also include an objective component, under which, the defendant would have to prove that a person of ordinary disposition would also experience such emotion and respond rashly without exercising reason and judgment.

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter of a police officer (Oakland, CA) in September 1968. He was sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. For 22 months, he was incarcerated at California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, CA under “lock-up”—a system which gave him very limited interaction with the general prison population. During this time, Newton had no direct contact with members or leaders of the Black Panther Party. Furthermore, he was restricted to ten persons on his visiting list, nine of whom had to be members of his immediate family. The author of this paper was the tenth person on Newton’s visiting list. For the entire period of his incarceration, I visited with Newton almost every Friday from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Following each visit, I would record a detailed memoir of our discussions, the general circumstances in the prison, and my reflections on everything that had transpired. This paper discusses the 22 months Huey P. Newton was in California Men’s Colony. It describes how we organized our sessions so the conversations would be of value to him during the following week. It also includes a description of some of the major ideas we shared, including how Newton developed some of his decisions about the Black Panther Party as well as his personal life. Finally, the paper includes my own observations about Newton and how he managed his life as an inmate “lock-up” in a maximum security prison. Newton was released in August 1970 following the reversal of his conviction by the California Appellate Court. He died in 1989. He was 47 years old.

In Italy, a judge reduced the sentence of a defendant by 1 year in response to evidence for a genetic predisposition to violence. The best characterized of these genetic differences, those in the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), were cited as especially relevant. Several months previously in the USA, MAOA data contributed to a jury reducing charges from 1st degree murder (a capital offence) to voluntary manslaughter. Is there a rational basis for this type of use of MAOA evidence in criminal court? This paper will review in context recent work on the MAOA gene–environment interaction in predisposing individuals to violence and address the relevance of such findings to murder trials. Interestingly, the MAOA genetic variants impact future violence and aggression only when combined with the adverse environmental stimuli of childhood maltreatment. Thus nature and nurture interact to determine the individual’s risk. Based on current evidence, I argue there is a weak case for mitigation. But should future experiments confirm the hypothesis that individual differences in impulse control and response to provocation found in MAOA-L men (without abuse) are significantly magnified when combined with childhood maltreatment, the case could turn into a stronger one.

Criminal law commonly requires judges and juries to decide whether defendants acted “reasonably.” Nevertheless, issues of reasonableness fall into two distinct categories: (1) where reasonableness concerns events and states, including risks of which an actor is conscious, that can be justly assessed without regard to the actor’s individual traits, and (2) where reasonableness concerns culpable mental states and emotions that cannot justly be assessed without reference to the actor’s capacities. This distinction is significant because, while the “reasonable person” by which category-1 cases are assessed is a disembodied and impersonal ideal that consists of nothing but the uncompromising values of the jurisdiction, the reasonable person by which category-2 cases are measured must necessarily incorporate some of an actor’s individual traits or risk blaming the blameless. Courts and commentators have thus far approached the task of individualizing or subjectivizing reasonableness in category 2 by trying to determine in advance which individual traits are generally relevant and which are not. I propose an alternative approach that, in addition to applying to negligence and voluntary manslaughter cases alike, derives its content from the social practice of blaming. I propose that a reasonable person in category-2 cases consists of every physical, psychological, and emotional trait an actor possesses, with one exception—the exception being that he possesses proper respect for the values of the people of the state as reflected and incorporated in the statute at hand.

