2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
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How about what the law says?
Self Defense expert Andrew Branca...
But let’s pretend that Huber had in his head that his attack on Kyle was motivated by a good faith desire to stop an active shooter—that has nothing whatever to do with either any of the criminal charges against Kyle or Kyle’s legal defense of self-defense.
Self-defense is evaluated from the perspective of the defender, period. If a defender is acting in otherwise lawful self-defense, he does not lose the privilege of self-defense simply because the person attacking him may be doing so in good faith, or with good motives.
If you’re at home, and armed men kick in your door, and you reasonably perceive that intrusion as a felony home invasion, you can use deadly defensive force against those men in lawful self-defense—and if later turns out that those men were actually law enforcement officers mistakenly, but in good faith, serving a warrant on the wrong house your claim of self-defense remains entirely intact, so long as your perception of them as home invaders was a reasonable perception under the circumstances.
Similarly, if two police officers or armed citizens separately respond to a school shooting with guns drawn, and spotting each other they each mistakenly but reasonably believe the other is the active shooter and start shooting at each other, they each have the legal privilege to defend themselves against the other’s attack. The fact that Joe is shooting at Frank in the good faith belief that Frank is an active shooter does nothing to diminish Frank’s privilege to use force to stop Joe’s attack. Both men are acting in good faith in using force against the other, but both men also fully retain their privilege to defend themselves against the other’s good faith attack.
What controls for your claim of self-defense is whether you reasonably perceived that you were being threatened with an unlawful imminent deadly force attack. You don’t need to be correct in that perception—you merely need to be reasonable in that perception.
So long as you are otherwise acting in lawful self-defense, that the person initiating the unlawful imminent deadly force attack upon you is acting in good faith doesn’t matter even a whit.
Their good faith is entirely irrelevant to your claim of self-defense, period.
In the context of Kyle’s shooting Huber, that means that so long as Kyle had a reasonable perception that he was being subject by Huber to an unlawful imminent deadly force attack, he was privileged to defend himself against that attack with deadly force—and any good faith motivation of Huber matters not a whit.
We can see, then, that any evidence about Huber’s motives in attacking Kyle is both irrelevant to the criminal charges against Kyle and irrelevant to his legal defense of self-defense.
The only question is whether Kyle reasonably perceived he was facing an unlawful, imminent deadly force attack. If he was, he was privileged to use deadly defensive force regardless of what might have been in Huber’s head (about which, again, we have no actual evidence, or anything other than speculation).
Now, it’s possible that the prosecution is planning to argue that Kyle’s conduct in shooting Rosenbaum qualifies as a provocation of Huber that should lose Kyle his privilege of self-defense. After all, if I engage in conduct that provokes you into a fight with me—calling you mean names until we fight—arguably I ought to be found to have lost the element of Innocence and therefore self-defense.
But provocation in this sense is a deliberate and targeted conduct. I intentionally engage in conduct that I should reasonably know will provoke violence and without justification.
That’s not what happened here in the shooting of Rosenbaum, however, as that shooting occurred only after a murder-threatening Rosenbaum chased down a fleeing Kyle in a parking lot and attempted to seize violent control of Kyle’s rifle.
That means that even assuming (speculatively, without evidence) that Huber felt genuinely provoked by Kyle’s conduct, that perception can only have been unreasonable, and Huber’s unreasonable perceptions cannot be a basis for denying Kyle his privilege of self-defense.
The effort of the State to argue that provocation can be applied to conduct generally that might anger others, and that you should lose your privilege of self-defense as a result, would turn thousands of years of use-of-force law on its head.
Under the State’s reasoning, even if Kyle’s shooting of Rosenbaum was found to be completely lawful, if Huber perceived it otherwise and was as a result “provoked” to attack Kyle as he fled for the police line, Kyle would have no privilege of lawfully defending himself against Huber’s attack. All that would matter would be Huber’s subjective belief that he was attacking Kyle with good motive.
And that’s the exact reverse of what the law provides in the context of citizens using violence upon each other. It is not the subjective belief of the attacker that controls, it is the reasonable belief of the defender.
Rittenhouse Trial Day 4: Two State Blunders Create Opportunity for the Defense
State witness Lackowski: “If Rosenbaum had done that to me, would be a threat to my life.”
legalinsurrection.com
