I don’t get all the hand-wringing here. Get in the car and shut the door. If the idiot is too stupid to move his hand, then it’s his fault if he gets hurt. If questioned, I’d just go “WTF, who puts their hand in the way of a closing car door? I never even saw it”.
I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of clients.
…for other lawyers.
There’s no magic words you can say on the phone to 911, nor can you just say “I was scared of rape!” and then magically win a civil suit or have criminal charges dropped.
The answer to the OP, like almost every legal question is “It depends”. In this case, you might be ok if you’re in the middle of the ghetto at 3 AM. But none of the scenarios presented here are the sort of thing that are going to justify “self-defense”.
You don’t have the right to run around breaking people’s hands and causing other serious bodily injury just because you’re annoyed, even in Texas. What if a pedestrian is standing in the bike lane? You can’t run him over, even though he might be “delaying” you and doesn’t have a legal right to be in the bike lane as a pedestrian. Just the same, you don’t get to overreact to minor transgressions, regardless of trying to come up with some absurd legal theory.
We have a pretty common-sense system about this stuff. Ask yourself if you would be perfectly fine with a guy breaking your fingers because you tapped him on the shoulder (which one could construe as battery, albeit about as convincingly as the wino falsely imprisoning you). The answer is probably no. Charles Bronson fantasies aside, it’s silly to think you should have the right to injure someone because you’re annoyed.
Keep in mind that the degree of violence in the defensive act must correlate to that of the percieved threat.
Closing someone’s hand in the door is simply assault.
Brushing them aside with a moving motor vehicle is assault with a deadly weapon.
Who here is pushing the “I did it because I was annoyed” theory here ?
It certainly aint me.
No, slamming someone’s hand in the door is battery. Telling them you’ll slam their hand in the door is assault.
Driving off while they are touching your car is neither assault, nor battery, nor with a deadly weapon. It’s driving off, unless the guy is standing in front of your car.
What is saying “I am leaving now, so you had better move your hand so I can close my door.” ? What action is reasonable for me to take in the OP? Calling the police and waiting half an hour for me to arrive doesn’t strike me as reasonable.
No one is pushing the annoyed theory. But all the wrangling and hemming and hawing about justification says to me that the real intent is just to punish this guy who dares invade your space/touch your car/whatever (aka, annoyance). I’m getting more of an “Id have kicked his ass real good” vibe than a “Holy shit, that would be terrifying” one.
BTW, calling 911 and saying your ‘defense’ in a clear, calm voice is closer to demonstrating malice aforethought than it is to giving you a defense. After all, you’re already thinking ahead to the legal consequences of your soon-to-be-committed attack.
In my old neighborhood, I would pass by about that number of panhandlers (or more) daily both on my way to work and on my way home. I’d be in the poorhouse myself if I gave each one a twonie every day.
Plus, you get to know the regulars. Aside from Guy Who Barks and Prosthetic Leg Guy, all the others were routinely scraped of park benches after using the money people like YogSosoth give them to buy Listerine. Most of the people who were “desperate” were really, really desperate - no argument there. The were desperate mainly because they were jonesing for their next fix. Guy Who Barks buys donuts. You didn’t have to give him change, he’d be happy if you gave him donuts. Prosthetic Leg Guy used his “donations” to buy cigarettes.
There are a lot of homeless people in my old neighborhood who needed help (many of them were passing through the area because there is a large shelter nearby and a few blocks away there is a truck that comes by twice a day with food and blankets). The only ones who were “desperate” and harassed people for change, weren’t using it to buy food or temporary shelter.
I have given my lunch to a guy*, but I won’t give out cash. I’ve seen it abused way too often.
- One of the churches behind my apartment building had free breakfasts on Mondays, and the guy had shown up on a Tuesday. When he asked which church had the food and I told him it was the day before, he looked horrified (the kind of “Oh, shit!” face you get when someone else is depending on you). So I gave him my lunch. He never asked for spare change.
They’ll come up if you put your hand in someone’s car door. 
I didn’t think anybody died in our hypothetical. Perhaps you mean specific intent?
Where’s Waylon Jennings when you really need him?
Daisy! Uncle Jessy! It’s Enos and the Sheriff!
In court do you think he will say that is what happened? Back to your word against his and his broken fingers. You hurt a homeless man. how bad can you be?
No, A&B is a crime of general intent. Malice aforethought sounds better than “making a call to 911 only for the transparent purpose of establishing a defense later”.
But your nitpick is accepted.
Look, if you’re a middle class white person who crushes the hand of a homeless derelict, you stand a pretty good chance of getting away with it.
The incident will probably never even reach the cops, the derelict will end up in the ER, and his story will be that “some dude” crushed his hand, and the ER docs shake their heads and amputate his fingers, and after a few days in the hospital he’ll be back on the streets but now he’s not just a mentally ill alcoholic derelict, he’s a mentally ill alcoholic derelict with half a hand.
