Illegal to use non-deadly force in self-defense???
I think it was last year or the year before that there was a big to-do about Florida passing a "stand your ground" law: in the majority of states, if you were not the aggressor, you can use deadly force to repel an assailant, even if you could safely have retreated. It's an issue that is more hotly contested than one might expect, and in a significant majority of states, even a non-aggressor must retreat rather than use deadly force if she can do so safely. This troubles me, mostly because the question of whether a reasonable person would have felt she could safely extricate herself from a situation that is sufficiently dangerous that said reasonable person would feel it necessary to choose between the use of deadly force and retreat is a murky one. I'm not sure in what situations such laws are applied, because I have a hard time imagining a situation in which a reasonable person would feel like she could flee and would feel like she needed to kill her assailant to protect herself. I will grant that the doctrine may be more applicable than I can personally imagine it being, simply because there are probably no scenarios in which such a doctrine could apply to me. I am small and disabled. The odds of me being able to safely extricate myself from a deadly situation without killing or seriously wounding my assailant are extremely small, and would require some very specific circumstances. So my perspective on laws that prohibit the use of force when fleeing is an option may be a bit skewed.
What I did not know (and my tiny disabled self finds utterly horrifying) is that a very small minority of states prohibit the use of non-deadly force against an assailant if the defender could have safely extricated herself without it. Yesterday, the Iowa Court of Appeals reversed a conviction that had been based on that restriction. It upheld the validity of the restriction generally, but found that it didn't apply in this case. While his conviction was overturned, the fact remains that a man spent a year in prison for throwing a non-lethal defensive punch against an assailant in an altercation in which he was not the aggressor. That is appalling. (Link thanks to Eugene Volokh.)
What I did not know (and my tiny disabled self finds utterly horrifying) is that a very small minority of states prohibit the use of non-deadly force against an assailant if the defender could have safely extricated herself without it. Yesterday, the Iowa Court of Appeals reversed a conviction that had been based on that restriction. It upheld the validity of the restriction generally, but found that it didn't apply in this case. While his conviction was overturned, the fact remains that a man spent a year in prison for throwing a non-lethal defensive punch against an assailant in an altercation in which he was not the aggressor. That is appalling. (Link thanks to Eugene Volokh.)