A case to be heard in the Supreme Court tomorrow could have significant implications for people trying to seek justice after someone has been driven to take their own life after being a victim domestic abuse.
The highest court in the country will tomorrow hear the case of Benjamin Field, who was convicted for the murder of Peter Farquhar in Maids Moreton in 2015, but successfully appealed his conviction and now faces a retrial.
Three organisations advocating for victims of domestic abuse-related suicide have intervened in the case, writing to the court defending the current approach to prosecuting in murder cases, which could be under threat.
The Supreme Court is set to consider the legal test of causation in homicides where the immediate act that actually causes the death is done by the victim – in the case of Peter Farquhar it was argued at the original trial that he had died after drinking whisky and ingesting a sedative, physically given to him by Benjamin Field.
Field made several attempts to overturn his conviction and was eventually successful. After a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), his last hope of it being quashed, his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal in August 2025. This marked the first time the CCRC had ever referred a case invoking their ‘safety valve’ power without having to rely on new evidence. The Criminal Prosecution Service (CPS) were then granted leave to appeal the case in the Supreme Court.
The Centre for Women’s Justice, Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse (AAFDA), and Project Resist say the outcome of this case will influence police and CPS deliberations on prosecuting domestic abusers who drive victims to take their own lives through violence, coercive control, stalking, harassment and sexual violence.
In a statement they said the current high threshold for proving that women’s suicides were directly caused by their abuse ‘already makes it difficult to secure successful prosecutions, particularly regarding vulnerable and traumatised individuals.’
The groups said that they fear any reversal or narrowing of this legal test may hinder these prosecutions even further and potentially exclude domestic abuse-related suicide cases from the ambit of homicide law altogether.
They continued: ‘The need to prosecute for manslaughter in such cases is pressing, particularly in the light of recent data from the Domestic Homicide Project that confirms that suicides following domestic abuse have overtaken the number of domestic abuse-related homicides for the third consecutive year.’
In 2025, 150 suspected suicides were recorded in England and Wales following domestic abuse, rising from 98 in 2024 and 93 in 2023. Their submission to the Court reveals that in 2024/25, victims of domestic abuse were nearly twice as likely to die by suicide than by acts of violence by an intimate partner.
Frank Mullane of the AAFDA said ‘there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that at the moment, many persons, whose domestic abuse caused the suicide of their victim, are simply not held to account by the criminal justice system’, adding ‘we cannot make it harder to hold these abusers to account.’
Harriet Wistrich who leads the Centre for Women’s Justice said that as understanding of coercive and controlling behaviour increases, many abusers ‘deliberately target vulnerable women and exploit their vulnerability’.
‘Perpetrators who do this should be held liable in circumstances where it is clear that their actions drove the woman to take her own life. It is crucial that the Supreme Court considers the wider implications of its judgment when considering the particular circumstances in the case of R v Field.’
