Say you’re a jogger and you’re jogging along a cliffside path. It’s a foolish thing to do because there’s no guardrail and there are lots of pedestrians.
You slam into someone and they go flying off the path, but they manage to grab hold of some part of your body as they go over the edge of the cliff.
No one helps. They just stand around looking at you both. They do witness, though, that you are being dragged over the edge by the other person. You can’t pull them back up, they refuse to let go.
You kill the person somehow, and they let go and fall.
Is this “self-defense”? Is it something else? Did you commit a crime? Did the people who stood there commit crimes?
If you weren’t actually being dragged but were just lying there for hours or days, again with no help from anyone, would killing that person be self-defense?
I’m most interested in the legal aspects, but if someone wants to throw in a moral or ethical aspect, that’s fine with me.
In the above instance, the person dragging you off the cliff had no malice, they were just trying not to fall and grabbed something. No Crime.
Because you mention you kill them before they fall, that’s not only a crime, its murder. If you shake them off in a panic for your own life and they die from the fall, no crime, just an accident. But to consciously and actively force them off may be a crime. It would probably take a jury to decide.
Depending on where you are you may be required by law to offer whatever assistance you can to anyone in need. But this is generally caveated to the point where you are not required to risk your life.
It’s an interesting puzzle. On the civil side, you may be liable in negligence for wrongful death for bumping the person off the edge of the cliff, although he could be found partly responsible for his own death if he was in a precarious position.
On the criminal side, your act of bumping him off the cliff could potentially amount to negligent homicide, but I think that’s rarely charged unless there are some indicia that you were acting recklessly in some way. I may be wrong.
As for killing the man to get him to let go of your leg, I imagine the inquiry would be the same as for any self-defense claim; were you genuinely threatened and was the force you used to repel that threat reasonable? Assuming you were genuinely being pulled off the cliff, the prosecutor would probably try to determine whether there were less drastic methods of getting him to let go. For instance, instead of reaching down to snap his neck, could you reasonably have just pried his fingers free? (Either way he’ll presumably fall off the cliff, but if you hadn’t broken his neck, conceivably he could have survived the fall). If there was no other way of saving yourself, then you probably have a decent self-defense claim.
You do not have a right to shoot a guy in self-defense here in South Carolina if you started it - in other words, if you find yourself in this predicament because you got in a fistfight that turned ugly. Additionally, if you shoot somebody in their defense, you’re putting yourself in their place, so if you don’t know if they started it or not…
Not really relevant to the OP, but possibly relevant to others who are wondering.
Since this is GQ, and any and all responses will really be opinions to this hypothetical scenario (cited or not), what remains is an honest to goodness cliffhanger …
Though this case seems different to me. You aren’t the aggressor, you didn’t deliberately start the confrontation, you just happen to make a dumb choice as to where to run. It would be analogous to running a stop sign and getting into a fender bender, that’s your fault, but then if the guy you hit immediately pulls a gun an says he’s going to shoot you, you can act in self defence and attack.
The difference in this case is the guy is not TRYING to kill you. He’s trying to save himself, but he’s doing so in a way that is going to kill you if can’t stop him.
Right. The question is whether that sort of negligence is adequate provocation or fits into another category that deprives one of the self-defense privilege.
But the test for self-defense isn’t what the other guy was trying to do, it’s whether the defendant “reasonably believed that use of deadly force was necessary to protect himself/herself from imminent danger of death or great bodily harm.” OCCA – Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals
So the question is whether your negligence deprives you of the self-defense privilege because your negligence put the guy in a position where he had to endanger your life to save his own.
So in the case I propose above (when you are at fault in a fender bender, but are otherwise completely reasonable non-aggressive, and the other guy pulls a gun and says he’s going to kill you), you’d have no right to defend yourself ? (even if in all other respects its a completely “no brainer” self defense case, e.g. no opportunity to retreat, etc.)
I know of no analogous Ohio cases, although the Law v. Commonwealth case (great name!) that Gfactor cites seems like a reasonable approach. This kind of fact-specific and offbeat case would almost surely go to a jury, which would, I suspect, probably acquit.
As to the onlookers, they very likely wouldn’t be charged. Only Vermont and Minnesota, IIRC, have statutes requiring bystanders to lend aid in an emergency if they may do so at no risk to themselves.
I’d say that in the traffic accident case, you could say “the difficulty” was not the fender bender but the later assault. In the OP’s hypo though, “the difficulty” is the jogger’s attempt to recover from your negligent act. I agree the language from the case I cited is subject to the interpretation you propose, though.
I don’t think that it’s quite fair to say that you would be negligent. Isn’t the standard for negligence ‘what a reasonable and prudent person would do?’ Running into somebody while jogging has so many variant causes that I’m sure that any good lawyer should get you off of the negligence part. Once you do that, I’d bet a trillion dollars your defense would be successful, since you were using deadly force to save your own life, which is, IIRC, universal as a defense. Could be wrong.
