4. AN ETHICAL RESPONSE TO ABUSE VICTIMS WHO KILL

Can Killing Ever Be Justified?

While humans are called to value life over death and avoid killing of self or others, some good exceptions exist. The right of self-defense is one of those exceptions. While self-defense "involves killing and thus ending an individual's life [it ]gives life the possibility to continue without being overwhelmed by evil." Consequently, an act of self-defense expresses in exception form what the principle that values human life expresses in rule form. (Maguire 1984, 81.)
A good ethic that places women's collective and individual well-being at the center of concern and gives priority to women's voices, urges us to re-imagine abuse victims' experience within the context of her use of killing violence. Communities through individuals, pastors, lawmakers and law enforcers must ask themselves: Do women's lives matter?
Battered women's shelters and programs, savvy legislators, and prosecutors have pushed the community to shine a bright light on domestic violence for more than thirty years, dragging it out from behind closed doors and placing it squarely before the community. Battered women need protection and legal advice, as well as economic and emotional support. At the same time, both the community and the church have prohibitions against humans killing other humans. Can killing ever be justified?
Rather than use an hypothetical situation, the case of Vella Pelletier Gogan, a longtime battered woman who killed her husband, will be examined here. I will argue that real-life situations such as these require an ethic that supports good exceptions to good principles. The art-science of ethics aims to bring sensitivity to and adopt a method for discovering moral value. An ethical response to battered women who use killing violence is required. So, how do we do ethics?
An ethics dialogue aims to determine the moral value of certain human behaviors through a series of questions and possible answers, in this case, to the end of discerning whether causing the death of another can ever be considered a moral act. As part of our ground rules, we agree that "moral" means that which humans should be. That which fulfills our humanity is moral. (Maguire 1984, 65)
Then we establish the moral object: Vella Gogan killed her husband Gene.
What was killed?:
He was a living human being.
He was a father.
He was an uncle.
Why?
"Motive gives essential and constitutive meaning to human action." (Ibid., 69). She killed him after he battered and threatened to kill her over three decades.
She believed he would make good his threat to kill her.
She was not protected by police whom she had called repeatedly.
She saw no other option to escape further abuse.
How?
"The manner and style of an action contributes to the constitution of its morality." (Ibid., 70)
Vella Gogan shot her husband and then used butcher's tools to dismember him to facilitate burial of his 200-plus pound body.

When?
This question becomes particularly important in this case since Vella Gogan killed her husband after longtime abuse and not during a particular attack. Therefore, she could be accused of premeditated murder and not be able to plead self-defense. It could be argued that she had multiple options available to her to end her abuse other than using killing violence. Yet, she testified that she sensed a shift in his behavior that led her to believe that he would kill her the night she shot him. Vella's testimony about this "sixth sense" is consistent with other abuse victims who kill, including the women featured in the award-winning 1993 documentary "Defending Our Lives."
Who?

"What is objectively moral for one person may be objectively immoral for another." 72.

Vella is a working-class former butcher's assistant who had been abused by her husband throughout their thirty-plus year marriage. She testified that though she was sorry for killing her husband, she did not want to die and believed that he meant to kill her.

Foreseeable effects of her actions
1) Her abuser would be dead.
2) She would be free from his abuse and death threats.
3) She might be imprisoned, or otherwise punished, for killing her husband.

A good ethic recognizes that killing may be justified as a matter of saving one's own life.

On Killing in Self-Defense

Some learned writers have broached the subject of killing in self-defense. In a sermon that addressed this issue, Marie Fortune advised, "Whenever any one of us takes the life of another human being, we should be called to account for our actions. It is the accounting we give that matters. Self-defense is the accounting to be given in this case." In the face of physical threat or terror, individuals have the moral and legal right to defend themselves. (Fortune 1992, 130)

Women who kill their abusers in self-defense represent a major theological hurdle for many church people. They may ponder how they can support the woman as she goes through the criminal justice system and yet not condone the taking of life. (Adams 1989, 54)

My own position is that when a battered woman kills her intimate partner in self-defense, this action announces not the woman's moral failure as much as the failure of the community to protect her. Resources such as legal aid, shelters and hotlines must be accessible, responsive, and effective and victims of battering must have both an awareness of them and the ability to put them into action.

States rely upon federal funding to help provide free legal services and attorneys to victims of domestic violence. According to a September 2003 story in the Bangor Daily News, Maine programs received $600,000 from the Justice Department's legal assistance to victims program between 2000 and 2003. Pine Tree Legal Assistance has helped 3,500 people since January 2000 by using its federal grant to pay for lawyers in Kennebec, Knox, Sagadahoc and Cumberland counties.

Yet, in September 2003, the Justice Department's program was not funded, leaving Maine service providers scrambling for alternative funding through the state Department of Public Safety, the Maine Bar Foundation, the Maine Women's Fund and the Maine Community Foundation to bridge the budget gap. U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe responded to a letter I wrote her seeking restoration of the funding. The bill called the Security and Financial Empowerment (SAFE) Act was referred to the Senate Finance Committee, of which she is a member. "You may be assured of my continued efforts to ensure that persons who are victims of domestic and sexual violence receive the assistance they need," she wrote on November 19, 2003.

Bangor writer Angela Hoy, who knows from personal experience, describes court as "100 percent confrontation. Nothing is scarier than walking into a situation when you have no idea what you're walking into. Even normal people are intimidated by the courtroom, let alone abused people without legal representation." As other women mentioned in this thesis have done, Hoy used her writing to help effect public policy. Her book "The Emergency Divorce Handbook," is available free online to those in need at www.angelahoy.com.

Though some of the funding was restored early in 2004, the federal budget crunch took a bite out of money abuse victims rely upon. Given this, the role of the church and ministers in making resources widely known and available becomes even more urgent. Change becomes possible only when the need for such change is named and appropriate action is undertaken. (Adams 1994, 8)

A good ethic for battered women mobilizes
a communitywide response to violence.