In closing decades, in widely upheld form, it amounted to proving a reasonable total loss of control as a response to another's objectively provocative conduct sufficient to convert what would otherwise have been murder into manslaughter.
This did not change the burden of proof which, as in all criminal cases, was on the prosecution to prove the actus reus and mens rea of the offence charged, i.e. murder.
If there was a "cooling-off" period, the court would find that the accused should have regained control, making all subsequent actions intentional and therefore murder.
The conviction for murder was held unsafe because the accused's psychiatric condition stemming from the abuse should have been attributed to the reasonable person when the jury considered the application of the objective test.
It was held in Camplin[14] that the accused's age and sex could be attributed to the reasonable man when the jury considered the defendant's power of self-control.
In R v Smith[17] the defendant was charged with murder and relied on the defence of provocation, alleging that he had been suffering from serious clinical depression and had been so provoked by the deceased as to lose his self-control.
Lord Hoffman held that the test was whether the jury thought that the circumstances were such as to make the loss of self-control sufficiently excusable to reduce the gravity of the offence from murder to manslaughter.
Furthermore, the House held, by a majority, that no distinction should be drawn, when attributing characteristics for the purposes of the objective part of the test imposed by s3 Homicide Act, between their relevance to the gravity of the provocation to a reasonable man and his reaction to it.
But in HM's AG for Jersey v Holley[18] the Privy Council regarded Smith as wrongly decided, interpreting the Act as setting a purely objective standard.
Despite the fact that a Privy Council ratio decidendi is only persuasive authority, the Court of Appeal applied it and reinstated the law before Smith.
The same result would have been inevitable if the provocation direction had been on the basis of Holley.In R v James[20] the court again considered the relationship between the Privy Council decision in Holley and Smith.
The Court of Appeal held that section 3 of the Homicide Act 1957 provided that anything could amount to provocation, including responsive actions provoked by the defendant.
The new defence of "loss of control" introduced by the Coroners and Justices Act 2009, specifically excluded self-induced provocation in section 55, subsection 6, a) in terms of "fear of serious violence" and b) in terms of "a sense of being seriously wronged by a thing done or said " when the "qualifying trigger" was incited "for the purpose of providing an excuse to use violence.
"[24] The Sentencing Council set out a guideline for manslaughter (substituted for charge/finding of murder) by reason of an accepted defence of loss of control.