Canada: N.B. case fuels debate over domestic violence

Story here. Excerpt:

'After a night of drunken revelry that escalated into a violent street fight, Crystal-Dawn MacKenzie grabbed a knife from her neighbour's kitchen, yelled "I'm going to kill him" and stabbed her common-law husband in the collarbone.

If the knife had moved just a centimetre in either direction, Patrick Andrew Thomas likely would have lived, a pathologist later testified. But the 29-year-old bled to death on a downtown Saint John street.

Eight months later, Ms. MacKenzie walked out of a New Brunswick court a free woman after a nine-woman, three-man jury in Saint John acquitted the 28-year-old mother of three of second-degree murder, accepting that she had finally snapped after years of abuse at the hands of Mr. Thomas.

The Crown filed an appeal last week, a rare move for a jury trial. Prosecutors are arguing that the judge erred in his definitions of murder and self-defence and that Ms. MacKenzie had alternatives to killing her husband to escape his violence.'