If you were forced to defend yourself with reasonable grounds, the law protects you – your actions may be deemed necessary to protect yourself and others, and your life. This is ‘reasonable belief’, and sits at the crux of the self-defence defence, with there being two elements to this defence: i) the belief that you were in danger, and ii) this belief being reasonable.
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A jury will look at the situation as a whole, not just at the specific event, and the prosecution must disprove one or both of these two elements. Because of this, the defence of self defence is sometimes complicated during a trial.
The prosecution must disprove the defence of self defence beyond reasonable doubt, and if they cannot do that, you may be entitled to an acquittal.
Non-homicide self defence
The question being asked is reasonably straightforward: did the person accused of a crime believe on reasonable grounds that their act of self-defence was necessary?
The answer has two parts to it. The person must have believed at the time that their actions were necessary (which is subjective – it doesn’t matter if the person was ‘right’ to believe what they did). This belief must be based on reasonable grounds (which is objective). The jury will determine whether there were reasonable grounds for this belief, and that they believed their actions to be necessary.
The jury will take a few aspects of the circumstances into consideration, such as what happened, the facts according to the accused, relationships between people involved, prior behaviour, delusions, beliefs held, excitement/distress/other emotional states that could have existed at the time.
If the alleged victim initiated the aggression, then they cannot claim they were acting in self-defence against a counter attack, unless for example in a fight, that they stopped fighting when the other person attacked them.
Murder or manslaughter due to self defence
You are not to be deemed guilty of murder if you defend yourself against death or serious injury, and the other person dies as a result. This also applies to manslaughter charges when the deprivation of your liberty or the liberty of another person is at stake.
The self-defence defence can also be used in cases of assault.
When force against police is used
If you act in self defence against a ‘lawful attack’ by police or other law enforcement agents, however this can only be used in exceptional circumstances since if you are in a situation where police have to apprehend you, it could be reasonably expected that they would use force.
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