Queens Woman Who Killed Husband Is Acquitted of Murder

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

She had always admitted that she killed her husband, firing 11 bullets from two guns inside their home in Queens. But she said she had no choice: if she had not shot him, he would have surely killed her first.

On Thursday, a jury in State Supreme Court in Queens agreed, clearing the woman, Barbara Sheehan, of second-degree murder charges in a trial that had been viewed as a strenuous test of a battered-woman defense.

Much of the trial’s testimony focused on the victim, Raymond Sheehan, and examples of his relentless abuse. Ms. Sheehan and her children testified that he smashed her head against a cinder-block wall during a family vacation in Jamaica in 2007, threw boiling pasta sauce at her and punched her in the face the evening before the killing took place in February 2008.

But prosecutors characterized Ms. Sheehan as a pathological liar who executed her husband because she despised him, and then cloaked herself in a false tale of chronic abuse to escape justice.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/nyregion/barbara-sheehan-who-killed-husband-is-found-not-guilty-of-murder.html

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Men's rights trolls will roll up here and say "Women are now beating men!"

[Taverner]

1. I'm glad self-defense is recognized in NY State

Because this was flat out self defense

[socialshockwave]

2. Men's rights trolls will roll up here and say "Women are now beating men!""

Oh it happens. Not as often, but to say women are pure, peaceful creatures(which is total bunk; I've met manipulative, cruel women as much as I've met manipulative, cruel men) is a load of horse shit.

[Lil Missy]

8. Nobody said that.

[Selatius]

3. Self-defense is still a valid legal doctrine.

While it is sad that things got to the point where a killing occurred, let's be happy that a jury of her peers concluded that she did, in deed, have a right to self-preservation against a physically stronger aggressor.

[Lil Missy]

4. She had good reason to despise him, but that doesn't negate her right to defend herself.

[schmice]

5. self defense

You absolutely hit the nail on the head (as it were).

[TheWraith]

6. 11 bullets? If you're executing somebody, you don't need 11 bullets.

That alone would make me tend to believe her side.

[thesquanderer]

9. Funny, I had the opposite reaction

11 bullets? 2 guns? To me that's what makes it, on the surface, NOT sound like self defense. (But I trust the jury verdict.)

[MrSlayer]

7. Justifiable if true.

No qualms from me. You have to do what you have to do.