maintenance of separate normative orders is not
envisaged under the law.
The second type of cultural defense strategy
argues that the defendant’s state of mind was heav-
ily influenced by cultural factors at the time of the
commission of the offense(s). Here the judge is
expected to take into consideration the defendant’s
state of mind and decide whether cultural factors
played an aggravating role, in which case the
charges might be reduced (for example, from sec-
ond-degree murder to voluntary manslaughter).
For example, in the case of a Sikh woman from
Punjab, India, who attempted to kill her two chil-
dren and then take her own life after she discovered
her husband’s infidelity, the argument was not
that such parent-child murder-suicide attempts are
accepted in India, but that conflicting cultural
norms pressured the defendant and resulted in her
feelings of disorientation and abandonment when
it became clear her husband wanted a divorce.
Illiterate and confined in an arranged marriage, the
defendant, Narinder Virk, could not speak English,
had no friends or employment and allegedly was
abused by her husband. According to her attorney,
Virk was trapped in the roles of a subservient wife
and mother, and was driven to madness by a culture
that measured her value by her domestic abilities
and the success of her marriage, and threatened to
disown her and her children if she failed. Expert
testimony at the trial was used to argue that Virk’s
despair at her situation was exacerbated by the cul-
tural standards in which she had been reared.
Culture in this circumstance is viewed as contribut-
ing to the defendant’s impaired mental state.
Sometimes extreme emotional disturbance may
only be understandable in a particular cultural con-
text (see Piccalo 2000).Examples of cultural defense
cases
In the United States, “culture” has become an
increasingly common defense in recent years, as
defendants assert that a person’s cultural back-
ground is relevant under the law. Historically the
idea that culture matters has been encountered
in cases as early as the 1920s, where judges in a
number of cases accepted a defense based on cul-
tural differences. For instance, Italian immigrants
referred to “culture” to defend themselves against
statutory rape charges when they seduced and mar-
ried young Italian-American women without their
parents’ consent (Cleghorn). Most often the
defense strategy that seeks the admission of cul-
tural evidence to benefit the defendant has been
associated with patriarchal practices that are harm-412 law: cultural defense
ful to women’s interests (Coleman 1996, Maguigan
1995, Volpp 1994, 2000, 2003).
At the end of the twentieth century many re-
ported cultural defense cases involved family rela-
tions. For example, in 1987 in New York a
Chinese-born man, upon learning of his wife’s infi-
delity, used a claw hammer to strike his wife in the
head eight times until she was dead. At trial an
anthropology professor from Hunter College testi-
fied on the defendant’s behalf, explaining that in
Chinese culture a woman’s adultery is severely pun-
ished because it is proof of her husband’s weak
character and is “an enormous stain” on the repu-
tation of himself, his offspring, and his ancestors
(cited in Renteln 2003, 34). In China, the expert
continued, a husband often becomes enraged and
threatens to kill his unfaithful wife. However, the
close-knit community usually intervenes and pre-
vents the husband from carrying out his threat. The
defendant’s case was premised on the absence of a
local Chinese community that would have presum-
ably restrained the enraged husband and protected
the intended victim. The court found the defendant
guilty of the lesser crime of second degree mans-
laughter and sentenced him to five years probation.
In another case, in a Los Angeles suburb in 1994
the attorney for a man who had beaten his wife to
death argued that the murder victim had violated
the norms of their Iranian Jewish community by
serving her husband – the defendant – a bologna
sandwich on the eve of the Persian New Year, an
occasion usually celebrated with a feast. Further
evidence brought to light by the defense at trial
demonstrated that the victim had continually
ridiculed her husband in front of relatives and
friends, calling him “stupid” and making him sleep
on the floor, again violating the norms of Persian
culture by undermining his dominance in the mari-
tal relationship. In his opening statement, the
defense attorney promised the jury that they would
hear evidence “about a culture that is vastly differ-
ent from yours and mine,” one that is male-domi-
nated and pious (Moore 2002, 196). In this case the
judge lowered the charges from first degree murder
to voluntary manslaughter. The jury convicted the
defendant on the lesser charge and he was sen-
tenced to serve an eleven-year prison term.
Trials of persons accused of child molestation
have also involved the cultural defense. An
Albanian Muslim man named Sadri Krasniqi was
arrested for allegedly molesting his four-year-old
daughter during a martial arts exhibition in subur-
ban Dallas, Texas, in 1989. Although Krasniqi was
acquitted of criminal charges in 1994, due in part to
the expert testimony of an anthropologist who