The doctrine of voluntary manslaughter mitigates a defendant's crime and punishment when the defendant kills in the “heat of passion” generated by an extremely provoking event, such as witnessing a spouse's adultery. The doctrine relies on empirical assumptions about the effects of emotion, especially anger, on decision-making, and about the time course of emotion. Modern psychology research questions at least some of these assumptions, but the law adheres to its traditional approach. The law's resistance to change may stem partly from its dependency on language and analogic reasoning; the words we use to describe emotions like anger, revenge, and fear may shape people's perceptions concerning these emotions and thus may constrain the law's ability to respond to new psychological insights about emotion. At the same time, the law must serve normative goals that transcend the quest for empirical knowledge. For this reason and others, psychology can only inform the law, but cannot force changes in the law. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How do you tell people to get together, to forgive and forget, if the judge doesn't show any concern for the community? Justice includes punishment, and there was none in this case. (1) It was midafternoon on a warm day in late April 1992, when the nation and the world turned its attention to Los Angeles. For the next five days, they watched in horror as thousands of residents took to the streets to burn and loot, sometimes even to assault and kill. "No justice, no peace!" was the anthem of the day as local blacks, Latinos, and even a sprinkling of Asian Americans and whites joined in the five-day "rebellion" that purportedly underscored the injustice of the first verdict in the Rodney King police brutality trial. But for many who actively joined in the rebellion, and for the thousands who stayed at home, but understood all too well why others acted, Rodney King was not the symbol of injustice that was being protested; Latasha Harlins was. (2) On 16 March 1991, at approximately 9:35 A.M., Latasha Harlins walked into the Empire Liquor Market located at 9172 South Figueroa Street in Compton, California. Within the course of five short minutes, she lay on the floor in front of the store's counter, suffering from a single close-range gunshot wound to the back of her head. Two dollars lay crumpled in her left hand. Soon Ja Du, her face beginning to swell and discolor from the four punches Harlins landed during a brief struggle between the two, ostensibly over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, crouched on top of the counter trying to see where Harlins had fallen. Two neighborhood children ran terrified from the store. (3) Blood still had not started to seep from Harlins's motionless body when Billy Du, who had been asleep in his van outside the market, rushed inside. Soon Ja Du was hysterical, screaming that she was being robbed, that the robber had tried to take money out of the cash register. She then seemed to lapse into a coma. Seeing his bruised wife to his right and Harlins's body with the money to his left, he made a desperate call to the police department. "'We got a hold up," he told a 911 operator. The thief was "'taking the money out of the cash register" and his wife"' shot the robber lady." (4) Eight months later, Soon Ja Du, convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Latasha Harlins, sat in a small, packed courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. The change of venue for the case from Compton to downtown Los Angeles purportedly gave the advantage of a secure courtroom: bullet-proof glass shielded the defendant, judge, and lawyers from anguished and angry spectators alike, all demanding some kind of justice. Judge Joyce A. Karlin heard defense and prosecution statements as she waited to deliver her sentence in a criminal trial by jury, the first sentence that she would render in a jury trial since she had taken the bench a few months earlier. (5) This is the story of a young African American female, Latasha Harlins, at two important urban sites: a small liquor/convenience store in her neighborhood and a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. It also is the story of her interactions with two women: Soon Ja Du, a middle-aged, naturalized Korean American shopkeeper's wife, and Joyce Karlin, a relatively young, quite affluent European American judge. Their "diversity," manifest by their different racial, class, and generational affiliations and identities evoke the "female side" to the U.S.'s fundamentally conflicted relationship with "others." There were profound differences, but there were also some important similarities. Perhaps the most important similarities were that all three were females; that they were all migrants to Los Angeles; and that each came as part of a family that had great hope for what they could accomplish in this vibrant "urban frontier." Their similarities, however, did not outweigh their differences, and the impact that these differences had on the manner in which they regarded one another and chose to interact. …

George Tiller was a Kansas abortionist who specialized in late-term abortions, which are legal under Kansas law only under special circumstances. Scott Roeder killed him, and on trial for murder, wished to plead that he was defending third persons against imminent and unlawful death at the hands of Tiller. He was prepared to present evidence to that effect to the jury, but the trial judge blocked both the plea and the evidence. If the evidence were persuasive, the jury could either have acquitted Roeder altogether, if they decided that his belief that he was defending third persons was reasonable, or convicted him just of voluntary manslaughter, if they decided he had a sincere but unreasonable belief. Since the blocked plea and evidence were Roeder’s only defenses, he was convicted of murder. He appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, which had it oral argument on January 29, 2014. This paper discusses the oral argument.

When a heterosexual man is charged with murdering a transgender woman with whom he has been sexually intimate, an increasingly common defense strategy is to assert what has been called the trans panic defense. The defendant claiming trans panic will say that his discovery that the victim was biologically male (when he thought the victim was biologically female) provoked him into a heat of passion and caused him to lose his self-control. If the jury finds that the defendant was actually and reasonably provoked, it can acquit him of murder and find him guilty of the lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter. Claims of trans panic are troubling because they appeal to stereotypes about transgender individuals as sexually deviant, abnormal people. In August of 2013, the American Bar Association passed a resolution to limit the use of gay panic and trans panic arguments. In the attached article, which is approximately 23,000 words, including footnotes, Cynthia Lee and Peter Kwan examine the cultural structures of masculinity that may lead a man to kill a transgender woman with whom he has been sexually intimate. Building on Professor Angela Harris’ important work on male-on-male violence, we argue that violence by men against transgender women is a type of gender violence that has not received the attention it deserves. We use masculinities theories to unpack the possible motivations behind the claim of trans panic. We also discuss how structures of heteronormativity and masculinity as well as the doctrine of provocation itself can encourage the jury to find that the defendant who claims trans panic was reasonably provoked. We argue that in addition to educating jurors about the discrimination and violence faced by transgender individuals because of their chosen gender identity, prosecutors should educate jurors about the structures of masculinity that make trans panic arguments appealing. We also argue that the current understanding of reasonableness in provocation doctrine — reasonableness as that which is typical — is misguided. We suggest reasonableness is better understood as a normative limitation on the provocation defense. Accordingly, the jury should assess not just whether the average man in the defendant’s shoes would have been provoked but also whether it was normatively appropriate for the defendant to be so provoked.

