This research argues that battered-person syndrome can be a legitimate defense in court, while cautioning that trivial use or overuse of such a defense could have the effect of hardening general (i.e., potential juror) attitudes against persons who are battered and who lash out against their abusers. Two hypothetical examples may help to illustrate the contention.
1. If one's sibling was being abused by a spouse, one's first course of action upon being made aware of the abuse would be to do everything possible to isolate the sibling from the abuser. That would be a significant challenge because it is commonplace for people who observe abusive relationships to ask "why the woman did not leave despite opportunities to do so which seem objectively apparent to an outsider, why she continued to love someone who hurt her, or why she did not seek help from medical providers or law enforcement personnel" (Maguigan, 1998, p. 50). If the sibling could not be persuaded to leave the relationship despite chances to do so and were later charged with a crime against the abusive husband, then the challenge for a legal defense would be to explain that dynamic via expert testimony.
One's inclination would be to want the sibling to have every advantage in court, including the option to benefit from expert-witness testimony that could help the court and jurors understand an account of the sibling's behavior. The content of the testimony would come down to accounting for the lashing-out without at the same time positioning the sibling/defendant as a mentally ill person. In that regard, the thinking of experts is that perceptions of battered-woman syndrome (BWS) must get somehow "beyond" the choice of medicalizing the defendant's behavior, as if the lashing-out against the abuser were somehow an epiphany of loss of control. Instead, the "syndrome" would have to be explained in terms of relationship dynamics, including patterns of emotional/psychologic...