Opinion ID: 163763
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Self-defense & BWS in Oklahoma: Bechtel v. State

Text: 21 In Bechtel, the OCCA reviewed a trial court's decision to exclude expert testimony on BWS offered to support the defendant's claim of self-defense. The OCCA made it clear that in Oklahoma, the key to the defense of self-defense is reasonableness. A defendant must show that she had a reasonable belief as to the imminence of great bodily harm or death and as to the force necessary to compel it. Id. at 10 (emphasis added); id. at 6 (A bare belief that one is about to suffer death or great personal injury will not, in itself, justify [self-defense]. There must exist reasonable grounds for such belief at the time of the killing. . . . Fear alone never justifies one person to take the life of another.) (emphasis in original). 22 In Bechtel, a battered woman case very much like Ms. Paine's, the OCCA stated that the two requirements of self-defense, reasonableness and imminence, can be understood only within the framework of [BWS]. Id. at 6 (emphasis added). Finding that BWS is a substantially scientifically accepted theory, id. at 8, the OCCA concluded that expert testimony about it would assist the trier of fact in assessing how the experiences of a battered woman impact her state of mind at the time of the killing and in assessing the reasonableness of her belief that she was in imminent danger. Id. at 6-8. The OCCA did not stop there, however. 23 After examining various psychological impacts of abuse on battered women, the OCCA determined that [s]everal of the psychological symptoms that develop in one suffering from the syndrome are particularly relevant to the standard of reasonableness in self-defense. Id. at 10 (emphasis in original). As a result, an expert's testimony about how BWS affected [a battered woman's] perceptions of danger, its imminence, what actions were necessary to protect herself and the reasonableness of those perceptions are relevant and necessary to prove self-defense. Id. at 10 (emphasis added). Because the issue is not whether the danger was in fact imminent, but whether, given the circumstances as [the battered woman] perceived them, [her] belief was reasonable that the danger was imminent, such expert testimony is all the more critical. Id. at 12 (emphasis added). 24 For these reasons, the OCCA concluded that a jury could not properly assess a battered woman's self-defense claim in the absence of the context provided by expert BWS testimony: Misconceptions regarding battered women abound, making it more likely than not that the average juror will draw from his or her own experience or common myths, which may lead to a wholly incorrect conclusion. Thus, we believe that expert testimony on the syndrome is necessary to counter these misconceptions. Id. at 8 (emphasis added) 1 ; accord Dunn v. Roberts, 963 F.2d 308, 313-14 (10th Cir.1992) (recognizing that an expert [BWS] opinion is particularly useful and oftentimes necessary to interpret for the jury a situation beyond average experience and common understanding). Therefore, although the OCCA held that the expert could not specifically testify to the ultimate fact of whether the battered woman's fear was reasonable, it concluded that a trial court's failure to allow expert testimony on BWS in such cases to provide necessary context is reversible error mandating a new trial. 840 P.2d at 9-10.