This article examines the Law Commission's Consultation Paper, Partial Defences to Murder, which was published in June 2003. There are fundamental problems with the defence of provocation. The author suggests that this partial defence should therefore be abolished and replaced by a new partial defence of self-preservation. This could provide a defence where the offender, or another person with whom he or she is closely associated, has been repeatedly subjected to serious violence or tormenting behaviour. This conduct must have caused the offender to be in a state of severe emotional disturbance at the time of the killing.

This article presents the results of an empirical study of intentional homicide cases in Missouri. The authors created a database of 1046 cases; it includes substantially all of the homicide cases prosecuted in Missouri over a five year period that were initially charged as murder or voluntary manslaughter and that yielded criminal convictions. The authors selected 247 cases from the larger database for more detailed analysis. We analyzed geographic and racial disparities in the rates at which: prosecutors charge first-degree murder versus lesser charges; prosecutors seek the death penalty, not lesser punishments; defendants are convicted of first-degree murder versus lesser crimes; and defendants are sentenced to death, not lesser punishments. The Missouri statute gives prosecutors very broad discretion. We estimate that at least 76 percent of the cases in the database are death-eligible under the statute. However, prosecutors pursued capital trials in only about five percent of the cases. Thus, death-eligible cases in which prosecutors chose not to pursue capital trials comprise at least 71 percent of the cases in the database. Prosecutors in different counties exercise their discretion differently, leading to substantial variation in charging and sentencing practices in different counties across the state. The analysis of cases by race of victim and race of defendant shows that there are racial disparities in charging and sentencing decisions, but the racial disparities are not as significant as the geographic disparities. The article presents measures of racial and geographic disparities without controlling for individual culpability; a follow-on study will introduce culpability measures as control variables.

At twelve and a half minutes into the broadcast, Detectives Logan and Briscoe arrest two murder suspects. District Attorney Adam Schiff instructs Assistant D.A. Jack McCoy to make the following offer to each separately: If you confess and provide evidence of first-degree murder by your accomplice, you will receive a 1 year sentence on a weapons charge provided that your accomplice does not confess. If she does confess as well, you both will get 8 years for murder II. If you hold out and your accomplice turns state's evidence, you will serve 25 to life for murder I. If she also holds out, you will serve 4 years for voluntary manslaughter. Assuming each suspect loses one unit of utility for each year in prison, Table 5.1 shows the payoffs of each subject given all of the possible outcomes. The rows represent the actions of suspect 1 whereas the columns represent the actions of suspect 2. Each pair of numbers represents the payoffs for suspect 1 and suspect 2 for each combination, respectively. The situation of the suspects is strategic because the outcome of any action by suspect 1 depends on the choices of suspect 2, and vice versa. What should the suspects do? Collectively, they prefer to hold out. If they both hold out, the total jail time is only eight years, far less than any other outcome. Unless, however, they reach a binding agreement, the individual incentives of the suspects undermine this outcome.

Efforts to explain when and why the state can legitimately impose retributive punishment on an actor who inadvertently creates an unjustified risk of causing death (and death results) typically rely on one of two theories. The prior-choice theory claims that retributive punishment for inadvertent lethal risk-creation is justified if and only if the actor's inadvertence or ignorance was a but-for and proximate result of a prior culpable choice. The hypothetical-choice theory claims that retributive punishment for inadvertent lethal risk-creation is justified if and only if the actor would have chosen to take the risk if he had been aware of it, even though he was not in fact aware of it. I argue that neither of these theories satisfactorily identifies when and why retributive punishment is warranted for inadvertent lethal risk-creation. Instead, I propose that an actor who creates a risk of causing death but who was unaware of that risk can fairly be subject to retributive punishment if he was either non-willfully ignorant or self-deceived, and if such ignorance or self-deception was due to the causal influence of a desire he should have controlled. The culpability of such an actor consists, not in any prior actual choice to do wrong, nor in any imagined hypothetical choice to do wrong, but in the culpable failure to exercise doxastic self-control: control over one's beliefs.

