Thread: Justice?

Originally Posted by Bruno

Not quite. You managed to take the knife away and you were with a bunch of friends. And at no point was your friend tied up and threatened with physical harm, in your own home. Different situation.

Maybe not verbally, but if someone pulls out a knife and waves it in your direction, and the direction of your wife, I think that counts.

I think a lot of parallels can be drawn.

There is certainly no doubt that if he'd taken the knife away and then him and his mates kicked the living hell out of him, we would probably have never been told the story because the poster would be spending christmas looking at four walls of a sweedish prison.

Yes, an interesting and relevant story.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Are you 100% sure he didn't run to get another weapon, or to try and capture the sone who'd escaped? would you take that bet if it had been your family?
.

Of course we cannot be sure that the burglar just didn't run to get a gun from somewhere to come back later. However chasing someone who is running away from your direction, hunting him down, and specially beating the hell out of him are not self defence. You can't justify it by saying that i thought he was just running to get a gun from somewhere.

I am really sorry for this guy. Had he just chased the burglar and kept him in place with the reasonable amount of violence, if necessary until poice arrived, he would be a hero now, and his action would be something that we all should see as an good example. Now he is just a normal dude who couldn't handle the extreme situation but lost his temper and went way too far. All the way to the dark side. He pays for what he has done. That is how i see it, and obviously so did the court. I do not know but it might also be that the court also wanted to send a message: Vigilantism is not acceptable.
What irritates me the most is that the burglar got away from this too easy. He should have been sent to jail.

Originally Posted by Sailor

What irritates me the most is that the burglar got away from this too easy. He should have been sent to jail.

Just from what I read in the article, it seems like a stroke of irony that the burglar was beaten to the point that he was not deemed fit to make a plea in court, which was why he is not in jail now

A lot of this comes down to the wording of the law and if the person being tried knows how to use this law to their advantage. For example in Victoria, Australia the crimes act states that "A person may use such force not disproportionate to the objective as he believe necessary to prevent the commission, continuance or completion of an indictable offence..."

What this means is that if the crime being committed is one which the person should go to jail you can use force to stop the person starting the crime, continuing the crime or finishing the crime. The only thing is the the force you use must only be what is necessary to stop the crime.

The key to using this law to protect yourself is being able to explain to a jury that force used was just enough to stop the crime and nothing more.

"Yes, I do think it was necessary and not excessive, to shoot him in order to stop the crime."