''Mullaney v. Wilbur'', 421 U.S. 684 (1975), is a
criminal case in which a unanimous court struck down a state statute requiring a
defendant to prove the defense of
provocation
Provocation, provoke or provoked may refer to:
* Provocation (legal), a type of legal defense in court which claims the "victim" provoked the accused's actions
* Agent provocateur, a (generally political) group that tries to goad a desired res ...
to downgrade a murder conviction to manslaughter.
[''Criminal Law - Cases and Materials'', 7th ed. 2012, ]Wolters Kluwer Law & Business
Wolters Kluwer N.V. () is a Dutch information services company. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands (Global) and Philadelphia, United States (corporate). Wolters Kluwer in its current form was founded in 1987 with a m ...
; John Kaplan, Robert Weisberg, Guyora Binder,
/ref> Previous common law, such as in '' Commonwealth v. York'' (1845), allowed such burden on the defense.[
Maine's statute]preponderance of the evidence
In a legal dispute, one party has the burden of proof to show that they are correct, while the other party had no such burden and is presumed to be correct. The burden of proof requires a party to produce evidence to establish the truth of facts ...
.[ ]Justice Powell
Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. (September 19, 1907 – August 25, 1998) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1972 to 1987.
Born in Suffolk, Virginia, he gradua ...
delivered the opinion for the court that provocation was a crucial part of the charge in that it determined "the degree of culpability attaching to the criminal homicide".[
States were able to circumvent this decision by careful wording, as in '' Patterson v. New York'', in which provocation, or "extreme emotional disturbance", was classified as an allowable defense ]excuse
In jurisprudence, an excuse is a defense to criminal charges that is distinct from an exculpation. Justification and excuse are different defenses in a criminal case (See Justification and excuse).Criminal Law Cases and Materials, 7th ed. 2 ...
, not as a listed element.[
]
See also
* List of United States Supreme Court cases
This page serves as an index of lists of United States Supreme Court cases. The United States Supreme Court is the highest federal court of the United States.
By Chief Justice
Court historians and other legal scholars consider each Chief J ...
* Lists of United States Supreme Court cases by volume
The following is a complete list of cases decided by the United States Supreme Court organized by volume of the ''United States Reports'' in which they appear. This is a list of volumes of ''U.S. Reports'', and the links point to the contents of e ...
*
References
External links
*
{{Criminal due process, doubt, state=expanded
1975 in United States case law
United States Supreme Court cases
United States Supreme Court cases of the Burger Court