From the link to the 2003 article right after the conviction:

Nourn's attorney, Bruce Cormicle, said he was disappointed with the verdict. Cormicle argued at trial that Nourn had no idea her boyfriend planned to kill Stevens. Stevens was killed after Nourn lured him out of his apartment by telling him she had car trouble.

"She never intended that Mr. Stevens be killed," Cormicle said. "This was the act of a madman completely independent of Ny Nourn."

So Cormicle argued that Nourn had no knowledge of the murder plan.

Yet from the 2006 SFChronicle article on the court's decision:

At Nourn's trial, her lawyer argued that she had acted under Barker's control. But the lawyer called no witnesses, explaining later that he was unwilling to put Nourn on the stand because she had told him she knew Stevens would be killed.

IANAL, but if this attorney knew that his client was aware of the murder plot and argued otherwise, shouldn't he be in trouble himself?

According to TV World, if a terrorist is threatening to blow up <insert random thing> unless you execute your boss, you get to execute your boss at a train yard with full government sanction.

I suspect in the real world, there is an issue of proximate cause to contend with. If someone is holding a gun to your head and telling you to shoot someone, you have a valid affirmative defense argument --- however it cannot possibly be a self-defense but instead one based on coercion.

It doesn't strike me as reasonable to say that you were defending yourself by following exactly what you were told to do. The legal term is coercion.

Now was she coerced? If she was does this fully mitigatie the fact that she helped murder someone patty hearst style? In this case I'm going to say that were I on the jury, I'd have wanted to hear this defense.

Whether or not this means that I'd have voted not-guilty per my jury nullification ability*, is hardly a sure thing.

*I suspect I'll -never- be selected for jury duty

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

The question here isn't whether this will be an EFFECTIVE defense or not, the question is whether you can be a competent attorney and never investigate this (clearly legally used, and sometimes effective) defense.  The Court of Appeals held that you couldn't provide effective legal defense if you failed to even bother investigating this issue.  I have to concur with the Court of Appeals.  Especially when we're talking about aiding & abetting, or first degree murder, both of which require a mental component of "intending to assist in deed."  If the intent is simply "prevent harm to myself" that clearly does not meet the intent requirement of either crime (called mens rea in legalese).

This write-up, and I must admit that the dissenting opinion, tries to make this out as a case about whether battered woman syndrome would have been an effective defense in these particular circumstances.  This is not an issue being addressed by the Court in this opinion, nor should it be.

Thalia