I am hoping that this is the case. The hypo was basically a toss up battered spouse syndrome self-defense claim where the wife spends time researching and preparing a spring gun trap for her abusive husband and you are placed in the position of her defense attorney trying to get her out of 1st degree murder. I hit the whole battered spouse syndrome defense (Leidholm) as hard as I possibly could to get around imminence. The pattern stated that the wife spoke harsh words to the husband, who ran upstairs swearing, she heard a bang, went upstairs, found her husband in a pool of blood, then called 911. There was nothing in the fact pattern to indicate how exactly he died, so I went with possible suicide instead of the spring gun and pointed to that as a possible independent intervening cause of death that could exculpate the client. Took it and ran with it like hell. I missed pointing out the greater likelihood that the husband was killed by the spring gun. FMLhaus wrote:I like to think about it like my elementary school math class where the teacher told us that by showing our work, we gave ourself a possibility for partial credit for showing we understood the basics of the problem, even if we got the final answer wrong.
Based on the grading rubric, there is no cap on points and we can get points for making thorough analysis. Maybe it's not a lost cause, but I certainly don't feel good. The whole exam was basically an outline dump and I think the curve is going to be pretty tight.
Oh well, it's done and there's nothing else that can be done. I felt so good after crushing the practice tests, but the actual test was quite a bit different than I expected based on previous samples. One more exam left this Thursday.
