A LAW intended to shield battered women from murder convictions has been hijacked by violent, often drug-crazed men.

Of 19 defensive homicide convictions since the crime was introduced in 2005, only two have been of women.

Supreme Court cases show the defensive homicide law has almost exclusively been of benefit to men who kill other men, often while drug-affected or in a violent rage.

The 2005 law replaced the provocation defence, abolished after a series of controversies about its use by male killers to avoid murder convictions.

But its introduction had been "a complete debacle", one prosecutor said.

A judge said it had been "resorted to by men in circumstances that the Law Reform Commission didn't really envisage".The commission had recommended the change to prevent unreasonable murder convictions of women who killed after years of domestic violence or abuse, but who had not faced an immediate threat to their lives.

Attorney-General Robert Clark yesterday said the law was not working as intended and had led to results that seemed "unjust and contrary to common sense".

He said the Government would consider amendments to ensure it applied "as it was originally intended, and is not able to be misused by offenders to escape full responsibility where they deserve to be convicted of murder".

Monash University criminologists Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Sharon Pickering said in a study of homicide law reform that defensive homicide had complicated the law so much it was "difficult, if not impossible, to operate in the jury environment".

Prosecutors they interviewed had described judicial directions to jurors as "mind-boggling" and "unbelievably convoluted".

Judges described them as "incomprehensible", "too complex" and "very, very complicated".

Defensive homicide carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in jail; the maximum for murder is life imprisonment.

A person is guilty of defensive homicide when a belief in self-defence is asserted without there being a reasonable basis for that belief.

Calls for legislative change began in 2010 after an outcry over the case of Luke Middendorp, who was jailed for 12 years with a minimum of eight for defensive homicide.

Middendorp, who was on bail and had previously assaulted his former de facto wife, Jade Bownds, stabbed her to death after an argument in which he claimed she threatened him with a knife.

The first woman convicted of defensive homicide by a jury, Eileen Creamer, was sentenced last year to 11 years' jail with a minimum of seven.

Creamer said she stabbed and bashed her husband because he bashed her and demanded kinky sex.