BCJ 3601 Unit 3 Essay

Unit 3 Essay

Columbia Southern University

Introduction

Being a battered woman can be mentally and physically I think when the Supreme Court was trying to say that there can not be a specific definition of a battered woman. There are so many situations that can make a woman a battered woman because not every situation is the same. Battered women tend to deal with things for a long period of time until they have had enough of the abuse. Sometimes this ends in the abuser getting hurt in the end. Being considered insane by a doctor needs to have some testing behind it to ensure that the diagnosis is correct. For someone to say they were temporarily insane for a couple of minutes not have any kind of evidence behind it. If that was the case then the person that has hit on a woman can say that they were temporarily insane for the of the beating.

Analysis

In this case, it is clear that Gwen was a battered woman. She had been getting mentally and physically abused for years by her husband. Because she loved him she dealt with it. She has had broken ribs, cuts, and times when her limbs were so swollen that she could not even walk. On the night in question, her Husband had gotten a call and said that he would be going somewhere and she asked him to bring back some chicken. He had been gone so long that she decided to peel some potatoes and cook them because that was the only thing that was in the house to eat. When her husband finally came back she saw that he placed a bag on the bed that said cub food. A place that she had told her husband that she wanted to go to. He then received a phone call from a friend and he said that he had to leave again. Gwen’s husband was gone for a while so decided to go to a friends house. The person that her husband was out with came home and she immediately called home to tell her husband that she would be home soon but her husband called her names and told her not to come home. She could tell on the phone that he was drunk. When Gwen finally came home it was after midnight and her husband was standing in the living room. They got into an argument about him having a girlfriend. She tries to run to the bedroom but he cuts her off and starts to hit her in the back of the head. As he is hitting her she sees the knife that she used earlier and proceeds to swing it back toward him. He says that she stabbed her but it is unclear if she actually did. She gets away from and runs down the stairs and hides behind a trashcan. He is called her name and then she hears a thud. She runs to her husband and sees that he is bleeding. She runs and gets a blanket then calls earl and the police. He later is pronounced dead at the hospital and Gwen is arrested at the hospital.

We are not able to define what a battered woman is because no one knows how it feels to be unless they have been in that type of situation. Battered women go through a lot mentally when dealing with situations. I could not even imagine trying to create a description of what a battered woman is. There is not one way that anything describes what it means to be a battered woman. A woman can be abused mentally physically, and emotionally which takes a toll on the woman for years to come. These types of incidents are there with these women for the rest of their lives and will affect how they interact with others. If a person has gone through the same things they can not define because it was not the same situation as another woman. Each situation needs to be treated differently.

Insanity??

In this case a guy murder a girl by stabbing her 40 times. A police officer stayed under them and heard a disturbance coming from their apartment. She went upstairs to see what was going on. A guy opened the door saying something like he just blew up, and noticed that he had blood on his clothes. She then noticed children on the couch and a woman laying on the floor bleeding. The police were called and he was arrested. His defense tried to claim temporary insanity at the time of the murder.

Is insanity and temporary insanity different? Insanity is defined as a person unable to live a normal life because their actions are dangerous to others and themselves. Temporary insanity is when someone claims they are sane before and after the crime, but insane during. The problem when someone is claiming temporary insanity is there needs to be proof. A psychiatrist examines the defendant after the crime but there is not any evidence before to actually to believe what they are saying to be true. Even though he might have diagnosed with a disease there is no way to determine that his disease made him murder her. Insanity was not even a defense that was used at the time of the murder.

They are presenting the case so that temporary insanity is something that comes and goes. The defendant is not diagnosed with permanent insanity. There are claims that the defendant has had times were he was sane before and after he did something that was dangerous to others around them, and insane during the incidents that happened. If a person is permanently insane then that person would be entitled to help from the state. I believe that the difference between the two is if there is evidence showing that the person was diagnosed with the disease before the incident happened. There needs to be some kind of paperwork showing that he has had spells that created incidents that harmed others around him. Just saying someone is insane or temporarily insane is not good enough to find a not guilty verdict.

References

Schmalleger, F. & Hall, D. E. (2017). Criminal Law Today. (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson

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