Canada: Professor says killing can be justified in Domestic Abuse cases

Story here. Excerpt:

'Battered women are morally entitled to kill their abusive partners, even those who are passed out or asleep, says a respected University of Ottawa law professor.

Prof. Elizabeth Sheehy raises the provocative idea in her new book, eight years in the making, called Defending Battered Women on Trial. It will be published Dec. 15 by UBC Press.

"Why should women live in anticipatory dread and hypervigilence?" she writes in the book's concluding chapter. Would it not be just, Sheehy asks, "to shift the risk of death to those men whose aggressions have created such dehumanizing fear in their female partners?"
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Sheehy likened women in abusive relationships to prisoners of war. "We would never say of a prisoner of war that it's not just that she or he kill their captor to escape. It is just to kill to escape that kind of enslavement."

Sheehy's book, which is written for a general audience, is built around the trials of 11 battered women, 10 of whom killed their partners. She draws heavily on trial transcripts to examine the evidence and the legal strategies of the defence lawyers.
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To select those 11 trials, Sheehy studied 91 cases of battered women who killed their partners between 1990, when the Supreme Court of Canada recognized "battered women syndrome" as a legal defence, and 2005.'