Burglar takes his victim to court

The Telegraph ^ | : 17/08/2002 | David Sapsted

[paul51]

It's outrageous that this has ended up in court.

Agreed. Maybe he should have dragged him back into the house and shot him.

[bernie_g]

I have a theory about gun control, based on statements made to me by Americans whose opinions I respect.

I was talking about the practical applications of martial arts for realistic self-defence in typical UK situations. I saw them looking at me funny. I asked why. They said in effect:

'If anyone stuck a glass in someone else's neck or bit their nose off in a bar-fight in the US, someone else would just pull out a gun and dust them.'

What they said was roughly. Bar fights are what I'd call 'match fights' with limits imposed by convention in the US.

Now I don't know how true this is exactly, but if it *is* true, and I can imagine that it would be it does say something about the disadvantages of gun control. I say this because in random bars in any town or city in the UK, you can get attacked in these ways by looking funny at one of the psychopathic drunks native to those environments. One *very* quickly learns to realise when one has walked into such a place and hopefully gets the hell out of there fast.

The theory then, is that the soccer thug types would observe politer conventions in their fighting and cause less maiming/death if firearms were legally available for self-defence here.

I'd be interested to know what folks here think.

[BlazingArizona]

Self-defense is illegal in Britain, but it's possible that this homeowner may get off because he didn't use a weapon. Using any sort of weapon, even an incidental object, to thwart criminal action will earn you a longer sentence than the perp. Shoot a burglar in Airstrip One, and they put you away for life.

[another cricket]

The theory then, is that the soccer thug types would observe politer conventions in their fighting and cause less maiming/death if firearms were legally available for self-defence here.

Oh, probably. The best thing about CCW is that they never know who is carrying. Or where they are carrying. We had a bit of a problem with some hoodlums at my church before Sunday service about two weeks ago. It was only a bit of a problem because before they could do anything four people had pushed their jackets back to show their holsters and were ready to draw. Our uninvited guests decided that they had pressing business elsewhere.

Could have been ugly if our very wise pastor had not made the decision he did to let the CCW members of the church remain armed. This is the first time we have had this kind of problem but we all knew it was going to come at some point.

The church is right on the edge of a very bad part of town. We are needed there so we aren't moving. But we aren't siting ducks either. And now the neighborhood knows it. We have been informed that we will have no further problems but we still carry. Just in case.

a.cricket

[bernie_g]

I'm afraid this isn't quite true, although I can see how you might have got that idea. Legally the way it works is that you have to use 'reasonable force' the arguments are almost always over what was reasonable.

The farmer guy talked his way into jail by shooting his mouth, not his gun. He in effect established prior intent to kill someone with his shotgun.

The interesting part is that it's actually the person defending himself that gets to define what's reasonable, but they have to be able to justify it to a jury or magistrate, with the prosecution making the best case they can to convict.

Usually what they do is either try to blow the self defence argument away entirely, as they did with Tony Martin using his own words. The point is never to say *anything* inconsistent with a reasonable claim to believing you were in danger. I.E. don't say 'I'm a 10th dan in Origami and he didn't stand a chance.' or 'I taught him a lesson' etc.

If they can't do that, then they have to show that the force used was unreasonable or that you had an obvious alternative to using force.

The latter is either true or not, they can't prove you should have tried reasoning with him because it's *your* perception of the danger that decides under UK law.

Unreasonable force is usually in the eye of the beholder but there is a rough defcon scale I reckon:

1) A friend is drunk or stressed and goes nuts, ideal response is to wrestle him down.

2) Drunk picks a fight, you can't avoid so pre-empt with nice familiar 'british' boxer punches.

3) Mugging, multiple attackers, any sort of weapon, big disparity in size, male on female etc. You can pretty much get away with anything in theory as long as you follow the rules above.

Exceptions are if you used, obviously non-improvised weapons like concealed knives or you're obviously some kind of huge martial arts monster and you accidentally killed a weedy junkie or a dumb kid who watched too many Arnie movies.

Generally the closer you got to deliberate lethal force, ie out and out Sykes-Fairbairn WW2 stuff, the equivalent of the 'old' USMC close combat training, or really nasty improvised weapons like beer glasses or dropping people off stairwells, the closer you are to having the prosecution paint you as a psycho and nail you even if it was actually self-defence.

You can even get away with using an *improvised* weapon to defend your home as long as you stick to the rules above.

Improvised here meaning, you can show it would have been around even anyhow and wasn't intentionally kept for maiming or killing burglars. This can cover many useful items :)

[stimulate]

"I'll stick with her majesty,thanks".

You can have her,thanks.

[bernie_g]

Let me ask you a serious question. Do you think that people from nations other than the USA have any right to be patriotic?

