Janice Brown and “Battered Woman Syndrome”

Justice Brown, whose nomination to the D.C. Circuit has been stalled by Senate Democrats, easily gets the better of her California Supreme Court colleagues in a dissent. The majority’s opinion makes it absurdly easy for a prosecutor to present expert testimony claiming that a woman’s recantation of a prior claim of a single incident of domestic violence was due to the woman suffering from “Battered Woman Syndrome.” The evidence in question clearly didn’t meet the specific California statutory standard for the admissibility of this sort of evidence, nor should the evidence have been admitted under California’s general expert testimony standard, which requires that expert testimony “assist the trier of fact.” Even granting the (very controversial) theory behind “Battered Woman Syndrome,” mainstream advocates of the theory haven’t been known to claim that a single violent incident creates the “learned helplessness” that is a hallmark of the sufferer of the syndrome. Justice Brown has once again shown why she deserves to be a D.C. Circuit judge.

Update:The majority appears to be arguing that even though the expert apparently discussed BWS on the stand, the court would not apply the specific statute governing BWS. Instead, the testimony should still be admitted because it was helpful to the jury to have an “expert” with experience dealing with victims of domestic violence discuss the psychology of victims of domestic violence, and the “cycle of violence” that leads to domestic violence. However, the general rule in American courts is that expert testimony regarding a testifying witnesses’ credibility (or lack thereof) is inadmissible, especially when the expert is not testifying regarding a body of established scientific knowledge, as opposed to experience-based witnesses. (See The New Wigmore: Expert Evidence, chapters 1 and 7.) In the case under the discussion, the expert in question was apparently not even a trained pyschiatrist or psychologist, but the “Program Manager for the Antelope Valley Domestic Violence Council.”