Self defense has been enshrined in our laws, as confirmed by the Supreme Court multiple times. There’s even a decision affirming that you can claim self defense when killing a cop, if the officer didn’t identify himself before shooting at you:
My question is about when you know the person threatening your life is an officer of the law. Either an Eric Garner type case, only without a posse of officers protecting the guy who killed him, or possibly a protester (or someone walking in an area where protests are occurring and there is a large police presence) being threatened by an officer. Specifically, I’m thinking of pictures I’ve seen from Ferguson where officers pointed weapons at peaceful protestors. Example. Example. Example.
A gun in your face is a clear threat on your life. I was always taught that you don’t point a gun at something you don’t want to immediately kill. You keep it held at the ready (in your hands but muzzle pointed down) if you just want to alert people that you are armed and capable of using it. Obviously, shooting at the cop armies in the linked pictures would be a death sentence. But suppose a similar thing happened outside of a protest, in a one-on-one scenario? If a cop points a gun at me am I justified in using deadly force to protect myself?
I’m interested in both the GQ legal answer (I’ve googled, but I’m not a legal scholar, so input would be appreciated), but also the moral question (hence Great Debates): Should I be allowed to defend my life against a police officer who is threatening it in the line of duty, whether or not he is justified in arresting me? Has anything changed (morally or legally) due to the huge number of unjustified police violence towards suspects in the past year? Is it more reasonable now to believe your life is in imminent danger when in the presence of police?
Note this is not about resisting arrest or felons fleeing the scene of a crime. This is about a citizen who, having committed a crime or not, has their life threatened by an officer of the law in a situation where the officer is not acting in self defense.
I believe you will find a huge gulf of opinion between those two points. If you have committed a crime to the extent that an officer is prepared to shoot you if you resist, you have relinquished the right to defend yourself. If you have NOT committed any crime, that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Sidenote: I’ve always heard the first rule is you don’t point a gun at something you’re not willing to destroy, not that you’re actively planning on shooting. It’s about being ready to shoot. If your weapon is pointing at the ground, you’re not ready to shoot anybody.
I think you need to narrow the question a little. Is the officer trying to arrest you, or trying to injure or kill you? IMHO, that’s pretty much the dividing line.
Yes. In the right circumstances, a person is privileged to use force to defend himself from someone known to be a police officer, even when the police officer is believed to be on duty. See, e.g., State v. Mulvihill, 57 N.J. 151 (1970) (collecting cases).
But, it’s a very dangerous proposition in reality, for numerous reasons. For one, a mere unlawful arrest does not entitle you to use self-defense. At least in most jurisdictions, you must cooperate with an unlawful arrest. For another, no one is going to believe you unless there’s video or witnesses. But at least in theory, you are entitled to defend yourself against an officer who uses unlawful force against you.
(It doesn’t really matter whether you’ve committed a crime or not, unless the crime was using force against the officer in question. That will factor into whether the officer is using appropriate force against you, of course, but I’m assuming that we’re stipulating here that the self-defense is against an officer using unlawful force.)
One can imagine many scenarios where someone could, IMHO, legitimately claim self-defense in killing a police officer. Let’s say a police officer, for no apparent reason, tackles someone on the street and begins beating that person while making no attempt at all to handcuff them, and then pulls his pistol to administer the coup de grace. In cases like this where a police officer simply can’t even pretend to be acting under the color of law, I say the victim has the right to protect himself.
I would say as a general rule, if you know someone is a police officer, and they don’t appear to be unhinged, your life is almost certainly protected by surrendering as opposed to shooting. Simply because a cop is pointing a gun at you, in the vast majority of circumstances, you are almost assured of surviving by complying with his orders. That, to me, means that killing a police officer in self-defense is not justified, except in really extremely rare events.
If you’re saying that an innocent person has a greater right to self-defense, I disagree. The place to consider guilt or innocence is a courtroom, not while lining up crosshairs with fractions of seconds to decide.
I would modify this only by pointing out that pointing a gun at someone is considered a use of force, legally speaking. It is excessive force to point a gun at someone for no reason.
It is not, I think deadly force in and of itself. So one would not be privileged to shoot that officer, but you might be privileged to disarm that officer. And if, given some other facts, you had an objective basis for believing that he planned to pull the trigger (and that such force was not lawful), then you could use deadly force. I’m not sure it has to get to the level of the cop randomly tackling you, beating you, and then getting his gun out to clearly kill you. But it would take more than just having a gun pointed at you by a cop at a protest.
And, again, as a practical matter, even the perfectly justified use of self-defense is probably gonna land you in the slammer half the time when used against a cop.
Agreed Ravenman. Meant my post more as expansion than disagreement.
