Assault charges dropped against Ontario man who confronted home intruder
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’.
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’.
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.
That is entirely up to the courts, and the judge, to decide. This is Canada, where the Rule of Law and the decisions of the court still mean something.
But really, why be concerned about it? The chances of any Canadian ever coming close to the lie are in the vicinity of winning the lottery - one in tens of millions odds.
No. I think it’s not good faith because your argument was not in any way trying to determine what is reasonable and was instead resorting immediately to extreme edge cases.
No I do not think “any” level of force is justified.
Do I disagree with that ruling? With only the information you’ve provided, no I don’t.
I’m also not interested in adversarial debate, I’m interested in discussion. I’m not trying to win anything here, I’m trying to expand my point of view and better understand how others view the society in which we all live.
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. 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 like the idea of people gunning down a teenager for the crime of ringing their doorbell.
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 your simply declare that all murder is legal, there is absolutely no version of a style 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.
But the stories I’ve come across tend to highlight how self defense laws are lacking in Canada
Here’s the thing. I hear this a lot. And every single time that I’ve ever been presented with an example, and looked into it deep enough, or enough time has passed that more information came to light, every obvious case of Canada’s self-defence laws “failing” has always turned out to be “No, actually, in this case there really was a line crossed.”
That’s not to say that no law can ever fail. Laws do get misapplied, and no law is perfect. There are edge cases where people will simply disagree; that happens a lot with the law. There are entire fields of academia basically devoted to disagreeing about laws. But it is remarkable that I have never yet seen even one clear cut case of “Wow, that guy totally did not deserve to get charged with anything, he was clearly just defending himself,” that didn’t turn out to be something far more ambiguous, if not outright damning to the defendant when the details are known.
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.
I am SO glad you do not rule our country.
It is only a very small step from what you said to the male head of the household having the right of life or death over the wife or female children. The right to do whatever he pleases with the wife and children. The right to be as racially prejudiced and the right to do whatever he pleases to any non-white male, because of course all he has to say is ‘they were an intruder’.
To paraphrase a line, fans of castle doctrine seem to see home invasions as a kind of cosmic lottery where every now and then one among them will be annointed with the opportunity to legally commit murder.
You told on yourself hard with that Kevin McCallister bit. This isn’t about safety. It’s not about justice. It’s about you foaming at the mouth at the idea that one day you might be granted the chance to unleash all the hatred festering inside you.
Meanwhile the reality of castle doctrine is stuff like this; apnews.com/…/indiana-house-cleaner-shot-wrong-add…
Authorities are considering whether to charge an Indiana homeowner who they say shot and killed a woman working as a house cleaner after she came to the wrong address. Police say officers found Maria Florinda Rios Perez dead Wednesday on the porch of a home in Whitestown, an Indianapolis suburb. The woman's husband told WRTV he was also at the door. He described his wife falling into his arms after she was shot. Authorities have not identified the homeowner. Boone County Prosecutor Kent Eastwood says the case is complex because Indiana law allows deadly force to stop unlawful entry.
I wasn’t going to bother replying to this dumpster fire of people taking my comment way too seriously and assuming I meant things I didn’t say, but your comment seemed reasonable enough in tone but so over the top in conclusion that it feels like maybe an opportunity to try to clear up a bit of misunderstanding.
I’m perfectly willing to debate what “reasonable interpretation of it” means, including how that explicitly excludes the extremely robust and often fatal American interpretation of it, if people want to do that, but the article you linked suggests you’re not looking for reasonable interpretations of it, you’re looking to cherry pick the worst to imply that’s what I’m recommending, which I’m not. Neither standing at someone’s door nor trying to open it are crimes, nor should they be. Are there gray areas? Sure, we can certainly discuss what’s reasonable within those gray areas and edge cases. What you linked is not a gray area, it is absolutely wrong. I acknowledge that.
Kevin McCallister was supposed to be a mild joke, lighten the tone a bit. I didn’t think anyone would be able to take seriously the idea of having enough advance warning of a burglary for creating elaborate rube-goldberg booby traps for home invaders. Clearly I was wrong about that. My hope was that it would trigger a little bit of a thought process in readers that would prevent people from being so kneejerk angry about this topic, not make people angrier.
Furthermore, it is not in fact about me at all, not that I expect you to ever believe that since you can clearly peer directly into my mind by using my words that I choose to post on the internet. Whether you believe it or not, I am in fact a big teddy bear, and I have no illusions that I would personally hurt anyone in this way or ever have any personal need for this. I know myself, and I know exactly how I would react to a violent home invasion, and I can assure you, it would be utterly stupid and naive in the exact opposite way of violence.
