Hmmm. The article indicates a broken window, and further ‘medical and forensic evidence’. If the broken window was the point of access, it might indicate that a lot of the cuts sustained by the alleged intruder could be traced to the broken glass. That fact would change the entire scenario. It then becomes ‘much ado about nothing’.
Canada is mostly good at sorting out the facts. After an initial arrest the gears of justice grind away and the facts lead to dismissals. Every time this happens though, people get all heated up about the initial arrest.
Good. Self defense is not a crime nor should it be. And yes I am aware that many people don’t understand what self defense means on a legal level, they can fuck off.
Oh no they understand, people were just getting wro fully charged for doing so before.
I’d be really interested to see an actual example of someone who was wrongfully charged in a situation that was clearly self-defence, as I’ve never yet seen one. And by that I do mean a) the charges stuck, and b) the situation was still clearly self-defence once all the facts were known.
I kept asking for that when this case originally hit the media. Nobody could provide an example. I can also think of people I know that also inflicted life threatening injuries on an intruder and were never charged. Police act on the information available to them at the time, then collect evidence that either confirms or contradict their suspicions. People seem to think our legal system is just for show and that only guilty people are charged with a crime.
There is a very big difference between ‘defending yourself’ and ‘deciding to take the law into your own hand and dishing out your own brand of justice and punishment’.
Doing the first is your right, doing the second is vigilante justice and almost always turns the country into ‘rule by organized crime’. Mexico is a good example of what happens when the ‘right to defend’ leads to ‘the right to impose your will regardless of the law’.
Can you elaborate on how that is the case in Mexico?
The Mexican cartel that thought they had a right to defend themselves by using a rocket against a police helicopter.
Unhinged to compare self-defence causing bodily harm to a literal terrorist organization.
Are you saying that if someone breaks into your home with apparent intent to cause harm that you can’t defend your person with whatever means necessary? I think that if someone breaks in brandishing a weapon that it should be open season.
This isn’t a case of a homeowner beating up a drunk that accidentally broke into a house thinking it was their own and fell asleep on the couch."Open season’ has a tendency to develop into open warfare against anyone you do not like. Unrestricted ‘self defense’ is wide open to abuse, like it is in America.
Alright, so if someone breaks in to your home with a crossbow, what is the limit on your self defense?
This case makes it clear. Once the authorities determine through an investigation all of the facts, and what actually happened, and collect all the facts, they will determine if the level of self-defense was appropriate.
I’m not sure I can agree. Why did they not simply wait to get the facts before filing charges?
This guy has had to deal with the fallout of being charged/arraigned/etc. and probably had to retain a barrister. The news said that they dropped the charges due to a conviction being practically impossible. Reading the details, it sounds like there was a strong defense for the resident to claim that most of the cuts were from the home invader cutting himself up on the window he broke in through…
So the charges were not dropped because it’s ok to defend yourself, the charges were dropped because they can’t prove that this guy sliced up the home invader.This case doesn’t do anything to show where the line is.
And yet the public gets in an outrage when known criminals get put back on the street and then re-offend, some in heinous crimes. Given his background and the number of convictions, I am sure he has his solicitor on speed dial. He was previously charged with attacking people with a baseball bat, and you want the police to believe him? Just ignore the blood, and let him go? Exactly how were the police to believe that the ‘victim’ was legitimately an intruder, and not someone the knife-wielder actually invited into his home, they got into an argument, and this guy took a knife to him? Police are not mind readers, and they are used to people lying to them. No way are they going to believe either side. Charge them, get them off the street, and let the system run its course.
I can’t imagine living in a place where defending yourself in your own home from an intruder with a crossbow is up for debate.
Read the article bud.
Crown attorney Sarah Repka told the court on Thursday that prosecutors have since been able to review further evidence, including medical records and the results of forensic testing, that were not available to police when they first laid charges.
At the time that the charges were brought, the evidence suggested he may have broken the law. New evidence made it sufficiently clear that he hadn’t. That’s a really big part of how prosecutions work.
We have a very simple principle here; proportionate response. Someone tries to beat the crap out of you, you got every right to beat the crap out of him. Someone pulls a knife on you, you can pull a knife on him. Someone attacks you with enough physical force and threat that you’re in fear of your life, you can do what it takes to protect yourself. Depending on the circumstances, that can even result in your attacker’s death, as long as you weren’t going out of your way to seek that outcome when there were very clearly other options available. And it’s very, very rare that cases like this even get prosecuted, because the law and the courts are very generous to the defendant.
You can absolutely defend yourself in Canada. We just don’t think it’s reasonable to gun down a teenager for the crime of ringing your doorbell. And for some reason Americans always seem to take issue with that.
But this defense costs money. Likely thousands. That shouldn’t be the case
The Crown dropped the case of their own accord after reviewing the additional evidence. He didn’t have to defend himself in court.
Obviously that doesn’t mean that no legal costs were incurred. We do have public defenders in Canada, so it’s likely those costs were born by the state. If he did incur any out of pocket expenses I would certainly like to see him compensated for those. Unfortunately I’m not aware of what the specific law is on that matter.
But again, as I pointed out elsewhere, this is a very, very rare case. Normally cases for self-defence are never even brought to begin with. The Crown either fucked up very badly here, or they sincerely believed that they had a very strong case that this was not legitimate.
That can happen in any justice system. Unless you simply declare that all murder is legal, there is absolutely no version of a self-defence exemption that will not sometimes be wrongly prosecuted. The question here is not whether or not the prosecuters were right to bring the case, it’s whether or not Canada’s legal self-defence standard makes sense. And given a choice between what we have, which works extremely well, and very rarely produces outlier results like this (remember, you never hear about the self-defence incidents that don’t get prosecuted) and a system where cleaners get shot for knocking at the wrong house, I think the choice is clear.
There’s a few ways I would like to take this but also I think overall I agree with you.
I don’t go into it to much but where I’m slowly adapting my views are on a few issues.
One is that I think one is that no cost should be incurred by anyone who defended themselves. I do totally get the argument that everybody deserves justice including criminals. But the stories I’ve come across tend to highlight how self defense laws are lacking in Canada and there is a lot of room between allowing all killings and some kind of castle doctrine.
The second issue for me is as I’ve aged, I can’t tell you what the hell police do. The amount of times myself or someone i know has called them, only for them to say “not much we can do, just file a report online” is too many. Yet majority of my municipal taxes go to them. So for me I am coming around to the idea that we need to pull back some of the responsibility society has given to police and reclaim it ourselves. They’re not keeping us safe. They are now refusing to act when the government tells them to. Because of this I think society does need to go back to the idea that we can’t rely on the justice system.
The amount of times myself or someone i know has called them, only for them to say “not much we can do, just file a report online”
Exactly how high do you want your taxes to go? Complete coverage for all o the calls would be prohibitively expensive, and I suspect you would be one of the first people to protest your high taxes.
If they cannot provide this basic service then we as the public need to the law in our own hands. The entier reason we do not is we entrust that to police. But they no longer serve. They are there to increase their budget and militarize themselves to protect only certain people.
So a privatized police force, on contract to only the wealthy who can afford them, accountable only to their employers?
