Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 28th September 2025.
In January 1941, Alexander Hill received a letter from his wife Alice. Hill was corporal in the military police, stationed in England. Alice lived at home in Springburn with at least one infant child. Her letter gave him cause to believe Alice had struck up a relationship with another man in his absence.
Hill approached his commanding officer, asking for permission to take a period of leave to return to Glasgow “explaining to him that he was concerned as to his wife’s relationship with a man and also as to her running up debts.” The officer let him go, giving him details of a solicitors’ firm to contact if his suspicions proved well-founded.
When he arrived back in Glasgow on the 18th of January 1941, Hill’s first visit wasn’t to the family home. Instead, he presented himself at the front desk of the local police station, asking for an officer to accompany him to his house “as a witness” to corroborate his suspicions about his wife’s infidelity. The cops told Hill to get stuffed. They assumed he was accumulating evidence for a divorce case against her – a civil matter and nothing to do with them. Just a few hours later, 19 Crichton Street, Springburn would become a crime scene.
When he arrived home, Alice Hill seems to have been alone in the house with the child. Hill confronted her with his suspicions. It turned out they were well-founded. William Headland was a chief yeoman of signals with the Royal Navy, stationed in Greenock. He was also the third man in their relationship – and joined them at the house shortly afterwards.
According to the statement Hill later gave to the police, a discussion arose as to what was to be the “outcome of the unhappy state of affairs.” Headland told Hill “I will make your wife very happy when I get a divorce.”
Hill asked Alice whether there was any chance of reconciliation. “No,” she said, “I don’t love you as I did when I married you at first.”
Hill’s response to this revelation was to shoot both Alice and her new partner in the head with this service revolver, leaving “the kiddie” sat in a chair by the fireside. He then walked back to the Springburn police station where he confessed what he did, claiming “I was driven to it.”
Hill was charged with murder, but the trial judge directed the jury he had a partial defence available to him – provocation by sexual infidelity. Lord Patrick told the jury they could convict him of culpable homicide instead, if they were satisfied he acted from “sudden indignation in the heat of the moment” rather than a cold and calculating plan to revenge himself on his wife and her new lover.
The difference was, and remains, material. Murder was the capital crime. Today, it has a mandatory life sentence. Then, being convicted of culpable homicide could spare you the hangman’s noose. Now, it usually means a significantly reduced and fixed sentence. The case report tells us that the jury “returned a verdict of guilty of culpable homicide with a strong recommendation to mercy.” Lord Patrick sentenced Hill to penal servitude for five years for ending these two lives and brutally destroying whatever future Alice and William might have been imagining for themselves.
This is the doctrine of provocation by sexual infidelity at work – and you might be surprised to learn it is still the law of Scotland. The legal requirements have been refined since the 1940s, but the basic rule remains the same. If you are in a relationship where “sexual fidelity was to be expected,” you discover your partner’s infidelity and experience an “immediate loss of self-control,” and the “ordinary person” might have acted in the same way – then you can kill your wife, husband, boyfriend, fiancé and their lover – but you’re not guilty of murder.
For almost a decade, my undergrad students have sat open-mouthed on discovering this doctrine is still the law of the land, given how uncomfortably the defence sits alongside modern ideas of the role of women in society, their sexual freedom, and the disintegration of the old vows to “love, honour and obey” your husband, however miserable and intolerable your domestic circumstances have become.
This week, the Scottish Law Commission has finally recommended that this doctrine be struck out of Scots law – and not before time. The history of this defence is the history of male violence against women, rationalised and minimised by our justice system. In England, they scrapped the defence back in 2009. It is remarkable it has survived here for so long.
Take another example from the archives. The setting is Dundee, August 1957. The attacker is another Alexander – Alexander Callander. He was indicted in the High Court for of assaulting two women to their severe injury at his home on St Kilda Road. The first victim was his wife Margaret. The second was a Mrs O’Neill. The case report alludes cryptically to “the unhappy circumstances of his married life after 1955.”
They were clearly unhappy for Mr Alexander, but less so for his wife, who seems to have found psychical consolation in the arms of Mrs O’Neill. Discovering them together, Alexander Callander battered them both with a bottle. His defence was that he was “provoked” into violence by this discovery.
In one of those judicial remarks which has aged like rancid fat left in the summer sun, Lord Guthrie told the Dundee jury the Callander’s had wife “indulged” in “those unnatural practices between females to which the name of Lesbianism has been given” and concluded that while “Lesbianism is not adultery, but I do not think that anyone would hold that it is a less serious infringement of the duty of a wife than adultery is” – concluding that the man in the dock could argue he was provoked by the discovery of his wife’s same-sex infidelity.
In fairness, the defence hasn’t only been used by men. In the 1990s, Vikki McKean shared her home in Rutherglen with her daughter, her same-sex partner, and a male lodger – Stephen Blackwell. McKean became convinced her partner had been having a sexual affair with the lodger, confronted him with the allegation, and then stabbed him to death.
Lord MacLean held that “in these more enlightened days of sexual equality there was no reason why the law should not extend uniformly to a man and a woman so that a wife or female companion should have the benefit of the mitigating plea of provocation equally with a husband or male partner” that there’s no good reason in the modern context “why the plea should not also be available to homosexual couples who live together and were regarded in the community as partners bound together by ties of love, affection and faithfulness.”
But you might ask yourself just how enlightened the basic legal principle can really be. The ability to kill your intimate partner and their new paramour without being convicted for murder must rank pretty low down the main goals of gay liberation. It is a perverse twist on accepting and recognising same-sex relationships, to suggest that extending special protections to people who commit honour killings to people in same-sex relationships is somehow an emancipatory move.
The truth is – Lord Guthrie’s 1957 reference to “the infringements of the duties of a wife” give the same away. It was over twenty years ago that Lord Hoffman observed in an English appeal that “male possessiveness and jealousy should not today be an acceptable reason for loss of self-control leading to homicide, whether inflicted upon the woman herself or her new lover.”
He’s right, and it is shameful it has taken so long for this ugly aspect of our criminal law to be recognised as a priority for reform. This week, the Scottish Law Commission provocatively but correctly described the current law as amounting to a legal sanction for honour killing – as if a sense of social shame and stigma about the break-up of a relationship could justify anyone to end another person’s life, or mitigate the harm you’ve done, or reduce your culpability.
If anything, the opposite is true. In modern Scotland, women are much less likely to be victims of homicide than men – but are much more likely to be killed by their current or former partners than anyone else. The literature on domestic abuse shows that the end of a relationship is a significant risk factor in the escalation of violence and potential lethality. Possessiveness and jealousy should be seen for what they are – threats to people’s physical security rather than pleas in mitigation. Whoever wins the next Holyrood election, taking up the Law Commission’s recommendations and abolishing this reactionary defence must be a priority.
Andrew Tickell 