So can you kill a burglar in your house

[Huge_Vitae]

Ok MickJ...

 

say the circumstances are then same, but instead of shooting him, although I am still armed with a loaded shotgun, I stab him to death with a knife also in my posession?

[Alan Stubbs]

According to the Times last week, it depends whether it is 'instinctive' behaviour. Which I took to mean that it's OK if you are predisposed to violent conduct.

 

So there's one law for the violent and another for the mild mannered.

 

A police officer was quoted as syaing that 'Self defence is seen as the minimum force required to get the attacker to the ground and keep him there until the police arrive.

 

So that's it totally clear for us all, isn't it? NOT!

 

Charles Dickens was right; 'The Law is a ass'.

 

[ 05. February 2005, 12:33 PM: Message edited by: Alan Stubbs ]

[SandTiger]

The Bill has been published, so it might be helpful to read that rather than newspaper commentaries:

 

This is the main text of the bill:

 

1 Amendment of the Criminal Law Act 1967

 

(1) The Criminal Law Act 1967 (c. 58) is amended as follows.

(2) In section 3 (use of force in making arrest, etc.), after subsection (1), insert—

 

“(1A) Where a person uses force in the prevention of crime or in the defence of persons or property on another who is in any building or part of a building having entered as a trespasser or is attempting so to enter, that person shall not be guilty of any offence in respect of the use of that force unless—

 

(a) the degree of force used was grossly disproportionate, and

( this was or ought to have been apparent to the person using such force.

 

(1B) No prosecution shall be brought against a person subject to subsection (1A) without the leave of the Attorney General.”

 

Discuss...

[SandTiger]

Huge_Vitae, we might be able to get you manslaughter on a plea

[KennyC]

The only thing that the man is guilty of is tresspassing ( English law? ).

 

So shooting him it would be manslaughter minimum.

[argyll]

Its all supposition. What you would actually do when faced with a burglar is probably going to be entirely different from what you had decided in advance when you had the luxury of thinking time. I keep a swordstick under the bed and swore that I'd use it on a burglar if ever got close to one. Two years ago I was awakened by a rustling sound downstairs. I crept out onto the landing, looked down and saw a long bamboo cane stuck though the letter box which the burglar was using to try and hook the house keys off the hall table where I'd stupidly left them. Swordstick ? nah. I crept into the office and quitly phoned the police. They caught the clown just up the road, still clutching the bamboo cane. He got community service.

[Huge_Vitae]

SandTiger:

Huge_Vitae, we might be able to get you manslaughter on a plea            

If anybody recalls "•Kenneth Noye, the gangland figure, was cleared in the 1980s of murdering an undercover officer who he stabbed after confronting him in his garden during a police surveillance operation. Noye has since been jailed for life for stabbing a young man to death in a "road rage" incident in Kent in 1996."

 

Or a few others.......

 

Click to see

[SandTiger]

So a very high level of acquittals and NFA's then?

[tugmistress]

that was my impression too tiggs.

as argyll said, it's all supposition. we can all plan but when push comes to shove what would we actually do?

luckily for me the only time i have ever been scared sh*tless is one night, when stuart was working nights, and i was asleep in the living room i was woken by something and the dogs going ballistic. it sounded like someone knocking on the window (we don't close the curtains) our door is hardly ever shut and the dogs went flying outside kicking up such a stink like someone was there..... i guess if there was they jumped the fence! me? all i could do was freeze and my heart was in my mouth going ten to the dozen

[Scapanapper]

To Quote Jeremy Hardy on todays' edition of BBC radio 4's News Quiz.

"You can kill a burglar in your home but you can't carry his head around the streets on a stick as a warning to others"

This seems clear to me!