Adultery and Homicide in English Law

What is it about?

Some proponents of equality before the law have recently sought to eradicate partial defences in homicide cases premised on a wife’s adultery, an effort given greater resonance by concerns that lighter sentences contribute to the high numbers of women killed by intimate male partners. Participants in these discussions sometimes imagine that the adultery defense has a centuries long history, an assumption shared by some historians. This article demonstrates that in English law, judges only came to accept adultery as a provocation sufficient to mitigate a charge of murder to manslaughter in the late 1600s. Even then, adultery served to moderate the punishment for a man who killed his wife’s sexual partner, not his wife. That a woman’s infidelity partially excused her killing only entered into English legal practice in the nineteenth century, this article suggests. While the article’s primary purpose is to correct a pervasive misconception of the timelessness and tenacity of notions that a husband might kill his unfaithful wife with some degree of impunity, it also suggests that altered perceptions of female sexuality, male honor, and the purposes of marriage, as well as shifting attitudes to crime and punishment, drove the emergence of this “long tradition” in the nineteenth century.

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Why is it important?

It demonstrates that excusing a husband's killing of an unfaithful wife has a shorter and less straightforward history than often thought.