Emma Humphreys

Emma Clare Humphreys (30 October 1967 – 11 July 1998) was a Welsh woman who was imprisoned in England in December 1985 at Her Majesty's pleasure, after being convicted of the murder of her violent 33-year-old boyfriend and pimp, Trevor Armitage.Ying Hui Tan (11 July 1995)
"Abnormal traits relevant to provocation"
''The Independent''."Self-portrait of a teenage killer"
''The Guardian'', 10 November 2003.

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.Mills, Heather (7 July 1995)
"Woman who stabbed violent partner freed"
''The Independent''. Humphreys was assisted in her defence by Justice for Women, a feminist law-reform group founded in 1991 by Julie Bindel and Harriet Wistrich.Gupta, Rahila (12 January 2015)
"Women defenders of human rights: the good, the great and the gutsy"
. ''OpenDemocracy''

Three years after her release, Humphreys died, aged 30, of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs at her flat in Holloway, North London.

Early life

Humphreys was raised with her two sisters, mother and father in Dolgellau, Merionethshire, north-west Wales. Her home life appears to have been chaotic. Her parents separated when she was five and her mother, an alcoholic, remarried; the second husband was reported to have been an alcoholic too. The mother, second husband and Humphreys relocated to Edmonton, Canada, where Humphreys began drinking, taking drugs, and having sex with men. According to her diary, which was found in her biological father's attic three years after her death, she was admitted in March 1983 to the Westfield Diagnostic and Treatment Centre in Edmonton, then transferred to a local psychiatric ward when she cut her wrists.

In December 1983 she returned to Nottingham, England, to live with her biological father and his second wife, and later with her grandmother. On 30 August 1984, when she was 16, she moved out of her grandmother's home and began working as a street prostitute. Humphreys was soon approached by 33-year-old Trevor Armitage, a drug addict with convictions for violence. The Court of Appeal heard that Armitage "had a predilection for girls much younger than himself" and was known by the vice squad to drive around the red-light district most evenings. Humphreys moved into his house in Turnbury Road, Bulwell. She continued working as a prostitute and gave Armitage part of her earnings. She said that he began hitting her.

In January 1985, Humphreys was arrested and kept on remand at HM Prison Risley for two incidents, one of which involved assaulting a hotel manager. She was conditionally discharged on 21 February 1985. While she was on remand, according to the Court of Appeal, Armitage allowed a second young girl to live at his home.

Conviction

Killing

On 24 February 1985, a Mrs Whitehead saw Humphreys in a bar; according to the Court of Appeal, she told the original trial that Humphreys had seemed "very lonely, depressed and desolate". Humphreys, Armitage and several others had spent the evening of 25 February 1985 in a pub. On the way out of the pub—accompanied by his 16-year-old son, Humphreys, and two of his friends—Armitage allegedly said: "We'll be all right for a gang bang tonight."

The group went to another pub, then back to Armitage's house. While Armitage was driving his son home, Humphreys retrieved two knives from the kitchen and cut both her wrists, then went to sit on the landing. When Armitage returned to the house, he went into the bedroom and removed his clothes, except for his shirt, then sat on the landing next to Humphreys. She told the court that she believed his removal of clothing meant that he wanted sex from her, something she did not want.

At this point, Humphreys said Armitage taunted her about the cuts on her wrists, saying she had not done a very good job. She responded by stabbing him with one of the knives, piercing his heart and liver. He died of his injuries.

Trial

Humphreys was remanded in custody and tried in December 1985 at Nottingham Crown Court, before Kenneth Jones J and a jury. 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.

The judge directed the jury to, in effect, ignore the psychiatric report. In considering how a reasonable woman would respond to the situation in which Humphreys had found herself, the jury should not attribute to the reasonable woman the "abnormal characteristics" the psychiatrist had described; that is, those characteristics were not "eligible for attribution to the reasonable woman". Instead, he told the jury to consider only the events immediately before the killing, and the effect Armitage's taunting would have had on a woman who "did not have a distorted and explosive personality". He told the jury:

On 4 December 1985 Humphreys was convicted of murder and sentenced to be detained at her Majesty's pleasure. She applied for leave to appeal on 2 January 1986, but it was refused.

