Since we are on a detour anyway, requiring a “duty to retreat” violates the federal Constitution and many many state constitutions, violates civil rights and the rights of the robbery victim, and puts the onus on the robbery victim to prove he/she could not retreat. If you are caught by surprise in your home, it is probable that you can not retreat, simply because you’ve been caught by surprise and there is no where to retreat to. To try and file charges because you “didn’t run away from your own home fast enough” is a travesty of justice. I have cited various state and federal rulings on this. “Duty to retreat” is an attempt to turn the victim into a criminal. NOTE!!! I am not talking about blasting away at someone who is not a threat or backshooting someone who is already leaving. I am not talking about going Batman or going Punisher on some evil-doer, I am talking about the simple right to protection against imminent serious threat.
People v Riddle (Michigan law)
Where the defendant claims he was threatened by another man in his garage, did he have a duty to retreat before defending himself? Michigan law has long held that a person in his or her own home does not have to retreat from an attacker.
The Sunshine State’s so-called “stand-your-ground” law is not a novel concept, although it is hardly universal in the “land of the free and home of the brave.” In Washington where the state constitution explicitly guarantees, “The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired” the state Supreme Court has twice affirmed in recent years that there is “no duty to retreat.”
The principle in both cases, known as State v. Studd (1999) and State v. Reynaldo Redmond (2003), is unambiguous. “The law is well settled,” said the court in the Redmond ruling, “that there is no duty to retreat when a person is assaulted in a place where he or she has a right to be.”
Self-defense is not “taking the law into your own hands.” Rather, it is acting within the law in the face of imminent and unavoidable danger of grave bodily harm or death.
Beard v. United States (1894)
Beard’s manslaughter conviction charge was overturned by the Supreme Court because the judge in the lower court had instructed the jury that Beard had a duty to retreat before using deadly force. Said the Court: Beard was entitled to <<stand his ground and meet any attack made upon him with a deadly weapon, in such way and with such force>> needed to protect himself from harm.
D. Beard v. United States: There is No Duty to Retreat Before Using Deadly Force
In Beard v. United States, [FN129] the Supreme Court took up an issue which would reach its culmination in a 1921 case [FN130] - victims of a criminal attack have no duty to retreat before using lawful deadly force.
A six-year study of Supreme Court cases has found scores of “forgotten decisions” affecting the “highly contested” constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Titled “Supreme Court Gun Cases,” the study examines 92 cases - 44 of them unedited -
“Three dozen of the cases quote or mention the Second Amendment directly,” says a statement by Bloomfield Press, publisher of the study.
The authors also show how the Supreme Court has recognized and supported armed self defense “with personally owned firearms” and that “an ancient ‘duty to retreat’” from a threat “is not obligatory.”