Case Note on R V Ahluwalia

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The case of R v Ahluwalia plays an important part in criminal law because following its decision, the law of provocation has since adapted to women who have killed, having suffered from battered woman syndrome. As well as this, the case has concerned many controversial issues to do with gender and whom this defence should be available to. Within this case note I will be analysing these issues and also showing the implications the case has had on both the defence and other cases. The appellant Kiranjit Ahluwalia who was of Asian ethnic, had an arranged marriage with her husband. Throughout the course of their marriage the appellant suffered from violent abuse from her husband in which one of the instances he tried to run her down at a family wedding. As the abuse worsened she filed her first injunction against him in 1983, ‘to restrain the deceased from hitting her’. However as the deceased continued with his violence against the appellant she obtained her second injunction after he ‘held her throat and threatened her with a knife’. The appellant’s husband was also having an affair with another woman. On the evening of the 9th of May, after an argument the appellant threw some petrol into the husband’s bedroom and set it alight. He died six days later from the burns. The appellant was convicted of murder, and appealed against her conviction based upon three grounds. The first ground of appeal was that the judge had wrongly directed the jury on provocation that it could only be used as a defence if there had been a sudden and temporary loss of control. The second was the misdirection of the jury in failing to consider the characteristic of being a battered woman to the reasonable person. The defendant was successful on the third ground of appeal in that ‘there may have been an arguable defence, which was not put forward at the trial’ and the murder

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