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A Court Battle Over a Husband’s Rage and a Wife Who’d Had Enough

During their son’s freshman year at college, Barbara and Raymond Sheehan had a weekend ritual of driving to Connecticut from Howard Beach, Queens, to watch him play football, take him to dinner and deliver clean laundry. On Feb. 17, 2008, they made the trip, ate a meal, 传奇私服 then headed home. In the car, Mr. Sheehan pounded Ms. Sheehan’s face and broke her nose. Other than the precise damage on that occasion, this, too, was a ritual in the Sheehan household: Raymond Sheehan, a retired police sergeant, was a man of serial rages and battery, a simmering presence who always had one gun strapped to his ankle and another around his waist. Thus armed, he watched TV or ate breakfast. He also patronized transvestite hookers, wearing diapers and sucking on pacifiers, then would come home and beat his wife, according to Ms. Sheehan’s lawyer. The morning after her nose was broken, as Mr. Sheehan, 49, was shaving, Ms. Sheehan,魔域私服 46, shot him five times with his .38-caliber revolver, which he had left in the bedroom. When it was empty, she picked up his Glock and shot him six more times. The police arrived to find him dead on the floor of the bathroom, and her waiting on the porch with her sister and a UPS deliveryman. She was charged with second-degree murder. The case, now more than two years old and still at least months away from trial, returned briefly to State Supreme Court in Queens on Tuesday as a remarkable war was being waged between prosecutors from the office of the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, and the defense lawyer for Ms. Sheehan. At the moment, she has been barred from presenting testimony from psychiatric experts about long-term abuse, but Richard L. Buchter, 传世私服 a judge who recently took over the case, has agreed to reconsider that decision. Few important facts appear to be in dispute. Ms. Sheehan shot her husband, as she has told anyone who asks. Mr. Sheehan beat his wife, according to her, their children, extended family, domestic violence counselors and medical records. The most important question to be resolved by a trial is Ms. Sheehan’s state of mind at the time she killed him. The law of self-defense requires the jury members to put themselves in the position of the person who used lethal force, and the Court of Appeals said that experts are necessary to explain the emotional paralysis of battered women who do not leave the person hurting them. “I think everybody should be told everything that happened,” Ms. Sheehan said Tuesday. She is free on $1 million bail, which was secured by the homes of several family members. She works as a secretary for the Department of Education. Mr. Brown, the district attorney, continues to oppose the use of psychiatrists by the defense, 传世私服 1.76精品传奇 a spokesman said, “because the defendant has failed to cooperate” during an examination by a psychologist hired by the prosecution. Michael G. Dowd, the lawyer for Ms. Sheehan, said that she had already been examined for more than 10 hours by the prosecution’s psychologist and was eager to answer any other questions the expert had. Mr. Dowd also said that a videotape would show that he and his client had cooperated fully. As told by the Sheehan children and Ms. Sheehan in interviews, their household was dominated by Mr. Sheehan’s rages. One day, he wanted steak for dinner but found his wife making pasta. He flung the sauce all over the kitchen, Ms. Sheehan said, and her daughter, Jennifer Joyce, recalled that “this pot of boiling sauce went all over my mother.” On another occasion, Ms. Joyce, a nurse, said,高仿运动鞋 she found her mother pinned to the living room floor as her father punched her. “I started screaming and he left,” Ms. Joyce, 24, said. “I was generally able to get away from him. One time, he knocked down the door to my bedroom. Another time, he caught me, and threw me down.” In the summer of 2007, the parents, their son, Ray, and another family went on vacation to Jamaica. Ms. Sheehan turned up for dinner with her face battered. “They showed up really late,” Ray said. “He started doing all the talking — saying she tripped in the tub and hit her head. He kept talking over her.” Ms. Sheehan said that in fact, her husband had smashed her head against a cinder-block wall. His wife said he would often remind her that he had worked in a crime scene unit and could dispose of her body without leaving any incriminating evidence. When she went to get her broken nose treated in an emergency room, he waited in the parking lot. 传奇私服 传奇私服发布网 “He kept calling me from the parking lot, saying that if he saw the police coming, he would kill me and kill them, and go down in a blaze of glory,” she said. The next morning, he was furious because she refused to go on a Florida vacation with him, Ms. Sheehan said. In his final minutes, she said, he pointed his Glock at her as he shaved, but she had already picked up his revolver. Then she fired at him. Both the son and daughter said that their father’s death was the best possible outcome, 新开诛仙私服 and that their lives were infinitely better: the long shadow of their mother’s being murdered had lifted and they felt liberated. They did not go to his funeral, but they went to his wake.