A British woman who killed her husband with a hammer had her murder conviction quashed on Thursday after an appeal found the original trial had not factored in the effects of decades of domestic abuse.
Supporters of Sally Challen, 65, including her two sons, hailed the decision to order a retrial as a landmark for victims of coercive control, criminalized in 2015, which involves extreme emotional and psychological abuse.
“This is an amazing moment,” Sally Challen’s son, David Challen, told reporters outside the court after the verdict was announced. “The abuse our mother suffered we felt was never recognized properly and her mental condition was not taken into account.”
About 2 million people, predominantly women, suffer domestic abuse every year in Britain, the government said.
It can take myriad forms, from beatings to rape, control of a partner’s actions, or limiting access to money, family and friends.
Sally Challen was convicted of murdering her husband, Richard, in 2011, and handed a 22-year jail sentence, later reduced to 18 years.
Her supporters say she was a victim of coercive control by her husband for more than 40 years, which was a factor underlying the attack and its immediate trigger.
Her legal team argued that coercive control, which was criminalized four years after Challen’s trial, had been poorly understood at the time and was not properly considered.
Women’s rights campaigners hailed the ruling as a significant step forward for victims.
“Sally Challen and her children experienced decades of controlling abuse at the hands of her late husband; this important contextual information was never considered when she was convicted of murder,” Women’s Aid’s Sian Hawkins said. “However, it is a bittersweet victory for Sally, her son, David, and their family with the court ordering a retrial.”
The Everyday Sexism Project, which encourages women to speak up about offensive behavior, from lewd comments to harassment, said on Twitter that it was “an important step towards understanding coercive control.”
Domestic abuse costs England and Wales about ￡66 billion (US$87.4 billion) annually, research by the British Home Office showed.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
RSS