In the quiet of suburban Los Angeles, Moosa Hanoukai picked up a pipe wrench and bludgeoned his wife Manijeh to death. When the businessman did not contest the facts, prosecutors assumed they had an easy second-degree murder conviction. But Hanoukai's attorney James Blatt mounted this defense: his client was a victim of husband battering and 25 years of abuse. Furthermore, because of the stringencies of an Iranian-Jewish culture, Hanoukai felt trapped: he killed Manijeh because he was not allowed to divorce her. The jury empathized and found Hanoukai guilty only of voluntary manslaughter. Instead of 15 years to life, he may serve as brief a prison term as 4 1/2 years.
The Hanoukai verdict provoked little of of the turmoil attending the acquittals of Lorena and John Bobbitt and the hung juries of the Menendez brothers. But critics charge that all these legal proceedings illustrate the same trend: juries are increasingly willing to make allowances for mitigating circumstances once considered largely irrelevant -- abused spouses who kill, violated children who murder incestuous parents, victims of posttraumatic stress syndrome driven to violence by disturbing flashbacks.
Such tales are the daily stuff of talk shows, of course, leading some prosecutors to blame Oprah and company for making jurors more sympathetic to novel defense strategies that try to excuse the accused's behavior. "I call it the Oprahization of the jury pool," says Dan Lungren, attorney general of California. "It's the idea that people have become so set on viewing things from the Oprah view, the Geraldo view or the Phil Donahue view that they bring that into the jury box with them. And I think at base much of that tends to say, 'We don't hold people responsible for their actions because they've been the victim of some influence at some time in their life.' "
Thanks to the talk shows, Americans are increasingly familiar with the language of therapy and recovery -- with new syndromes, with the fragility of the psyche and with the painful ways the abused can become abusive. Nan Whitfield, a Los Angeles public defender, believes media coverage of abuse has raised juror interest in the motives and mind-set of the accused. "I think juries have always been interested in why something happened," she says. "Once the defendant crosses the threshold and does present that evidence ((of his victimization)), I do think the jurors' ears perk up and they become more interested." She speaks from some experience. She won the felony acquittal of Aurelia Macias, accused of cutting off her sleeping husband's testicles with a pair of scissors, by arguing that the California woman had been verbally and emotionally abused throughout her marriage and feared for her life. Macias now faces just one count of simple battery.