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21 Berkeley J. Crim. L. 1 (2016)
Assaultive Femicide and the American Felony-Murder Rule

handle is hein.journals/bjcl21 and id is 1 raw text is: ISSUE 21:1 SPRING 2016 Assaultive Femicide and the American Felony-Murder Rule Hava Dayan* This article examines the American legal criminal doctrine that is commonly applied in cases of a particular sub-type of femicide: assaultivefemicide, women who are battered to death. The most relevant criminal doctrine applicable to these circumstances is the felony-murder rule, applied in most U.S. jurisdictions. As will be shown, the doctrine's most problematic modification relates to one of its sub-doctrines, the principle of merger, which was stretched and extended to include lesser non-homicidal offenses such as assault. This gross doctrinal extension has in fact created a criminal anomaly whereby blameworthy murderers of women are exonerated and technically exempted from murder convictions. Given that most U.S. jurisdictions apply the felony-murder doctrine in some form, the article will analyze and scrutinize the felony- murder doctrine with regard to its particular applicability to circumstances of assaultive femicide. In addition, the article will propose statutory amendments to Sections 210.2(b) and 210.6 of the U.S. Model Penal Code. The proposed statutory amendments to the U.S. Model Penal Code are applicable, mutatis mutandis, to most American jurisdictions and may constitute a prototype for future legislative state reforms. IIntroduction......................2..... ...............2 II.A Criminological Perspective on Assaultive Femicide.. .......... 5 II.The Origins of the Felony-Murder Rule ........... .................... 11 IV.The United States Felony-Murder Rule..................... 15 DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15779/Z380G40 Copyright 0 2016 Regents of University of California * Ph.D, LLB, Senior Staff Member, School of Criminology, University of Haifa. I would like to thank Prof. Nancy K. D. Lemon from Berkeley Law School for her insightful comments and thorough review, and to the editors and members of Volume 21 of the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law for their diligent and intelligent work on this article. ISSUE 21:1 SPRING 2016

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