''R v Humphreys''

Justice for Women

In 1992, Humphreys read about the release of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, whose conviction for murder after she killed her violent husband was reduced to manslaughter, thanks to a campaign led by Southall Black Sisters and joined by Justice for Women. The latter was founded in 1991 by Julie Bindel and Harriet Wistrich, who later qualified as a solicitor. On 24 September 1992, from Holloway Prison in north London, Humphreys wrote to Bindel to ask for help.

Bindel and Wistrich arranged for a legal team and helped to organize an appeal based on the defence of long-term provocation.Wistrich, Harriet; Siddiqui, Hannana; Bindel, Julie (Winter 1998/99)
"Emma Humphreys Remembered"
''Trouble and Strife'', 38. 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

The case (''R v Humphreys'' 9954 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 " en 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."

News reports show Humphreys leaving the Old Bailey that day with Bindel and Wistrich after the judges substituted the murder conviction for a verdict of manslaughter and sentenced Humphreys to time served. Wistrich told a press conference: "Whilst we applaud the judges for their decision, we do not feel grateful that a simple act of justice has taken this long. Justice for Emma has come ten years too late. This case has been a miscarriage of justice on a par with that of the Guildford Four and Judith Ward."

Significance

The English law on provocation had been biased in favour of men, who are more likely to react immediately with anger to a provocative event. Legal scholar Clare Connelly writes that, by challenging this in the 1990s, the cases of Kiranjit Ahluwalia (''R v Ahluwalia'' 9924 All ER 889), Humphreys (''R v Humphreys'' 9954 All ER 1008), and Sarah Thornton (''R v Thornton (No 2)'' 9962 All ER 1023) were "monumental in securing legal recognition of the experience of abused women who kill their violent partners". Both Ahluwalia and Thornton had killed their violent husbands while the men slept.

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'' 9491 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:

Death

On 11 July 1998, three years after her release, Wistrich and Bindel found Humphreys dead in bed at her home from an apparently accidental overdose of chloral hydrate. In September 2000, Humphreys' family doctor told the inquest, at St Pancras Coroner's Court, that Humphreys was first prescribed the drug in Holloway prison because she had had difficulty sleeping. According to a friend, she had taken too much of the drug several times since her release, and seemed to be addicted to it. When she died, she weighed just 70 lbs (31.7kg) and had 20 times the recommended dose in her blood. Bindel told the inquest that Humphreys had been "thrown out of prison and left to her own devices". The jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure."Woman cleared of murder 'overdosed'"
BBC News, 14 September 2000.

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.

The diary includes material from March 1983, when Humphreys was 15 and living with her stepfather in Edmonton, Canada. She had been admitted to the Westfield Diagnostic and Treatment Centre and to a local psychiatric ward. She describes how her mother was drinking a lot and not eating. In November 1983, preparing to spend Christmas in England, she tells her diary:

Back in the UK in 1984, she describes her mother's attempted suicide, her mother being beaten by her husband (Humphreys' stepfather), and how her mother would refer to her as "fat bitch". (Humphreys was painfully thin.) By September that year, she is working as a prostitute and has met Trevor Armitage. "It's fucking cold outside, standing there for a couple of hours. I've had no problem with the cops out there. I get a lot of compliments from everyone 'cause of my legs." She moves in with Armitage that month, aged 16.

Throughout September and October 1984 she describes Armitage hitting her and calling her a liar. She leaves him in November, determined not to go back, but then does go back. The second-last entry is on 19 January 1985. She had been arrested and kept in custody a few days earlier for assaulting a hotel manager. According to ''The Guardian'', she was released on 21 February into Armitage's "care". She killed him four days later.

Bindel and Wistrich co-edited a book, based on Humphreys' diary, ''The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys'' (2003). The book has a foreword by Vera Baird, one of the barristers who represented Humphreys, and contributions from Beatrix Campbell and friends of Humphreys. Justice for Women awards the annual Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize to women who raise awareness about violence against women and children."Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize"
emmahumphreys.org.

See also

*Sara Thornton case
*Colin Campbell – UK man who also infamously had his murder conviction downgraded to manslaughter in the 90s

Notes

References

Further reading

"Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize"
emmahumphreys.org.
Justice for Women

*Julie Bindel and Harriet Wistrich (eds.). ''The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys''. London: Astraia Press, 2003.
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Humphreys, Emma
1967 births
1998 deaths
1985 crimes in the United Kingdom
1985 in British law
1985 in England
1995 in British law
British female criminals
English female criminals
1995 in England
Court of Appeal (England and Wales) cases
Overturned convictions in England
Violence against women in England