SHOT HUSBAND.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 934, 2 December 1933, Page 26 (Supplement)

SHOT HUSBAND.

ILL-TREATED WIFE. UNCONTROLLABLE IMPULSE. SORDID FRENCH TRAGEDY. A jury of the Seine Assize Court at Paris has decided in favour of a woman who pleaded that when she disarmed her brutal husband in a drunken sleep she yielded to the uncontrollable impulse to kill him with his revolver. The woman, Mme. Berthe Dugener, was the mother of three children, and it was not denied by the prosecution that for years the husband, a confirmed drunkard, had ill-treated liis wife and children to such an extent that neighbours frequently complained to the police. On the night of the tragedy the husband returned home as usual and at the point of the revolver he always carried, he forced the wife and their 13-year-old son, in the early stages of consumption, out of the house, despite the fact that there was heavy rain. “Something Happened.’* When the two entered the house again, soaked to the skin and shivering with cold, the man had fallen into a drunken sleep on the bed. Seeing the revolver protruding from his pocket, the woman took hold of it, as she told the judge, with the intention of preventing her husband making U6C of it when he woke up. “Then,” she continued, “something I cannot explain happened. I had the irresistible impulse to turn the revolver on my sleeping husband. I did so, firing two shots in succession. 1 cannot explain it except by stating that the impulse seemed to be stronger than my will. It was only when

my husband rolled or» to the floor that I idealised what I had done.”

The sobbing woman made a deep impression on the jury, but the presiding magistrate and the prosecuting counsel were less disposed to accept her story. Both insisted that in any case no woman had the right to take the life of a husband, however, much he might ill-treat her.

The jury, however, had evidently been convinced of the woman’s sincerity, for they were only a few' minutes in arriving at a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and the weeping widow' was discharged, to receive the warm handshakes of the spectators.

There was also an affecting scene when she passed into the ante-room to be embraced and congratulated by her three children, who had attended the Court after going to church to pray before the shrine of their patron saint for the acquittal of their mother.