Emma Humphreys

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.

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 (five stone) 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.

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. Humphreys was assisted in her defence by Justice for Women, a feminist law-reform group founded in 1991 by Julie Bindel and Harriet Wistrich.

Bindel and Wistrich arranged for a legal team and helped to organize an appeal based on the defence of long-term provocation. 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".

The case (R v Humphreys [1995] 4 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.

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 (which closed in 2016), Humphreys wrote to Bindel to ask for help.

The 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 [1992] 4 All ER 889), Humphreys (R v Humphreys [1995] 4 All ER 1008), and Sarah Thornton (R v Thornton (No 2) [1996] 2 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 [1949] 1 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."