[jwtexian]

May I barge in and reply to your #47?

In my opinion only those countries that hark to a history of English Common Law and/or those individuals striving to preserve same have any reason to be "patriotic" in any honorable and righteous sense.

Regards.

[Pearls Before Swine]

"I ran behind them for about half a mile, over the top of the cliffs, and caught one of them. He couldn't run any more and he just collapsed into a ball because he thought I was going to hit him."

He should have pushed that ball over the edge of the cliff with his toe.

[bernie_g]

Well, I dunno. Even though I found the code Napoleon a bit disturbing, I'd have more respect for a Frenchman who stood up for his country than one who would stand idle and see it insulted.

I admire the heritage of English Common Law also, and see the founding of the US as it's finest flowering in some ways (although I can see how that might be controversial here)

I don't think that makes people of other nations inferior though.

Look at it this way, for many years, my country was subjected to a sustained terror campaign by a limited number of Irishmen, supported by a limited number of Americans and Colonel Quaddafi.

Should I therefore hate all Irish, American and Libyan people? No I don't think so, nor should I regard them as my inferiors. My quarrel was only ever with the actual group of guys doing the terrorism and supporting it.

[jwtexian]

I don't hold any "people" to be inferior. Most nations are inferior to those that are historically English though. Hey, I'm a Chauvinist (yea, I know he was French...).

Regards.

[Righty1]

The entire west has lost its' self preservation instincts.

[BlazingArizona]

2) Drunk picks a fight, you can't avoid so pre-empt with nice familiar 'british' boxer punches. 3) Mugging, multiple attackers, any sort of weapon, big disparity in size, male on female etc. You can pretty much get away with anything in theory as long as you follow the rules above.

In America, a person defending himself against criminal action has a general right to use force to a similar level to that exerted against him. Our jurisdictions vary most in what a defender may do if armed with a gun. In Arizona, for example, Tony Martin would have been given the key to the city as a hero; behind the Iron Curtain in New York, he would have been fined but would have gotten a laudatory article in the New York Post and a John Stossel segment on ABC 20/20. In judging reasonable force, broad allowance is made for the fact that a defender who is not a law-enforcement professional can't be held to strict police-type standards in evaluating reasonable force.

In Britain, though the legal language does not seem to be very different, the de facto standard seems to be far stricter. In your case (2), what happens if you are attacked by a drunk, and, not knowing Marquis of Queensberry boxing rules, you hit back with a cricket bat? Is this automatically adjudged excessive force, or is it OK if you can prove you were on your way to a cricket game?

here is a famous case involving local people where your rule in case (3) certainly did not apply. Some years ago, a Phoenix-area doctor and his wife vacationed in London. One one occasion when the wife was out shopping my herself, she was mugged by two men in the Underground. She drove her attackers off by slashing at their eyes with her nail file. The muggers were arrested, but so was the victim. She was able to return home after posting bail equivalent to US $400,000, and then had to make several trips back for various stages of her trial. The case dragged on for so long that I never knew exactly how the case came out. So far as I recall she avoided any prison time, but was out a larege anount of money for legal costs and airfare. The prosecution's case appeared to be that trying to put muggers' eyes out, even in a two-against-one, men-against-woman case, was somehow unsporting.

[bernie_g]

In case 2) I guess I was mixing two thing up, what you can legally do, and what I'd advise someone to "learn" for that situation.

I'd usually suggest that someone interested in self-defence learn some kind of boxing or kick-boxing first because it works very well in the 'average' situation you run into here in the UK, gets straight knockouts in the likely ranges if you practice hard enough, is unlikely to get you in too much legal hassle and you can learn enough in a year or so to be pretty useful. But that's an ideal.

You can certainly go a lot further in case 2) but you might not want to. Pretty much anything that'd be OK in a martial sport, something pretty hardcore but with some kind of rules, no eye-gouges etc, should be OK against one reasonably well-matched opponent.

Improvised weapons would probably depend, a cricket bat probably, sharps maybe or maybe not depending on the circumstance. Basically if it's going to look like a square fight to the jury, fighting 'honourably' is wise. But if you're at any kind of significant disadvantage, you should be able to get away with 'dirty' techniques or improvised weapons.

Concealed carry of *anything* that hasn't got a totally plausible explanation is pretty dodgy though.

Let me give you a couple of cases.

1) Alfie Lewis, world middleweight kickboxing champ, out for a drink with his white girlfriend in Liverpool one night, two guys try to pick a fight with racist and ungentlemanly remarks. Alfie tries to avoid confrontation, witnesses see the thugs insist. Alfie pre-emptively attacks, knocks both down but doesn't follow to the ground with axe-kicks or stomps etc. One unfortunately dies, I think he banged his head on the pavement, Alfie is charged, but exonerated.

