Emma Humphreys

Emma Clare Humphreys (30 October 1967 – 11 July 1998) was a Welsh woman who was imprisoned in England in December 1985, after being convicted of the murder of her violent 33-year-old groomer and pimp, Trevor Armitage.

Aged 17 when convicted, Humphreys spent a decade in prison before winning an appeal against the conviction, on 7 July 1995, on the grounds of long-term provocation. The Court of Appeal reduced the conviction to manslaughter, and she was released immediately. The success of the appeal was significant because it supported the argument that courts should take long-term issues such as "battered woman syndrome" into account when considering a defence of provocation. Humphreys was assisted in her defence by Justice for Women, a feminist law-reform group founded in 1991 by Julie Bindel and Harriet Wistrich.

Three years after her release, Humphreys died, aged 30, of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs at her flat in Holloway, North London. During a medical examination just after the killing, a doctor had found "three recent cuts to her right wrist, fifteen well-healed scars to her right forearm, nine recent cuts running across her left wrist with fresh, dry blood over them, and seven well-healed vertical scars running up her left forearm". A psychiatrist told the court that Humphreys was "of abnormal mentality, with immature, explosive and attention-seeking traits, the last trait referring to her tendency to slash her wrists", according to the Court of Appeal. On 24 September 1992, from Holloway Prison in north London, Humphreys wrote to Bindel to ask for help. In January 1995, the Court of Appeal granted Humphreys leave to appeal "on the basis of new grounds of appeal relating to the judge's direction to the jury".

Appeal Barristers Vera Baird (above) and Helen Grindrod QC represented Humphreys in court. The case (R v Humphreys 4 All ER 1008) was heard by Lord Justice Hirst, Mr Justice Cazalet and Mr Justice Kay over three days on 29 and 30 June and 7 July 1995. Humphreys was represented by Helen Grindrod QC and Vera Baird, instructed by R. R. Sanghvi & Co. Rhys Davies QC wrote that it was Grindrod's "powerful and charismatic advocacy that won the day" for Humphreys. Representing the Crown were John Milmo QC and Adrian Reynolds.

The grounds of the appeal revolved around the concept of the reasonable person, and which characteristics to attribute to that person when deciding how she would have responded to a situation. As laid out by the Court of Appeal, the grounds were that "the judge had erred (i) in not directing the jury that they could take the seriously abnormal personality of the appellant into account as a characteristic to be attributed to the reasonable person when considering whether that person would have lost her self-control and behaved as the appellant did; and (ii) in restricting the jury's attention to events immediately surrounding the killing."

On 7 July, the judges accepted the defence position, namely that "hen considering whether the reasonable person would be provoked in the circumstances of a defendant, the jury was entitled to take into account characteristics of the defendant which were not repugnant to the general concept of the reasonable person, including a permanent psychological illness or disorder which was abnormal, such as attention-seeking through wrist-slashing." Humphreys (R v Humphreys 4 All ER 1008), were "monumental in securing legal recognition of the experience of abused women who kill their violent partners".

Before R v Humphreys, the test for provocation involved asking whether the accused had experienced a "sudden and temporary" loss of control, and whether a reasonable person would have been similarly provoked in that situation. The definition of provocation was based on Devlin J in R v Duffy 1 All ER 932: "Provocation is some act, or series of acts done (or words spoken) ... which would cause in any reasonable person and actually causes in the accused, a sudden and temporary loss of self-control, rendering the accused so subject to passion as to make him or her for the moment not master of his or her mind."

Any lapse of time between the provocative event and the killing suggested that the accused could have taken advantage of a "cooling-off period" but chose not to do so. Legal scholar Anne Bottomley explains that, before R v Humphreys, courts did not recognize the "cumulative effect of violence ... The emphasis was almost entirely localised to the 'provocative act' immediately prior to the killing". Examples of what courts regarded as provocative acts and typical responses were sudden, explosive and masculine. The emotions experienced by "battered women" were not considered.

Bottomley writes that the Court of Appeal made two important rulings in R v Humphreys. First, immaturity and attention-seeking were accepted as characteristics "within the meaning of the Camplin test"; that is, the jury was entitled to consider whether a reasonable person with those characteristics would have been provoked. Second, the effect of the taunt should have been considered within the context of the entire relationship. According to the Court of Appeal:

This tempestuous relationship was a complex story with several distinct and cumulative strands of potentially provocative conduct building up until the final encounter.

Over the long term there was the continuing cruelty, represented by the beatings and the continued encouragement of prostitution and by the breakdown of the sexual relationship.

On the first part of the night in question there was the threatened "gang bang" and the drunkenness. Immediately before the killing, quite apart from the wounding verbal taunt, there was his appearance in an undressed state, posing a threat of sex which she did not want and which he must have known she did not want, thus demonstrating potentially provocative conduct immediately beforehand, not only by words but also by deeds.

Finally, of course, there is the taunt itself, which was put forward as the crucial trigger which caused the appellant's self control to snap. According to Julie Bindel, Humphreys told her that she had been raped by a stranger in her own apartment a few weeks before her death, and attributed her increased drug-taking to coping with the assault.

Diary After her death, Humphreys' father gave Bindel and Wistrich a suitcase he had kept in his attic that contained her belongings, including a diary dating to three years before she killed Armitage. Had the diary been available at the original trial, it could have been used in Humphreys' defence. Justice for Women awards the annual Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize to women who raise awareness about violence against women and children.