An Abused Wife? Or an Executioner?

Article here. Excerpt:

'The murder trial of Barbara Sheehan, the Queens school secretary who shot her husband with 11 bullets, often bears the hallmarks of a dysfunctional wake.
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Jacquelyn C. Campbell, an expert witness on domestic violence from Johns Hopkins University, likened an abused woman to a dog who receives a shock every time it tries to leave a cage, eventually remaining frozen in place, even when the cage door is left opened.
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But the Queens prosecutor, Debra Pomodore, attacked the syndrome as little more than “pseudoscience” embraced by the defendant out of desperation to stay out of prison. Moreover, Ms. Pomodore, an assistant district attorney, argued, being abused was not an excuse for an open season on killing men; of the nearly four million women abused each year by their husbands in the United States, only 500 to 600 killed them, she said.
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Battered women’s syndrome became so widely accepted as a legal defense in the early 1990s that a number of states, notably Ohio and Maryland, granted clemency to some women imprisoned for assaulting or killing their mates.'