Tgace
Grandmaster
If you are really serious about learing the complexities of this Steve...read this.
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/oslj/files/2012/03/71.2.raymond.pdf
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/oslj/files/2012/03/71.2.raymond.pdf
Suppose, once again, that you are assaulted by a person threatening you with deadly force. But, looking further back in time, imagine that you wound up in that situation because you chose to enter into, rather than avoid, a potentially risky situation. Imagine, for example, that a friend told you that the assailant, a longtime enemy, was looking for you, had a gun, and planned to spend the evening at a local club. You replied, “Who cares? I’m not afraid of him. If he tries to start something with me, he’ll be sorry,” and headed off to the very same club. Once there, the assailant threatened you with lethal force. May you respond with lethal force in self-defense?
Some might say that, by going to the club where you knew the assailant might be, you were “looking for trouble.” Should that affect whether you can claim self-defense? Should legal analysis of a self-defense situation permit consideration of an expanded time frame, in which the prior conduct of the actors may preclude their right to act in self-defense? Or should the question about the legal justification of an act of self-defense turn on the narrow circumstances of the ultimate violent interaction, without an inquiry into whether prior behavior by the actor claiming self-defense precipitated a confrontation that could have been avoided? In other words, how should we “frame” the incident in which an actor claims the right to act violently in self-defense?
One might think that the answer to this question would be clear: either the law should draw the frame broadly, to include those facts, or draw it narrowly, to exclude them. Most commentators seem to think that the law is clear on this issue. As it turns out, however, the law is decidedly ambiguous about this problem. This lack of clarity has far-reaching implications. The problem of framing an incident of the use of force in self-defense is ubiquitous; any time we consider whether a person properly used force in self-defense, we must decide how far back, both in time and circumstance, we will look to consider how the actor came to be in the situation in which force became necessary.