Defenses: Justification and Excuse: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
25 flashcard terms for Criminal Law Topic 8, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 15-question quiz — free, no account needed.
A claim that conduct otherwise criminal was right or at least tolerable in the circumstances, so the act itself is not wrongful and third parties may assist the actor.
Excuse defense
A claim conceding that the act was wrongful but asserting that the actor is not blameworthy because of some condition or pressure that undermined free and rational choice.
Self defense elements
A defendant may use force when he honestly and reasonably believes it necessary to repel an imminent unlawful attack, using force proportionate to the threat faced.
Deadly force limitation
Force likely to cause death is permitted only against threats of death, serious bodily injury, or in most codes forcible felonies such as rape, kidnapping, or robbery.
Imminence requirement
The threatened harm must be about to occur, which is why preemptive strikes against future violence generally fail even when the fear is genuine.
Reasonableness standard in self defense
Most jurisdictions judge the defendant's belief by an objective reasonable person placed in the defendant's situation, admitting some but not all individual characteristics.
People v. Goetz
New York held that the statutory phrase about reasonable belief imposed an objective standard, rejecting a purely subjective test for the subway shooter's fear.
Imperfect self defense
An honest but unreasonable belief in the need for deadly force does not acquit but reduces murder to manslaughter in many jurisdictions.
Duty to retreat
A minority requirement that a defendant retreat before using deadly force if he can do so in complete safety, subject to the castle exception.
Castle doctrine
The rule that a person attacked in his own home need not retreat before using otherwise lawful defensive force, even in retreat jurisdictions.
Stand your ground statutes
Modern legislation abolishing the retreat requirement anywhere the defendant has a lawful right to be, so long as the other elements of self defense are met.
Initial aggressor rule
One who starts the confrontation forfeits self defense unless he withdraws and communicates that withdrawal, or the victim escalates to deadly force in response to nondeadly force.
State v. Norman
North Carolina rejected a self defense instruction for a battered woman who killed her sleeping husband because the threatened harm was not imminent.
Battered woman syndrome evidence
Expert testimony offered to explain why a defendant reasonably perceived danger and did not leave, admitted in many states to inform the reasonableness inquiry.
Defense of others
Force may be used to protect a third person on the same terms as self defense, with jurisdictions split over whether a reasonable mistake about the need protects the intervener.
Defense of property
Nondeadly force may be used to prevent an unlawful dispossession of property, but deadly force and spring guns are impermissible to protect property alone.
People v. Ceballos
A spring gun rigged in a garage produced liability because mechanical devices may not be used to inflict deadly force where the defender could not lawfully do so in person.
Law enforcement defense
Officers may use reasonable force to make an arrest, but Tennessee v. Garner bars deadly force against a fleeing suspect who poses no significant threat.
Necessity defense
Also called choice of evils, it justifies otherwise criminal conduct when it averts a greater imminent harm and no reasonable lawful alternative exists.
Nelson v. State
A defendant who commandeered highway equipment to free his stuck vehicle failed the necessity claim because the danger was not imminent and less drastic options existed.
Duress
An excuse for a defendant who commits a crime because another threatened imminent death or serious bodily harm and a person of reasonable firmness could not have resisted.
Duress and homicide
The common law refuses duress as a defense to murder, while the Model Penal Code allows the excuse in principle even for homicide if the threat overcame reasonable firmness.
M'Naghten test
The classic insanity standard excusing a defendant who because of a mental disease did not know the nature and quality of the act or did not know it was wrong.
Irresistible impulse and control tests
Broader insanity formulations excusing a defendant whose mental disease destroyed the capacity to conform conduct to law, narrowed after the Hinckley verdict.
Diminished capacity
The use of mental abnormality evidence to negate a specific mental state such as premeditation, distinct from a full insanity defense and barred in some jurisdictions.