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Notes -
The canonical example is a spouse walking in on an act of adultery and killing one of the parties. Some states require that the act be illegal. So something like finding out your son's baseball coach was molesting him or that your employee drained the company funds to finance a gambling spree might qualify. Some states have held that it's a sort of modified version of the battered wife defense, where long-term domestic abuse would count as sufficient provocation to reduce the charges to manslaughter if the provocation weren't severe enough to be justifiable self-defense. In the same vein, some states allow manslaughter in the case of incomplete self-defense, where the defendant genuinely but unreasonably feared for his life. Mutual combat would be another example, where the perpetrator develops the intent to kill during the course of the fight. I would also add that the killing has to take place before the perpetrator has time to reflect on his actions. If the coach admits he's been abusing your son and your immediate reaction is to beat him to death, that's a better case than if you drove to his house armed after your son told you he'd been abused. But, like I said, it's reserved for unusual cases where a juror would say "I understand that as a society we can't allow people to get away with this, but I understand why the guy would have gone to those extremes". It's not for cases—like getting dumped, or fired, or cut off in traffic—that normal people experience on a regular basis without getting the urge to kill.
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