Are some women getting away with murder?

Can a woman always be excused - partially or completely - from killing a man just because he is dreadful?

I tend to agree with the early assessment made by Janet Charlton of the kind of person who must have killed her lover, Daniel O'Brien. Back in the first weeks after the murder, Ms Charlton told her victim's mother, Elizabeth O'Brien, that his killer "must be a psychopath".

Later, she remembered that it had been she herself who had taken an axe to the head and upper body of her lover of eight months, and confessed the killing to the police. Earlier this week, a jury decided after 19 hours of deliberation that Ms Charlton was not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter on grounds of provocation. What worries me is that Ms Charlton seems to have been all too eager to be provoked.

Ms Charlton has no regrets about taking Mr O'Brien's life, and declared in the witness box: "I did the right thing and I will say that forever and a day. The man was mad."

I think a normal person would have one or two regrets, though. As the single mother of a small daughter, Amy, Ms Charlton ought to regret that her five-year prison sentence will mean that her daughter is effectively motherless for at least the next two-and-a-half years.

She ought to regret that, after the killing, she sent her daughter upstairs where the three-year-old saw the murdered man handcuffed, blindfolded, gagged, with 20 axe wounds, the weapon still embedded in his head, and draped with her mother's underwear.

She ought to regret that she and her daughter moved in with this "madman" two months after he had replied to her internet advert for escort services, and lived with him for a further six months before she eventually killed him. She ought to regret that her daughter will have to cope with this trauma, and its aftermath, for the rest of her life.

But no, Ms Charlton "did the right thing". Her story is that her lover abused her with his sexual demands and that she wanted to leave him. He told her that if she tried to leave, he would kill her, then abuse and kill her daughter. So she killed him instead, with an axe that he had provided.

Ms Charlton says she did what she did because she "had no choice". Any suggestion that "doing the right thing" in this case might perhaps have involved quietly, and without announcement, getting the hell out of that situation leaves one open to the accusation that one doesn't understand "battered woman syndrome".

My worry is that battered woman syndrome – and this phrase was used during Ms Charlton's trial – or at least how it can be used in court, is coming to be understood rather too well. I am reminded of the case of Jane Andrews, who killed her lover by attacking him with a cricket bat and then stabbed him to death after he had said he would not marry her. (Mr O'Brien's ex-lover testified that he was intending to leave Ms Charlton, and that this had been discussed between them the day before the killing.)

Ms Andrews claimed provocation during her trial, too, saying that she had been beaten and raped by her lover. After her claims were rejected and she was sentenced to life for murder, Ms Andrews received hundreds of letters in prison from battered women supporting her plight. Later, though, Ms Andrews confessed that she had in fact made up the allegations.

What made Ms Andrews's claims of abuse and provocation unbelievable to a jury, and Ms Charlton's believable? The answer, as Hercule Poirot always stressed, lies in the character of the victim. Thomas Cressman was a model of rectitude, and no shred of evidence suggested otherwise. Danny O'Brien though, was a monstrous man, who enjoyed watching porn involving animals, indulged in all sorts of cruel and humiliating sexual practices and had injured an ex-lover's spine grotesquely during intercourse. If this lover had gone to the police and reported her assault, it would surely have been Mr O'Brien who was behind bars, not Ms Charlton.

But the trouble is that the monstrous behaviour appears to have attracted Ms Charlton, rather than repelled her. She was seeking out dangerous sexual relationships, and having found an outrageously dangerous one, she leapt right in, without too much worry about the sort of person she was exposing her daughter to. Ultimately, it turns out, it was Mr O'Brien who was the victim of this folie à deux – not murdered but slaughtered, killed without mercy as a consequence of his own bad character.

But can a woman always be excused – completely or partially – from killing a man just because he is dreadful? Certainly battered woman syndrome does exist, and certainly it is important for the law to be far more vigilant in spotting it than has been the case in the past. But equally, a woman can commit a "crime of passion" just as easily as a man can, without battered woman syndrome being involved.

To question the legitimacy of citing battered woman syndrome during a particular murder trial is inevitably seen as a threat to the defences of other women who may feel driven to kill. But blacking out and not remembering a murder is not really consistent with battered woman syndrome, anyway. In cases like this one, understanding of the syndrome may be clouded or distorted, rather than illuminated.

A lot of difficulty in gaining recognition for the syndrome has been that killings perpetrated as the culmination of intimidation and abuse can seem cold-blooded or pre-meditated, rather than committed during a moment of loss of self-control. In the latter situation, the battered women can claim self-defence. The struggle has been to raise awareness of the fact that self-defence can be legitimate in the former situation too.

Ms Charlton's claim of self-defence was rejected because her victim was bound, gagged and blindfolded at the time she attacked him. How easy it would have been for her to walk out with her daughter then. Instead, she killed in a frenzied attack, then showered the blood off and visited a friend with her daughter.

After a trip to the park, she returned to Mr O'Brien's luxurious home with her ex-husband, the father of her daughter, and expressed surprise at the carnage they found. This easily conjured network of support seems to me like a strange mutation of battered woman syndrome, even though Ms Charlton claimed in court that she was estranged from friends and family during the brief relationship.

To me, it doesn't quite add up. Ms Charlton's situation with her lover compelled her neither to plan a killing, nor to lash out to save herself. I'm not saying that there were not extenuating circumstances. There were. It is not that Ms Charlton has not been punished enough. She has been. But at the same time, we need "crimes of passion" to be properly understood, for both sexes, not filed erroneously under "battered woman syndrome".

What really worries me about this case is that it can only fan flames of resentment from men who already feel that their very lives are seen as less valuable than the lives of women. This is not only happening in the courts. It is in matters of health care that the discrepancies can seem most shocking.

The last thing we want is to start being lazy or imprecise in our explanations of why a man may lose his life at the hands of a woman. I think justice has been done in this case. But I don't think it has been seen to be done with quite the proper clarity.

d.orr@independent.co.uk