A similar story in Ohio some years ago had a woman at home with a couple small children when someone broke in. she called the cops, then retreated to the basement with the kids, locking the door. The burglar began pounding on the door and she yelled that the police were on their way and that she had a gun. He broke the door down whereupon she shot and killed him. She was tried for manslaughter because there was an exterior door in the basement, and the prosecutor argued that she should have gone out that way instead of confronting the burglar. The jury refused to convict.
A legal rule-of-thumb (which means it’s only approximately accurate, and will vary widely across states, etc.) is that you as an individual can’t do more to an intruder than the government could do if he was caught & convicted in court.
Thus since burglary is not a capital crime, you can’t kill a burglar robbing your house. Nor can you set up bobby traps or machines to kill him. So if the burglar turns to run away, you can’t shoot him in the back.
But murder or attempted murder generally is a capital crime, so that’s why you can defend yourself, if you think you are in danger of being murdered. If the burglar pulls out a knife and comes toward you, then you can shoot him.
But the assumption is that you, as a law-abiding citizen, should choose the least-violent way of responding to the threat. That’s where the concept of possible escape comes in. If you could have just run out the back door instead of shooting the burglar, that is what you should have done. (But if your children were asleep in the bedroom upstairs, that changes the situation, too.)
Of course, all this depends on specific actual circumstances of the case. And it eventually all comes down to what a jury will find as acceptable actions to ‘defend’ yourself. Still, it’s best to avoid that situation – even if the jury finds you Not Guilty, you will have spent a lot of time & money defending yourself in court.
I can see how this is reasonable in some cases; the fact that you know a stalker or your crazy ex-husband doesn’t make them less dangerous, for instance. But does this mean you could invite your arch nemesis over, kill them, and claim it was a home invasion? Or, as has happened to me a couple times, could somebody get upset with you while you’re at their house, kill you, and claim you were a home invader? That seems a bit … surreal.
Um … and of course, when I say it’s happened to me, I mean people have gotten upset with me while I was at their house, not that they have killed me.
Such as nonlethal booby traps- maybe stuff that ‘catches’ the crook for the police to collect, or debilitates them sufficiently to be able to make an escape (I’m imagining a boobytrapped room that fills with teargas when triggered )
Could you purchase rubber bullets for a shotgun? Or those bean bag thingys police use? How about stun guns? They rarely leave marks, which would be hard for the robber to prove that you did anything particularly nasty to him
The booby trap thing is because over the years, courts have found that booby traps pose a clear and present danger to public safety personnel. Suppose I have a vacation home that gets broken into. I set up a shotgun to dust off the bad guy. The place catches on fire and I dust off a fireman instead. And it has happened.
I really don’t think there is a jury in the country that will convict you for capping a burglar inside your house, especially if you tell them that he was threatening you or your family. If you do shoot someone, though, make sure you kill them. That way, it’s only your story being told. I ANAL and everything, but that’s just common sense.
Yesterday a 21 yr old broke into a house while the house was occupied. The occupant (age unknown) procceeded to beat the unarmed intruder with a crowbar. The intruder was life-flighted to Pittsburgh and for a short while his condition was critical.
The guy that beat the intruder is 17.
(I am little freaked out about this question. This is from my hometown and my dad told me about the case yesterday, and I know the family that was involved. It really is a small world)
I remember when a neighbor’s house was broken into in Colorado quite a few years ago. My neighbor grabbed his .22 and went after the burglar while the wife called the cops. The burglar split. When the cops showed up, they found my neighbor with the .22. One of them took him aside and asked him what he intended to do with the gun. He said he was going to shoot the burglar. The cop asked what he’d do when the burglar kept coming.
The bottom line (explained the cop) was that if you’re going to have a firearm for self-defense, you should (a) have one with adequately lethal force and (b) know how to use it, so the intruder doesn’t take it away from you and hurt you with it. I thought these were both excellent pieces of advice.
Then, the cop went on to say that if he shot the guy outside the house, he should drag him inside and shoot him again. This is very bad advice. Forensics people will figure out what happened and, as Crafter_Man pointed out, your credibility will be toast. If your case goes to a jury, they’re much less likely to believe your version of the story. Besides, intentionally messing with a crime scene is a crime in and of itself.
Of course, if you can prove it was self-defense, it doesn’t really matter whether he was in your house or in your yard.
A former neighbor of mine was a police officer. His advice was that if one is confronted with an in-home intruder, one should shoot to kill first then fire a shot into the ceiling. When questioned, you could then claim that you fired a warning shot into the ceiling first and the intruder still did not flee, thus requiring you to then use lethal force to defend yourself. He believed this would increase the “justifiableness” of the shooting.
