We are delighted to announce the first in a series of guest blogs from Dame Vera Baird DBE KC.
Dame Vera is a barrister and has been a long-time champion of women’s justice. Our Director, Harriet Wistrich, first worked with her in the early 1990s when she advised on the criminal appeal by Emma Humphreys which resulted in the court overturning her conviction for murder in 1995. In 2001, she became the MP for Redcar, became a Minister in the Ministry of Justice in 2006 and was Solicitor General from 2007 to 2010. Between 2012 to 2019 she was the elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria. In 2019 she was appointed Victims Commissioner and CWJ collaborated with her closely on the catastrophic collapse of rape prosecutions. Vera now holds a number of honorary academic posts and has recently been appointed to the Women's Justice Board.
Prosecuting perpetrators for manslaughter when domestic abuse leads to suicide
In January, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) failed in the manslaughter prosecution of Ryan Wellings, a domestic abuser, whose victim, Kiena Dawes, killed herself. It was only the third prosecution of this kind that the CPS had ever attempted, and they have lost two. That is a shocking record, given the abundant evidence that more women are driven to suicide by their abusers than are killed by them [1]. In 2022-23, for instance, a National Police Chief’s Council report showed that 80 abuse-related deaths were homicides and 93 were victim suicides.
The three CPS attempts took place in 2006, 2012 and the third was Kiena’s case. That is no demonstration of relish to tackle these worrying cases. It is urgent that CPS and police work out a strategy, to hold abusers accountable when women are driven to suicide, especially now that the police’s own figures show it to be an accelerating pattern.
Kiena
Wellings abused Kiena for two years. He tried to strangle her, hit her while she was pregnant, held her face under water when she was bathing her baby, put a cordless drill in her face to ‘drill her teeth out’ threatened to pour acid on her face and told her to kill herself.
On 17 July 2022, he rammed her head into a radiator and, though police arrested him, he went home as soon as he was free. On 22 July, Kiena left her baby girl at a friend’s house and took her own life under a train. She left a note:
“….I was murdered… Ryan Wellings killed me.”
Coercive control, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide
Domestic abuse charities have long seen the link between coercive control - from which women feel they will never escape - and suicide. Two thirds of people, who have suffered abuse, experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and brain injury. These are alarming numbers [2].
Thirty-seven studies have found that trauma, and hopelessness, typically found in abused women, are strongly associated with suicidality [3].
A review of 3,500 women, who were being supported by Refuge, showed that 83% had experienced hopelessness, 24% had felt suicidal and 18% had actively made plans to end their lives [4] [5].
However, most jurors are unlikely to know about these studies, and only a few will have seen domestic abuse, in their own lives. Calling expert evidence is imperative, if jurors are to understand that coercively controlling domestic abuse may put women into a mental state, pre-disposing them to suicide.
The CPS won their only domestic manslaughter success through expert evidence. A psychiatrist told the court that the victim, Justine, had been in a "substantially abnormal" state, feeling depressed and hopeless and that there was "a clear link” between those feelings, caused by the actions of the defendant and her suicide" [6]. The defendant, Nicholas Allen, pleaded guilty.
The crime of manslaughter
In the case of Dhaliwal, the first of the CPS’ attempted prosecutions, in 2006, the Court of Appeal made clear that the offence, in law, can cover driving someone to suicide. They said:
‘...subject to evidence and argument on the critical issue of causation, unlawful violence on an individual with a fragile and vulnerable personality, which is proved to be a material cause of death (even if the result of suicide) would at least arguably, be capable of amounting to manslaughter.’ [7]
Kiena suffered from a personality disorder, causing impulsivity and poor self-esteem, and had made suicide attempts before she met Wellings. So, she had ‘a fragile and vulnerable personality,’ but despite the Court emphasising its relevance to manslaughter, ironically, it seems from press reports that Wellings’ defence successfully blamed her poor mental health for her suicide and exculpated him.
There are two points. The first is a legal rule called ‘the eggshell skull principle’. It says that a defendant is liable for the harm they cause to a victim, even if it is unusually serious harm because of a pre-existing vulnerability [8]. So, if Kiena’s poor mental health made her more susceptible to suicide, Wellings was nonetheless responsible, if his behaviour was a substantial cause of her death. The psychiatric evidence was that Wellings’ behaviour made her condition worse over time, and would have contributed to her suicide.
It is not clear that the CPS even argued this point, though it is especially vital in the context of research into Domestic Homicide Reviews about suicides, showing that, in no less than 94% of them, the victim had pre-existing mental health problems and in half, there had been previous self-harm.
Full information and the key legal rules are key to jurors properly unravelling these interacting factors.
Causation
If a separate decision to die by suicide is freely and voluntarily taken, it would, in a perfect case, break the ‘chain of causation’ between the abuser’s behaviour and the death. However, the courts have repeatedly said:
‘..causation is heavily context specific …’ [9]
For instance, in Corbett [10], a man who violently assaulted another was convicted of manslaughter when his victim ran away and was killed by a car.
In the case of Wallace [11], a woman who threw acid over her boyfriend, causing him endless pain, and near-total paralysis, was convicted of his manslaughter, though he went abroad and signed, voluntarily, to be euthanised.
It is common sense that what caused the death in the Corbett case, was not a free and voluntary decision to run (instead of fight).
If the research findings and psychiatric evidence are put into court and the ‘eggshell skull’ principle is pressed, it may become common sense that the cause of a victim suicide can be feeling trapped in unimaginable coercive control, like Kiena’s.
There are at least three hopeful signs:
In July 2023, an Inquest into the suicide of 30-year-old Kellie Sutton, heard about the impact of long-term abuse, from an expert, and the jury found that her abuser had unlawfully killed her.
Secondly, after Kellie’s death, the abuser was prosecuted for coercive control, but the trial judge seemed to consider that he may have been guilty of manslaughter since he said:
“He drove [his partner] to hang herself that morning. Beat her, ground her down and broke her spirits.” [12]
And thirdly, a CPS prosecutor told one of the Warwick researchers:
“We did a briefing... because often, the suicide messaging has come across as if its everyone’s severe mental health problems. It is saying no, it is because they feel completely hopeless in that situation.”
Conclusions
If the police tackled domestic abuse well, from the start, few cases would lead to death.The CPS says it intends to take on more such prosecutions, so casework charities, like AAFDA should liaise closely with them, on appropriate cases.
Successful prosecutions for manslaughter are essential. Women abused into such despair that they take their own life, do so by compulsion, not by choice.
References:
1. An Analysis of Domestic Homicide Reviews in Cases of Domestic Abuse Suicide; Danger, Munro & Andrade, University of Warwick July 2022
2. Domestic Abuse & Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) National Centre for Domestic Abuse 2022
3. McLaughlin, J., O’Carroll, R. & O’Connor, R. (2012) ‘Intimate Partner Abuse and Suicidality: A Systematic Review’. Clinical Psychology Review 32: 677-689
4. Ibid at page 46
5. WRAP-Domestic-abuse-and-suicide-Munro-2018.pdf
6. Man jailed for manslaughter over ex-girlfriend's suicide - BBC News
7. R v D 2006 EWCA Crim 1138
8. See Owens v Liver pool Corporation (1939) 1KB 394
9. Hughes (2013) UKSC 56
10. 1996 Criminal Law Review 594
11. 2018 EWCA, Crim 690
12. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-4354153