I apply the body of social science data and feminist theory regarding domestic violence to reexamine heat-of-passion/adultery law. The article is organized around two central points. First, law implies a dubious distinction between men who premeditate the murder of wives and lovers, and “innocent” men who catch their wives in bed with someone. This distinction does not accurately describe husband-to-wife homicides. Second, there is a remarkable similarity between the social understandings that underlie important elements of voluntary manslaughter's heat-of-passion doctrine and the excuses and justifications that abusive men give to explain their violence. This congruence between how abusive men perceive their violence and the legal doctrine of voluntary manslaughter perpetuates two major misconceptions about the nature of wife-killing. The first misconception follows from the belief that violence in response to a wife's provocation -- in this context, the wife's adulterous conduct--is an uncontrollable response, which in turn reinforces the belief that intervention can have little deterrence or prevention impact. The second misconception follows from the congruence between the justifications given by abusive men and the quasi-justificatory elements of voluntary manslaughter doctrine: the wife-killer who kills in response to his wife's “provocative” conduct is seen as an unlikely recidivist and therefore less dangerous. I include a close examination of a California case that appears in many criminal law textbooks, People v. Berry. The California Supreme Court in Berry overturned a first degree murder conviction by finding that the trial court's failure to give a voluntary manslaughter instruction was reversible error. The Court’s reasoning demonstrates the deleterious effect of the resonance between the excuses and justifications given by abusive men and the cultural (mis)understandings that underlie modern heat-of-passion/adultery doctrine.

VioLit summary: OBJECTIVE: The goal of this article by Andrew was to describe the use of a Violence Index in the study of the extent and degree of violent crime. This index was argued to be a useful tool in evaluation. METHODOLOGY: A quasi-experimental method was employed to study 172 delinquents who were affiliated with the California Subsidy Program. Two studies were performed. Study I examined 116 referrals for psychological evaluation within the program between January 1971 and March 1973. Study II examined 56 referrals within the program between April and November 1973. Cases were excluded when there was incomplete data and, in one case, when the crime was reduced by the court to a non-crime. The mean age of all the youth was 17.78 years. The youth were probationers, assigned to the intensive supervision of this program for difficult probationers in the community, and additionally had to be part of the "troublesome" subgroup of the probationer population. Data were collected from their psychological case files. The Violence Scale was developed in the following way. Four professionals (two probation staff and two clinical psychologists, including the author) involved with delinquency ranked a list of each subject's most serious crime in Study I. These rankings were averaged, and a new rank was assigned to each crime. For Study II, the same four professionals took the table derived from Study I and inserted 9 new crimes that were averaged between them. Scores on the scale ranged from very non-serious (smoking) to very serious (voluntary manslaughter). The hypotheses being tested were 1) males would have higher violence scores, 2) non-Anglos would have higher violence scores, and 3) there would be no differences between the two time periods. ANOVA was used to analyze the data. FINDINGS/DISCUSSION: Males were found to be significantly more violent in Study I (p AUTHOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS: The author concluded that the payoff/risk for keeping the violent delinquent in the community could be improved with improved prognosticating ability. It was also argued that the violence scale could serve as a prototype for future testing; an improvement would be to make the scale a ratio scale rather than an ordinal one. Another improvement, the author suggested, would be the association of psychodiagnostic indices with the degree of violence and identification of "inhibition" and "prevention" variables included. Creation of a pre-violence scale was also advocated. EVALUATION: It is a common fact that prior offending best predicts future offending. This article takes this one step further and creates a measurement of the seriousness of this prior offending. Seriousness of crime measures have been around for many years, but at this time (1974), it is very likely that this study's attempt was one of the pioneers. The sample size, while large enough to support the statistics used, is questionable when it comes to generalizability. The data were taken from a specific program in California; more broad-based study would need to be done to make statements about the violent juvenile population in general. The age of the data should also signify caution. Internal validity issues arise in this study in the following areas: 1) clinical files as a data source would contain an unspecifiable variation in its information given many different professionals write these files, and 2) the use of four persons to create the seriousness measure raises caution about the amount of variation that was encountered and how accurate the measure was. The conclusions about the insignificant increase in female seriousness over the time periods are not supported with literature or other data. In fact, the liberation argument has not been supported by data since its emergence in the early 70's. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado) N1 - Call Number: F-461, AB-461 KW - 1970s KW - California KW - Survey Instrument KW - Juvenile Violence KW - Juvenile Delinquency KW - Juvenile Crime KW - Juvenile Offender KW - Offender Assessment KW - Delinquency Assessment KW - Delinquency Prediction KW - Crime Assessment KW - Crime Prediction KW - Violence Assessment KW - Violence Prediction Language: en

In Book IX of Plato’s Laws a conflict arises between the needs of practical legislation and the Platonic principle that all wrongdoing is involuntary. That there is a conflict seems obvious. For example, our present common law distinction between voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter is important morally as well as legally. And since manslaughter of either sort is wrong, the distinction appears to collapse if all wrongdoing is involuntary.