So in Eric Garner’s case, I think if you stipulate that the chokehold constituted excessive force, then he might have been privileged to, say, bite the choking officers arm if he could get to it.
In the case of the officer pointing his gun at protestors, and again stipulating that the officer had no valid reason to be pointing his gun at anyone (which AFAIK is true), I think there would be a case to be made for the protestor being privileged to disarm that officer (though as a practical matter that would likely get the protestor killed, of course), or do something like throw a shoe at him to distract him while he runs away–something proportional to the unlawful force that was being used against the protestor.
And, of course, there may be a duty to retreat in MO. Not sure. If so, then the protestor’s obligation may have been to try to leave. Though I’m not sure how that duty plays out when a gun is pointed at you.
You are only allowed to defend yourself or another person from an unlawful act. And being arrested is not an unlawful act, even if force is involved.
Let’s say that the police find Richard Matt and David Sweat’s hideout. They burst in and they’re wrestling Sweat to the ground. Matt steps out of the bathroom and sees people have broken into his residence and are assaulting his colleague with intent to abduct him. Normally, this would be an unlawful act and Matt could defend himself and Sweat. But that’s not the case here. The same acts are now lawful because it’s police officers performing an arrest and it’s illegal to resist them.
Now I’m not an idiot. I’m fully aware that there are police officers who go beyond the legal limits of their job. We’ve seen too many unfortunate examples of that recently. But giving individuals the right to resist arrest is not the solution. The solution should be society stepping in and enforcing the law against the police just as the police enforce the law against individuals.
That’s all correct. But I think the OP is asking about unlawful use of force by the police. The fact that the unlawful force is used to arrest someone (whether the arrest is lawful or not) does not matter.
Either. Is it justified to threaten someone’s life while trying to arrest them? Assume, for the sake of this thread, that whether or not the suspect has committed a crime, we’re not discussing dangerous felons or someone the officer has a reasonable cause to believe will harm others. I’m talking about a threatening a suspect’s life while arresting them for shoplifting or smoking pot.
And Richard Parker, pointing a deadly firearm in someone’s face is not a threat to their life? Does that mean I can point a weapon in a cop’s face and he would only be justified in disarming me, and shooting me would not be justified? Or is there a double standard here? How about this: Is it legal for an officer to point a weapon at a suspect he would not be justified in shooting (for self defense, or to defend others, etc)?
It is a threat to their life. But the degree of that threat depends on additional facts. I do not believe–cop or not–that simply pointing a gun at a person absent additional context is a sufficient basis for the use of deadly force in response. In many cases, such an action would be a sufficient threat of deadly force. But we can imagine many situations in which it would not be. Since police regularly point their guns at people for good reason, and all police are armed for good reason, some of the background factors that might justify the use of force against some random who points a gun are absent when it’s a police officer.
Similarly, people don’t generally point guns at police officers unless they intend to shoot them. So a police officer, absent other context, is generally justified in using deadly force in response. But imagine that a police officer and I are sitting in my garage. I’m cleaning my shotgun and momentarily point it at him. Can he shoot me? Of course not. Could he grab my arm and force the gun away from his face? Yep–even though that would otherwise be a battery.
It’s not a double standard. It’s the same standard. There are just different relevant facts.
Sometimes yes and sometimes no. The officer doesn’t have to be justified to use deadly force in order to point the gun. But he does need a sufficient justification for the use of force inherent in merely pointing the gun. If a police officer arrests you at gunpoint because he sees you littering, with no other justification, that would be illegal.
But what if the cops have bad information, and instead of going to 301 Oak St where Richard Matt and David Sweat are hiding, they go to 301 Elm St? The officers and in plain clothes and break in to where two random guys Joe Smith and Mike Johnson are living. Can Joe and Mike defend themselves from what seems to be random guys breaking into their house and seemingly trying to attack them? Even if the police are yelling that they are cops, it might be hard to absorb that if you’re woken up in the middle of the night by people coming into your house.
I’ve mentioned the movie Peace Officer before, and it deals with some things like this.
To keep closer to the context of the OP, we’d need the police to not identify themselves as police. As discussed upthread, if they yell “Police!”, Mike & Joe aren’t entitled to resist arrest. If it’s just a bunch of guys kicking their door in at 2 am and waving guns around, that’s a different story.
The bottom line is there is a double standard. A police officer has powers that a civilian does not. So actions that would be illegal for a civilian to do can be legal for a police officer to do.
If a person walks up to you, points a gun at you, and tells you to lie face down on the ground, you would be reasonably able to assume his intent is illegal and would be legally allowed to defend yourself against him.
If a police officer walks up to you, points a gun at you, and tells you to lie face down on the ground, you’re supposed to assume he has the legal authority to do this and you are not legally allowed to resist him.
