In brief, a guy and his significant other come home at 3AM and immediately notice there’s an intruder inside. Guy grabs a knife and confronts intruder in his girlfriend’s mother’s bedroom (the three of them share a place). Intruder gets cut. Several times.
Some hours later, the guy (homeowner) is charged by police for using excessive force.
The rest is pretty much speculation - it sounds like the intruder claims he was stabbed despite not being a threat to anyone and that ‘(I) was just trying to get out of the place’.
What is not speculation is that the homeowner has been charged with “aggravated assault”. If convicted, he can be sentenced to a lengthy prison term (up to 14 years).
There is much wrong with this. For starters, if you encounter someone in your home in the middle of the night, I kinda doubt that you have enough time, and levelheadedness, to think about the pros and cons of your response. Basically, you are scared shitless and running on more adrenalin than you’ve ever experienced. You are not thinking; you are reacting in panic mode. Which leads to the second major problem with all this - would any judge/jury in his/her/its right mind convict this guy? What are the Toronto police trying to do by charging him? Toronto cops have lost a HUGE amount of respect lately (corruption, multiple instances of shooting unarmed mental patients, and especially their shameful actions at the G20 protests). If this guy gets convicted, the little good will they still enjoy among Torontonians will take another hit. (The reader comments to the linked article provide some sense of the way the public feels about this case. In a word, they are outraged.).
And, not that it would be allowed as evidence in the homeowner’s trial, the intruder had a criminal record which included robbery and assault - not the type of character anyone should try to “talk down” while waiting for the cops to appear. It also makes his credibility just a tad suspect.
Police Chief Wiggum: …And once a man is in your home, anything you do to him is nice and legal. Homer: [nefariously] Is that so? [calls out window] Oh, Flanders! Won’t you join me in my kitchen? Heh, heh, heh… Homer punching his palm in anticipation Wiggum: Er…, it doesn’t work if you invite him.
“I swear, I was just trying to leave! (with my bag of their property) The fact that I was upstairs by the door to his mother’s bedroom has nothing to do with it! He’s a big meanie head and I’m just trying to turn my life around and be a good person!”
You know, if I caught you upstairs outside my mother’s bedroom door in the middle of the night, you’re a fucking dead man.
Hopefully the prosecutor will think better of this and drop the charges. The police should never have arrested him.
A lot of these “self defense is illegal now!” stories end up having some twists that pretty sensibly take them out of the definition of self defense, so maybe everyone should wait and see.
I will say these stories make me want to move back to Texas.
The actual confrontation happened more than a year ago. It seems to me that the prosecutor has had plenty of time to decide whether or not to proceed with the case, or to offer the guy some sort of deal.
If the house had been otherwise empty, and the guy and his girlfriend (who were downstairs and near the door) could easily have gotten out and called police without confronting the intruder, i think you could make an argument that going after him with a knife would be excessive. If the only thing in danger is property, then getting out seems a smarter move than following the guy—who might not have been alone, and who might have been armed—up the stairs.
But if my mother, or some other member of my family, were up there, then all bets are off.
The girlfriend’s mother said she heard Johnson say “don’t hurt me”, which kind of gives credence to his claim that he was just trying to escape.
I’m not sure what to make of the story. The girlfriend says the Mahilal was trying to hold Johnson until the police arrived. If he was stabbing him in the course of detaining him, I don’t think a charge of aggravated assault is unwarranted.
Stabbing an unarmed, non-violent intruder would be illegal in the UK. Dunno about Canada, but they’re often closer to our law than America’s. Unfortunately, in this case.
So what do you think the homeowner should be allowed to do? A non violent burglar is in a house, do we get to kill him, even if he isn’t a threat to anyone? Or is there a gray area in there, an area where you are allowed to use reasonable force to protect your property, but you’re not allowed to kill a guy who has surrendered or is no threat?
Shit isn’t harsh language illegal in the UK? I thought if you called a guy you catch burgling your apartment a thief you’d be brought up on charges, hurting his self esteem and all.
The wikipedia article on self defense in the UK has a single word, don’t.
I’m not sure, but I do tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who didn’t break into someone’s house in the middle of the night.
I would assume someone who broke into my house was a life-threatening danger until he was no longer in my house. If he could get away, I’d let him, but I think these things tend to be pretty chaotic, and the guy who created the crappy situation shouldn’t get much slack when we later have to sift through the details. The guy protecting his family? My starting assumption, unless proven otherwise, is that it was perfectly reasonable to shoot or stab an intruder like this.
Y’know, I keep hearing shit like this and my question for you and the rest of people who say things like it is: Why don’t you just learn how to fucking cook? It’s not like you can’t get fine meat in Minnesota and you can have BBQ any way you like it whenever you like it and never even have to enter Iowa. Except to get some of their beef and pork, which are awesome.
If a guy with past convictions for assault breaks into your mom’s house and goes into her room at 3 am, you would need some very, very strong evidence to believe he isn’t a threat.
For all you know he is armed, and even if not he could assault you or your family at any moment as is his wont. He better drop down on his stomach with his head down and his arms to the side, not moving. Anything other than that and he is a deadly threat no matter how much he says “don’t hurt me” (a phrase which, come to think of it, doesn’t even mean he won’t hurt you). Actually, even lying down you’d have a gun to fear. I’m not sure how someone, having done such an obviously threatening thing to begin with, can prove they aren’t really a threat, other than escaping through a window.
On the other side of the coin, a local guy recently woke up to find an intruder in his home. The 911 call is entertaining. He tells the operator that he needs cops, because he has an intruder. She says she’ll send somebody. He says, well, they need to hurry because I shot him. “You SHOT him?” “Hell yes, I shot him six times. He was coming right at my wife and me! So you better send an ambulance, cuz he’s bleeding all over the floor.” Intruder: dead, with six 22 rounds in him. Charges: none.
I think that if it were me (at 3 AM with a stranger in my mother’s room) I’d get my baseball bat and crack him as hard as I possibly could over the head or back of the neck (catching the base of his skull if my aim is on).
Do you really think you wouldn’t panic? In the dark?
My only thought, the only one (if I were capable of thinking) would be to protect my family - “I have one chance; I can’t screw it up”.
