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Please note that this event will be recorded, if you do not wish to be part of the recording, please feel free to turn your cameras off once the talk begins. The talk will be made available on the Criminology website and YouTube channel at a later date.
Registration closes at midday on Wednesday 04 February. The Teams link will be sent to you that afternoon.
When should a woman who has been subjected to domestic violence be treated as accomplice of crimes carried out by her abuser? Black letter law in the United States says one thing, but legal practice says another. American courts frequently say that in order to be liable for a crime committed by someone else, a defendant has to want the crime to occur. More precisely, the defendant has to try, or aim, to bring about the crime. And a victim of domestic violence coerced into cooperating in a crime carried out by her abuser generally does not want, or try, or aim, to bring about the crime. She simply seeks to avoid retaliation. So prosecutions of women for complicity in the crimes of their abusers might be expected to be rare, or at least rarely successful. But it turns out that the coercion experienced by victims of domestic violence often does not matter when they are prosecuted as accomplices in their abusers’ offenses. It does not matter whether they sought to bring the crime about. They can be, and frequently are, held criminally liable without any finding that they had a “purposive attitude” to the crime. This article examines why this occurs. Part of the explanation is that American legal doctrines regarding criminal complicity have been developed with insufficient regard for the dynamics of intimate partner violence.
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