If I am charged with murder and I say I was acting in self-defense, what are my obligations in defending myself? Do I have the burden to prove that things went down the way I say they did? For the record, I live in Austin, Texas.
Thanks,
Quartz
November 1, 2007, 1:36pm
3
Interesting: why isn’t it up to the prosecutor to show that it was not self-defence?
at common law the burden of proving. . . “all . . . circumstances of justification, excuse or alleviation” - rested on the defendant. 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries *201; M. Foster, Crown Law 255 (1762); Mullaney v. Wilbur, supra, at 693-694. 7 This was the rule when the Fifth Amendment was adopted, and it was the American rule when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. Commonwealth v. York, 50 Mass. 93 (1845).
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=volpage&court=us&vol=432&page=202#202
Indeed, well into this century, a number of States followed the common-law rule and required a defendant to shoulder the burden of proving that he acted in self-defense. Fletcher, Two Kinds of Legal Rules: A Comparative Study of Burden-of-Persuasion Practices in Criminal Cases, 77 Yale [480 U.S. 228, 236] L. J. 880, 882, and n. 10 (1968). We are aware that all but two of the States, Ohio and South Carolina, have abandoned the common-law rule and require the prosecution to prove the absence of self-defense when it is properly raised by the defendant. But the question remains whether those States are in violation of the Constitution; and, as we observed in Patterson, that question is not answered by cataloging the practices of other States. We are no more convinced that the Ohio practice of requiring self-defense to be proved by the defendant is unconstitutional than we are that the Constitution requires the prosecution to prove the sanity of a defendant who pleads not guilty by reason of insanity.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=480&invol=228 (emphasis added.)
So there’s no constitutional obstacle to state’s requiring a defendant to prove self-defense, but most states require the prosecution to disprove it.