The likelihood that he’ll take down your license plate number, and call the cops is pretty small, and even if he does the cops probably aren’t going to expend a lot of effort to find out exactly who crushed this homeless guy’s hand. And even if they track you down, and the prosecutor decides to go to trial, you’ll be a middle class white guy accusing of hurting a mentally ill derelict. Odds are very very good that you’ll have at least a couple of sympathetic jurors who will hold out for acquittal.
So given all that, the odds good to very good that you’d get away with slamming your car door on the hand of a mentally ill homeless guy.
I’m also available for advice on how likely it is that you’d get away with picking up teenage prostitutes, strangling them to death, and dumping their bodies in the river. Same answer, pretty good. It took them 30 years to track down the Green River Killer, and that was only by a fluke.
Maybe others are talking a different scenario, but this is the one I am talking about :
The justification is he has physically invaded your space. He has you in a vunerable position ( I am assuming you are seated in the car and he puts his hand somewhere to keep you from closing the door). He shows no signs of backing off. He doesnt take the chance to back off. You are going to be safer once the door is closed than when its open. Leaving it open leaves you vunerable.
If you tell him to move the hand or its getting smashed he is either :
Really stupid.
Crazy.
Or Intends harm.
Or its Opal.
I aint going to assume the first and take a personal physical risk of the second and third, just because someone MIGHT get some broken fingers.
I tell you what, when I get out of the minimum security prison after six months I’ll drop by your grave because you got stabbed in the neck by some crazy dude that was bent outa shape because you wouldn’t contribute to his cause.
BTW, I risked life and limb two summers ago to “save” a homeless dude twice my size and totally out of it. So, take your vibes and go do some useful pro bono work somewhere.
But now we’ve created a fantasy scenario where your choice is: crush a homeless guy’s hand, or get stabbed in the neck by a homeless guy.
As Stranger pointed out upthread, the answer for all you self-defense types is that getting into this situation in the first place is foolish. Getting into your car while this crazed homeless guy is right next to you is the mistake, because that’s what leaves you vulnerable to getting stabbed in the neck.
If the question is, “If I am in reasonable fear of immanent bodily harm, would I be justified in using extreme levels of force, such as permanently maiming someone?”, then the answer is that if you’d be justified in shooting the guy, you’d also be justified in slamming the door on his hand.
But if you aren’t in fear of life, you aren’t justified in using force. You aren’t justified in pulling out a gun and shooting someone who’s blocking the sidewalk, and you aren’t justified in crushing someone’s hand just because they touched you, or touched your car. Yes, a simple touch is battery. But you can’t maim someone over simple battery. You can’t maim someone just because they are blocking your way. The old “I’m just swinging my fist, and if Billy gets in the way that’s his fault” didn’t work with your parents when you were 10 years old, and it’s not going to work that well with the Judge either.
But like I said above, you’re not very likely to see a Judge in the first place, so maim away, and you’re very likely to get away with it.
Thats not my point.
What are the chances that I crush a guys hand and end up in deep legal shit for it vs the chances he is crazy or has bad motives and I’ll be seriously physically harmed ?
I await the stats for “I got 10 to 20 years on hobo maiming row” vs “crazy sonna bitch attacked me when I was in my car with the door open”.
I agree with not getting in the car in the first place, but once that bridge is crossed there is no going back. Maybe he is really nice right up the last minute then you realize, hey this isnt some clean shaven save the whales dude but somebody else.
And, personally, I’d be LESS likely to close the door on “homeless” looking dude than some younger clean shaven guy that won’t move that hand.
The problem is that we’re not talking about the odds of someone being an attacker vs them just being persistent and trying to scam money, nor are we talking about getting away with it. Those are probably better topics for great debates, or alternatively, I would say asked and answered.
The OP asked if it’s legal to smash a panhandler’s hand if he won’t let go of your car. The answer is pretty much “no”.
You can argue about risk vs reward all you want, but absent a reasonable apprehension of severe danger, your actions are illegal. Reasonable in the legal context doesn’t mean “you might have been in danger if the guy was hostile” or “better safe than sorry”. The Illinois statute gives: “only if you reasonably believe that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or another, or the commission of a forcible felony.”
Now, you can argue the caselaw and the statutes are bad. You might even be right. But that’s the law.
What are the fucking chances that his hand is “crushed”, or he even suffers a broken or sprained finger? I’ve had my hand trapped in car doors numerous times, and I’ve known many a person who has had the same, and NONE of them has had a broken bone. Sure it’s entirely possible if someone hauls off and tries to slam their door like the gates of Hell, but it’s also quite possible a light bounce of the door of their hand would do no more than bruise them, at worst.
My wife’s mother is missing two phalanges on one finger, from getting her hand smashed in a car door about 20 years ago. So I guess I’m biased from my sample set.