Rethinking Imminence: Self-Defense and Coercive Control in Domestic Violence
Authors
Ziyue Wu
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Domestic-violence self-defense cases reveal a persistent structural mismatch in American criminal law. Doctrinal elements designed for sudden, episodic confrontations—particularly imminence, necessity, and objective reasonableness—often fail to capture the lived reality of ongoing coercion, entrapment, and patterned violence within intimate relationships. Contemporary research on intimate partner violence increasingly distinguishes between isolated acts of aggression and sustained regimes of “coercive control,” defined as behaviors intended to monitor, dominate, and entrap victims over time. When legal doctrine ignores this patterned context, factfinders risk misinterpreting survivor behavior through enduring myths—such as the expectation that a “reasonable” victim would simply leave—and misapplying the reasonable person standard in ways that systematically disadvantage abuse survivors. This Article argues that American self-defense doctrine need not create a separate “battered person” defense to address these cases. Instead, existing doctrine can accommodate domestic-violence self-defense claims if two conditions are met: (1) courts consistently admit expert testimony on battering and its psychological and situational effects, and (2) jury instructions operationalize a genuinely contextual standard of reasonableness, evaluating what a reasonable person in the defendant’s situation, with similar knowledge and experience, would have perceived and done. Properly understood, coercive control can also support a more flexible interpretation of imminence, treating it as a contextual inquiry rather than a rigid temporal threshold. The Article synthesizes leading U.S. decisions—including State v. Kelly, People v. Humphrey, and State v. Norman—alongside statutory developments such as California Evidence Code § 1107 and post-conviction relief mechanisms for survivors. It further offers a comparative analysis of Canadian law following R. v. Lavallee and the 2013 reforms to Criminal Code § 34, which explicitly incorporate relationship history into the reasonableness inquiry and treat imminence as one factor among many. The Article concludes by proposing doctrinal and institutional reforms focused on evidentiary consistency, jury-instruction redesign, and post-conviction review pathways. These reforms aim to reduce arbitrariness in adjudication while preserving principled limits on defensive violence and recognizing the legal significance of coercive control in assessing self-defense. This Article ultimately argues that the perceived inadequacy of self-defense doctrine in domestic violence cases stems less from doctrinal failure than from evidentiary and interpretive deficiencies.
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Authors
Ziyue Wu
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References:
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