One woman stabbed her estranged husband to death after he raped her at knifepoint in the presence of her children, according to her testimony. Another woman shot her husband, a police officer after she said he threatened to kill her and their baby. The man was sleeping when she fired the fatal shots.

Those women, Karen Straw and Madelyn Diaz were both acquitted by New York juries in the 1980s. Had they been tried a decade earlier, they might have spent years in prison. They avoided that fate in large part because of a turnabout in criminal law – one that gave domestic violence victims a means of defending themselves, if not against their abusers then at least in court, essentially for the first time.

Legal experts and domestic violence advocates give significant credit for that change to Holly Maguigan, a lawyer and law professor at New York University who died Nov. 15 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 78 and had suffered cardiac arrest, said her husband, Abdeen Jabara.

For decades, Maguigan devoted her legal practice and scholarship to a very specific set of clients: victims of domestic violence – mainly but not only women – who assault or kill their abusers and then face criminal prosecution.

Maguigan represented such clients as a public defender and a private practice lawyer in Philadelphia in the 1970s and ’80s and later advocated for them more broadly as a professor at NYU, where she trained a generation of lawyers in the defense strategies that she had helped develop.

She was “truly a person who just was there for the people who were usually ground up by the system,” said Michael G. Dowd, a New York lawyer who has defended dozens of abused women.

In the view of Maguigan and many other advocates, the law had failed domestic violence victims for generations. Police and prosecutors traditionally regarded domestic abuse as a private matter and declined to pursue cases against offenders.

“Until the late ’70s and early ’80s, cops rarely made arrests for wife-beating because it was assumed that men had the right to control their wives,” Maguigan told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “It goes back to the basic notions of male ownership of women.”

When abused women fought back against their assailants, lawyers who represented them in assault and homicide cases were left with what Maguigan described as a “basic and terrible problem.”

Judges and juries tended to blame the women for staying with their abusive partners. Moreover, they often rejected claims of self-defense. Although most domestic violence victims who attack or kill their abusers do so amid confrontation, according to Maguigan’s research, some act preemptively, before the next attack can occur. In those instances, the women fared poorly arguing self-defense because the danger they faced was not regarded as imminent.

(In a highly publicized case in 1977, Francine Hughes was found not guilty because of insanity after she set her abusive former husband on fire as he slept, a case dramatized in the 1984 TV movie “The Burning Bed,” based on a book by Faith McNulty and starring Farrah Fawcett.)

The legal landscape began to shift in the early 1980s, as courts across the United States began to accept expert testimony on “battered woman syndrome,” a term used to explain the mental state of women who are subjected to cycles of violence and may turn to violence because they see no other means of escape.

Maguigan resisted the use of the term “syndrome” in that context. The word played into ancient stereotypes of women as hysterical, she and other advocates argued, and presented women as weak and unbalanced, when in fact they were acting rationally by defending themselves.

“They didn’t do it because they snapped. They didn’t do it because they’re crazy,” said Sue Osthoff, a founder of the Philadelphia-based National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, who worked with Maguigan for decades. “They did it because they’re defending themselves.”

The goal for defense lawyers, Maguigan once wrote, should be to “explain the impact of intimate violence without appearing to pathologize battered women and deny their reason and capacity.”

She assisted lawyers including Dowd in strategizing a defense for individual clients and worked with other lawyers, professors, and activists to expand the definition of concepts such as “self-defense,” “reasonable force” and “imminent danger.”

“It took a huge amount of work and persuasion to convince the justice system to allow women … to argue that they were justified in using force even though at the time they used it, they were not necessarily directly in danger of harm,” said David Rudovsky, a Philadelphia lawyer and former law partner of Maguigan’s. “Eventually what happened is that both legislatures and the courts recognized that defense.”

“I do believe many, many victims of battering would not have done as well as they did” without Maguigan’s work, Osthoff said. Many were acquitted, and many were not charged at all.

Holly Maguigan was born in Buffalo, New York, on May 29, 1945. She grew up in Chester, Virginia, south of Richmond, where her father was a corporate plant manager. Her mother was a homemaker.

In 1966, Maguigan received a bachelor’s degree in history from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and planned initially to become a medievalist. She studied at the University of Oxford in England before returning to the U.S., where she received a master’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969.

She had, at that point, no interest in the law.

“I really hated lawyers,” she said in an interview on the radio program “Law and Disorder.” “They were boring. They talked about themselves all the time. They only had stories about their cases and how great they were, and they would never post bail when people got arrested.”

Her mind was changed as she became increasingly involved in the feminist, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements. During an organizing meeting for protests at People’s Park on the Berkeley campus, she was fascinated when a lawyer began, by her account, “ululating” to prevent the reading of what he said was a John and Jane Doe injunction against the march.

“I thought that was so cool,” she said. “That was the best – the most useful thing I’d ever seen a lawyer do in my life.”

Maguigan set aside her studies of medieval history and began applying to law schools. She was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated in 1972.

She began her career as a public defender in Philadelphia and later joined Rudovsky as a partner in his firm, where she took civil rights and police brutality cases in addition to her defense of domestic violence victims. She joined NYU in 1987 and took emerita status in 2021.

Maguigan’s first husband, Thomas Wright, died after their marriage in 1969. She later had a relationship with Paul Tully, a top Democratic strategist and key aide to Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign.

Survivors include her husband of 26 years, Abdeen Jabara, of Manhattan; a daughter from her relationship with Tully, Miranda Tully, of Queens; three brothers; and two grandchildren.

As Maguigan helped open up the law to better protect victims of domestic violence, she achieved perhaps an even more fundamental victory by increasing the understanding – within the legal community and beyond – of the agony and fear the victims live with and the steps they might take to escape.

“People who haven’t been through it don’t understand it,” she once told the Associated Press. “We like to think that home is safe.”

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

Jerry Doolittle, who wrote White House jokes and murder mysteries, dies at 90

Next »

To save the climate, the oil and gas sector must slash planet-warming operations, report says