2) The police have a suspect in the Brinks Mat bullion robbery, police surveillance guys lurking in his garden trying to wire his house. He's a known knife-freak gangster. He sneaks up on them, stabs one something like 22 times. Gets away with it.

Told the court: "I'm a jewellery merchant, I have valuables, I saw sinister figures and went to confront them and in fear of my life brought along a knife that I'd been using for some innocent purpose only a moment before."

This guy eventually went to jail for life after stabbing a motorist in a road rage incident. Tried to claim self-defence again but nobody was buying it a second time.

3) Bouncers have a punch up with a bunch of Paras outside a club. The Paras lose to the bouncers, largely because one bouncer was wearing brass knuckles and partly because the Paras were all pretty foully drunk.

Unfortunately for this one bouncer, he'd forgotten that the club has a CCTV on the door too. The tape shows him beating the hell out of these soldiers but it's not clear whether he's wearing brass knucks or just covered in blood.

The police try really hard to get him to admit to wearing brass knucks, but he stays quiet, his colleagues stay quiet, the medical reports are inconclusive, the Paras go along with the cops for a while but eventually get bored.

They're the Paras and therefore a little thing like being repeately punched in the head isn't such a big deal, all things considered. So once they've calmed down a bit and sobered up, counted each other's stitches and so on, they just want to head back to camp and get some grub and a kip.

Eventually the cops give up and don't charge the bouncers with anything at all, because the only thing that was *unreasonable* there was considered to be the brass knuckles. Savage on-camera beatings were OK because the numbers were pretty equal and Paras vs Bouncers with no hardware either way, was considered a reasonably fair match.

[bernie_g]

By the way, in case it isn't obvious, I'd like to say that I utterly deplore what happened to the lady with the nail file. I don't think cases like that should even see court.

[2sheep]

>It's painfully obvious that you've never seen the snopes.com site. Most of your emailed 'cases' are thoroughly debunked hoaxes. Would you like a worm to go with that hook, line, and sinker? You've been fished big time, dude.

I recall specifically that the first incident was correct and outrageous.  I stated that "If they are correctly reported,  they are unjust:"  and you have overlooked that part.

A lot of the nonsense on the urban legend sites, or even the need for such sites may be globalist swill to debunk all alternative news sources and make only CNN the total news source for globalist speak.  Sure there is much on the internet that is not true, just as the publishers of globalists lies intentionally publish disinformation along with what is true just to keep people off balance and make it difficult to ascertain what is true or what is not.  There are many examples in the news every day of innocent people being persecuted by the government and imprisoned wrongly just as the sodomites in Florida are even this day working to imprison Christians by falsely accusing them.  The list I posted is surprisingly tame in view of those injustices.  Truth is the victim.  It lies bleeding in the street and most do not even care.

[2nd_Amendment_Defender]

You would use a Desert Eagle .50 for home protection? I hope the .50 AE bullet doesn't go through your uninvited felon, through your house walls and kill someone else outside. I would suggest getting a good model 1911 .45 handgun and load it with glaser rounds. Glaser rounds are expensive but will not go through home walls and are great criminal stoppers.

[sirshackleton]

"I ran behind them for about half a mile, over the top of the cliffs, and caught one of them. He couldn't run any more and he just collapsed into a ball because he thought I was going to hit him."

Doesn't England use kilometers?

[Shooter 2.5]

In the worst bars here in Texas, there are shootings and stabbings all the time. In short it's usually some bad guys killing other bad guys. I would have to say that's what drives the murder rate up so bad.
When a person has a CCW, they aren't permitted to carry in a regular bar and the only restaurants a CCW holder can enter are the ones that don't earn most of their profits from alcohol.
I don't think the bullies can operate the way they did once they became an adult because someone would threaten them with an escalated amount of violence. I had someone threaten me at work and I laughed and told him that I wasn't afraid because I had already seen him try to shoot a gun. The argument stopped with that.
Street muggings just don't happen in Dallas when it's a male to a male because of the threat of a CCW carrier. It's male against female or elderly.
I don't think Britain is handling their crime in a realistic manner even without the firearm controversy. From what I can tell, the authorities want the sole power to end crime and to me, that's wrong. The authorities should applaud the law abiding citizen stopping assaults against themselves regardless of the weapon used.

[stimulate]

"Do you think that people...other than the USA have any right to be patriotic?"

You have every right to be patriotic, I don't question that.I just think that your Majesty has far less civil rights protections than he USA.You don't even have a Constitution!

Isn't it obvious?