DEFENSIVE homicide laws meant to help battered women but which have been hijacked by thugs and drug addicts will be scrapped under sweeping justice reforms.

Simpler and clearer tests for self-defence will be introduced for all criminal offences, along with new jury directions on family violence, to ensure genuine abuse victims have legal protections.

And new rules for court evidence will aim to reduce character trashing of victims by lawyers trying to “blame women for their own murders”.

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Victorian Attorney-General Robert Clark said draft laws would enter State Parliament this week because defensive homicide had “failed to work as intended”.

“Instead it is wide open to offenders using it to escape full responsibility where they ­deserve to be convicted of murder,” Mr Clark said.

media_camera Normunds Dambitis at the Supreme Court in Melbourne.

The Sunday Herald Sun can reveal that since 2005, just five of 33 defensive homicide convictions have had female ­defendants.

Killers who escaped murder convictions include ice addicts, a schizophrenic man who thought he was a clone of Hitler or Hitler’s grandson when he killed two men, and a prisoner who stabbed an inmate 16 times.

Many of the 33 cases have involved alcohol or drug-affected killers.

Defensive homicide occurs where a person kills in the belief that it is self-defence, but without reasonable grounds for that belief.

The maximum penalty is 20 years’ jail whereas for murder, it is life.

Among those to use the laws have been Normunds Dambitis, who used lumps of wood and his fists to kill Scott Shaw two days after leaving jail.

Dambitis and others intervened after the victim, armed with a machete, threatened a gropu of teenagers. Mr Shaw had been disarmed when Dambitis assaulted him. He pleaded not guilty and was sentenced to 11 years with an eight-year minimum.

Another was 26-year-old Luke Middendorp, who killed partner Jade Bownds by stabbing her four times in the back while drunk.

He claimed she had attacked him and he grabbed the knife and stabbed her over her shoulder. Middendorp was drunk and the relationship had been violent.

He pleaded not guilty and was sentenced to 12 years, with a minimum term of eight years.

Police Association secretary and former homicide squad detective Sen-Sgt Ron Iddles welcomed the new laws and said they cater for family ­violence issues and “make self-defence easier for a jury to understand”.

Mr Clark said new jury directions would allow for the significance of family violence — including that it may not be limited to physical abuse — to be explained to jurors.

Other changes to the law will enable judges to intervene when defence lawyers attempt to introduce gratuitous “victim blaming” in court.

Joy and Roger Membrey, whose daughter Elisabeth disappeared and was presumed murdered in 1994, said changes would be good for families of victims.

Football commentator Phil Cleary, who is an outspoken advocate for abuse victims after his sister was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 1987, said unnecessary “victim blaming” had to end.

“I am so passionately opposed to lawyers being able to blame women for their own murders,” Mr Cleary said. He welcomed scrapping defensive homicide because the law had “been used by men to effectively get away with murder”.

matthew.johnston@news.com.au