If you hit a woman in self defence, be prepared for an unsympathetic jury, including me if I was ever to sit on one.
Ronda Rousey (like professional athletes in general is an unrepresentative exception, and in any case there are good reasons why she doesn’t compete against men. I really wish people would get a better sense of the difference between individuals and statistical norms.
This is a gender-based version of the Stand Your Ground; the idea being that if an assailant attacks you, you have a duty to acquiesce or flee until you cannot acquiesce or flee any longer. It’s appealing to some folks until they look at it from the victim’s perspective.
I wonder: if this had been a man who’d thrown the first punch, and a woman who’d defended herself with one punch, would she have gotten a medal by now?
Edit: Sorry, I meant, this is akin to the opposite of Stand Your Ground. Stand Your Ground means you don’t have to flee.
Thanks for offering to explain, I think, but that article gave me a headache. I guess I must be an old-school feminist. To return to the OP’s question, I think women who hit can expect to get hit. As can men.
You have looked at the amount of time this occurred in, correct?
In your scenario this fellow is supposed to:
I think that is a lot to expect from someone just punched in the face.
I’d probably push her away and melt into the crowd but if I didn’t, I wouldn’t worry too much about one stupid asshole who didn’t have the intellect to correctly apply the law. Speaking in grneral of course. There isn’t enough in the specific video to make a judgment either way.
Hear, hear. Before retaliating, he should have formed a committee, posted a public notice, investigated all options, had a committee meeting, and followed the majority decision. Only then would a return punch be justified, and with the proper force.
Let’s not be hasty. A simple majority might still result in jeopardy. A 2/3 majority would be a better option. I think a sub-committee would have to be formed to investigate the matter properly on what percentage vote would be most appropriate to minimize the risk to all concerned.
Seems like a very sexist argument to me. Self defense shouldn’t be restricted based on the gender of assailant. Would you let a woman with a hammer or a bat swing on you? Would you understand an “unsympathetic jury” that put you in jail for defending yourself? If he legally defended himself what crime will he be charged with?
Although, if any state were to define “drunken bitch” as a legal term of art, my money would be on Jersey.
I look with pleasure on being called ‘stupid asshole’ by the folks who think it’s cool to hit women.
I didn’t call you anything if that’s what you’re implying. Get over yourself. And not a single person here thinks it’s cool to hit women, or men for that matter.
No one thinks it’s cool to hit women.
The difference is that the rest of us don’t think it’s cool to tell them victim of an act of violence that he should just stand there and take it, either.
I disagree. The disparity in size or strength has a lot to do with how the situation is viewed. Rather than a woman, consider if the person who attacked first was a small child? Sure they could be using 100% of their ability with actual intent to do harm, but a 7 year old using only fists is going to have a hard time presenting an actual threat to a fully grown capable adult. A reasonable response should consider disparity in size or strength.
I think it’s a question of clearing the hurdle, not how far you’ve cleared it, though.
As for the video - it’s not clear the events that lead up to it, but that dude handed out a nap like it was on sale pretty damn quick. After initially hitting him, she didn’t appear to want to continue to engage and just stood there seeming to not know what to do next. Based solely on the short video, I’d say in the heat of the moment maybe not criminal. Maybe.
Not only is it not cool for men to punch women, it’s also not cool for men to punch men. Also among the things that are not cool is women punching men, and women punching women.
He could very easily have killed the person he punched. He only missed killing her by luck. And apparently she’s still in a coma in the hospital and could very well die, or be permanently disabled for the rest of her life.
Forget whether his actions met some legal standard for self defense. Our legal system doesn’t have the ability to hand out perfect justice. He punched another person and put them in the hospital with life threatening injuries. Again, a legal standard is only partially relevant here. I mean, they haven’t identified the man, to charge him with a crime they’d have to prove in court that he was the person in the video who threw the punch. Our standard for criminal liability is justifiably high. Plenty of people have done plenty of horrible things and weren’t convicted of any crime for those horrible acts. Will he get away with it? Maybe. That’s irrelevant.
All this ignores the fact that he punched someone hard enough to nearly kill them. Maybe he’ll never see the inside of a jail cell for what he did. But he still nearly killed a person with his bare hands. You can have the legal right to do something you shouldn’t do. He responded to a punch with lethal force. Just because he might not be convicted for it under our legal system doesn’t make what he did right. Again, he nearly killed her, and depending on if she recovers he may end up having killed her.
That’s fucked up. He beat her into a coma. The fact that she possibly swung first doesn’t change that fact. A normal person who looked at themselves in the mirror the day after this incident wouldn’t decide that if they manage to avoid criminal charges for this incident that the aforementioned beating was perfectly reasonable. “I was never convicted of a crime for my actions” isn’t enough to earn you decent human being status.
He beat her into a coma? No. The sidewalk and fall probably did that. However it doesn’t sound as dramatic.
Should he have hit her that hard? Probably not. Should she have hit him to begin with? Probably not.
For the record, she didn’t *possibly *strike first; she indisputably did.
And the reverse could well have been true. That someone could die because of their actions is regrettable as it was easily avoidable. If you assault someone you can’t expect them to be nice to you in return or restrain themselves if things don’t work out like you hoped for (as in them being on the ground rather than you). Some people are assuming he wasn’t hit any harder than if a small child hit him yet she was as tall as he was. And we don’t know if the victim* just wandered off and died in a ditch somewhere, not that it particularly matters even if he wasn’t hurt. What we do know is that she was trying to hurt him. You don’t punch someone unless you intend to do harm. Was she pulling her punches with him?
But, wow, the amount of Monday morning quarterbacking here is tremendous. I’d do this or I’d do that forgetting that it all happened in about a seconds worth of time.
*victim being the one who was initially assaulted as seen in the video.
We can’t tell from the video why she hit him. There may have been a perfectly good reason.