Bill Extends Self-Defense Rights to Battered Spouses

SACRAMENTO —  It wraps the protective arm of the “homeowners’ bill of rights” notion of self-defense around battered spouses who kill their abusers.

And it’s heading for the Senate floor--and a fight.

Written by a former prosecutor and sponsored by state Sen. Lucy Killea (I-San Diego), the Domestic Violence Fair Trial bill would extend the justifiable-homicide defense to some habitually battered spouses--almost always women--who feel so trapped by their batterers that at some point they see just one choice: the abuser’s death or their own.

Killea says it has met with “a lot of sympathy, and a lot of raised eyebrows--is this carrying this too far?”

“It is a change in the self-defense law, and that I think is what makes the district attorneys uneasy. But I think the change is beneficial and it’s a very narrow scope.”

But the executive director of the California District Attorneys Assn., Michael W. Sweet, calls it “just a recipe for murder.”

Bob Giroux, Killea’s staff consultant on measure SB 1144, said that “under the ‘homeowners’ bill of rights,’ you can kill somebody in self-defense if they’re coming after you. What this bill says is, in domestic violence situations where an individual can prove there’s been false imprisonment and a pattern of being battered . . . they can be acquitted.”

The bill’s author, onetime Marin County prosecutor Tiffany Franchetti, who spent four years as a deputy attorney general in Gov. George Deukmejian’s Administration, says that just as the homeowners’ bill of rights is about “situational self-defense,” so is SB 1144.

Sweet, though, opposes expanding the standard of self-defense, which is limited to what a “reasonable man” would have done in the accused killer’s place.

That, Franchetti said, is exactly the point.

“These laws were written for the kind of combat men have, that juries could judge from common experience--two men in a bar having a brawl, that’s what the objective standard was meant to protect,” Franchetti said. That standard can deprive battered spouses of legitimate claims of self-defense, she said.

To Sweet’s objections that SB 1144 could signal open season on husbands and boyfriends, Franchetti says the bill is so narrowly drawn that virtually none of the 30 women whose clemency petitions are before Gov. Pete Wilson could have qualified.

It requires independent proof of repeated felonious abuse, rape or sodomy, a genuine belief that the spouse or the children were victims of felony false imprisonment, and an honest belief that the spouse or a family member was facing death or serious injury.