STF NA MÍDIA

JUSTIÇA NO EXTERIOR •
THE NEW YORK TIMES (US) • NEW YORK • 19/9/2011
Queens Woman Testifies She Killed Her Husband in Self-Defense
By DAN BILEFSKY
A Queens secretary accused
of killing her husband testified
on Monday that she shot
him in self-defense when he
pointed a loaded pistol at her
head after she had refused to
accompany him on a Florida
vacation.
“He said he was going to kill
me, that he was going to go
down in glory,” said the secretary,
Barbara Sheehan, 50,
taking the stand for the first
time in her murder trial in the
State Supreme Court in
Queens. “You could see it in
his eyes — his eyes were
glazed over, there was no
emotion, they were blank. I
knew he was going to kill me
right then.”
During several hours of testimony
in which she described
nearly two decades of
abuse at the hands of her
husband, Raymond Sheehan,
49, Ms. Sheehan wore a scarf
that was purple — the same
color as the ribbons that o-
ther women in the courtroom
wore in support of domestic
violence victims.
Ms. Sheehan told the jury
that on the day of the shooting,
in February 2008, she
took the loaded revolver that
belonged to her husband
from a bedroom, shoved money
into her bra and tried to
sneak out of the house after a
fierce argument over the
planned trip to Florida.
“I was so scared; I wanted to
get away,” she said.
“I didn’t want him to hurt me
or my kids anymore,” she
added, sobbing quietly as the
jury listened with rapt attention
and members of Mr.
Sheehan’s family in the courtroom
stared ahead blankly.
Ms. Sheehan said that as she
passed by the bathroom, Mr.
Sheehan, who had been shaving,
tried to stop her, grabbed
a semiautomatic pistol
that he had placed atop the
bathroom vanity and aimed it
at her head. It was then, she
said, that she shot him. “I
just shot it because he was
aiming the big gun at me,”
she said. “I was so scared. I
was petrified of him.”
She said her husband then
fell to the tile floor and screamed
that he was going to
kill her. As he reached for his
pistol, which had dropped to
the floor, Ms. Sheehan testified,
she got to the gun before
he did and shot him again.
“His face was blank, his eyes
were blank, he was enraged,”
she said. “I didn’t know how
many shots I fired. I stopped
firing when I didn’t feel threatened
anymore.”
The emotional testimony was
a notable moment in a case
that has generated national
attention and is considered a
test of the so-called battered
woman defense, in which the
history of the abuse that a
woman accused of assault or
homicide has experienced is
drawn out by her lawyers to
help explain her state of
mind at the time of the attack.
New York State’s selfdefense
law justifies the use
of lethal force when a threat
to a person’s life is deemed
immediate. In her testimony,
Ms. Sheehan recounted a
history of emotional and
physical abuse that included
her husband’s throwing boiling
pasta sauce in her face
and his hitting her in the head
with a phone receiver when
she tried to call for help.
She said that Mr. Sheehan
had also forced her to watch
as he put on adult diapers,
women’s dresses or ladies
tights and masturbated. “He
would force me to watch
things that I didn’t want to,”
she said. “He would put on
diapers and act like he was a
baby. I didn’t like it. It made
me feel disgusted.”
But during cross examination,
the prosecutor, Debra
Pomodore, portrayed Ms.
Sheehan as a cold-blooded
executioner, asking how it
was that Ms. Sheehan, who is
free on $1 million in bail,
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