Of course, duress involves an actual decision to kill, whereas provocation a temporary loss of self-control.
My stepfather knew not to push me too far, because given enough provocation, I would have at least tried to kill him.
The correct construction of the law on provocation as it then stood was that the intent to kill arose out of a passionate loss of control and provocative conduct directly linked to that loss of control.
But here the genocidal impulse isn't to blend the races until blacks disappear but to kill them at the least provocation.
Denise, played with heartbreaking maternal fervor by MaConnia Chesser, recalls the white officer as a monster, "afraid and angry both," ready to kill a black youth at the slightest provocation.
The earlier law of provocation did not work for women, its basis being that the defendant was angered to kill and such women were not angry but afraid.
Even if the zoo wasn't seeking to create an international provocation, it had made a bold public-relations decision: it would defend its right to kill a giraffe by showing itself to be unembarrassed about killing a giraffe.
"If every woman who was the subject of a "gentle", "non-aggressive" although persistent sexual advance… could respond with brutal violence rising to an intention to kill or inflict grievous bodily harm on the male importuning her, and then claim provocation after a homicide, the law of provocation would be sorely tested and undesirably extended," Kirby wrote.
Yet he asked Ellis only one question during cross-examination - did you intend to kill, to which the answer was yes - because he wrongly believed that intent to kill ruled out any defence of provocation.
They believed that the defence, to establish provocation, had to prove the killing was not motivated by malice - that what happened was in the "passion of the moment" without any intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm.