However I do have a strong sense of justice and empathy for people who, through past trauma or mental state, have a violently strong aversion to people entering their very clear and extremely well-defined personal spaces where they have what I feel is a very reasonable expectation of safety and comfort, and when the facts are as clear as they are in this case, I don’t think those people who do react violently to a very clear invasion deserve to be further threatened or victimized by the legal system that presumes they don’t have any legal right to do that. My point of view may be tinted by the fact that in my hometown several children ranging from age 3 to age 12 were recently brutally raped and some left with permanent life altering injuries by a well-known and previously convicted sex offender. I would really strongly appreciate it if people did not break the windows and doors of other people’s houses while there are people inside and attempt to enter them, and I really do not have much sympathy for those who do think there are any valid reasons for that.
My point of view may be tinted by the fact that in my hometown several children ranging from age 3 to age 12 were recently brutally raped and some left with permanent life altering injuries by a well-known and previously convicted sex offender.
First off, that’s horrific, and I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone. I’m sorry that those people went through that, and I’m sorry that you had to experience being a part of a community that went through that.
But if I’m understanding you correctly - and please correct me if I’m not - it very much sounds like you feel that the police used too light a hand in that case. There was a person with a known history of the same exact crime, and that person was left to continue their actions without any intervention. You would, I assume, concur with the idea that the accused’s past should have played a much stronger role in the investigation and that the police should have been quicker to pursue a charge, yes?
So let’s take a closer look at this self-defence case.
Historical court records reviewed by CBC News show he [McDonald, the man who defended himself] has a violent past. McDonald pleaded guilty to three charges, including assault, following a 2001 incident involving a baseball bat. The more serious charge of assault with a weapon was withdrawn. Seven years later, McDonald again pleaded guilty — this time to assault causing bodily harm — in connection with an attack on another man. He was sentenced to a three-month jail term and 18 months’ probation. McDonald also admitted to breaching probation and, separately, failing to comply with a release order.
So, the cops arrive at the home of a man with a well known and extensive history of violent assaults, and find in his home a violently assaulted person in critical condition. This well known violent criminal with a history of doing stuff exactly like this says “Oh no officers, he attacked me, I was just defending myself.” And the cops look at the person bleeding to death, in critical condition, covered in lacerations (this is established elsewhere in the article, feel free to check), being rushed to hospital, and they look at the known violent criminal with exactly credibility, and they call bullshit.
Just like they should have called bullshit when that sex offender said something to the effect of “Oh no, it wasn’t me, it must be some other serial rapist.”
You can’t have it both ways, can you? You can’t have a world where the cops call bullshit on the rapist, while also having a world where the cops immediately suss out that the man with a history of violent assaults did not in fact commit a violent assault in this situation where it really, really looks like he committed a violent assault. They did their jobs; they arrested him, they pressed charges, and then when all of the evidence was in view the Crown determined that the defendant’s story actually did line up well enough that they’re pretty sure he’s not lying. This time.
I agree with all those things and I think they’re very reasonable. Without getting too much into the weeds about the local case I mentioned, I don’t have any problem with the actions of police in that case, but I do have some serious problems with the laws that are in place.
Maybe I am giving the accused in this case too much credit, it’s something I do often. And maybe I’m mistaken, but I believe the reason this guy is not being punished for what he did is not because what he did is not an actual crime (as far as I know, it still is) but because police are simply declining to prosecute it in this particular case. The outcome may be the same, but I think those are very different situations. That is the part I am not so comfortable with, I think those are fundamentally different things and I don’t think the police should be ones left with the responsibility for making that decision. It’s the difference between being owed $200 for passing go, and being gifted $200 for passing go. You’ve got $200 either way, but gifts aren’t required by the rule book.
All I’m saying is that I think the law should be much clearer about this kind of situation to avoid the police having to make those judgement calls, because they can feel very arbitrary in that case, and in my experience that often leads to having those judgement calls applied in very inconsistent and unequal ways, especially if the person accused could be vulnerable to certain prejudices that do seem to exist in our world, and sometimes in our police forces and justice system too. I understand it’s not going to solve that particular problem on its own, but if the laws or legal precedent were more explicit and specific to define when exactly we might consider something to be reasonable use of force in defense of one’s home, I think we could avoid a lot of the questions and uncertainty that we see in this case.
maybe I’m mistaken, but I believe the reason this guy is not being punished for what he did is not because what he did is not an actual crime (as far as I know, it still is) but because police are simply declining to prosecute it in this particular case.
You are, indeed, mistaken.
Self-defence is not a crime in Canada. If you’re starting from the position that it is, you’re wrong, and you need to educate yourself more on how Canadian law works.
Section 34, Canadian Criminal Code:
34 (1) A person is not guilty of an offence if
(a) they believe on reasonable grounds that force is being used against them or another person or that a threat of force is being made against them or another person;
(b) the act that constitutes the offence is committed for the purpose of defending or protecting themselves or the other person from that use or threat of force; and
© the act committed is reasonable in the circumstances.
Mere self-defense is not what I’m talking about though. This says the man confronted him. According to my understanding of the way courts interpret self-defense, that is, therefore, not self-defense. If you go after a guy who’s broken into your house and you’re wielding a baseball bat, that is, at least as far as I understand it, assault with a weapon. It doesn’t matter that he was in your home, and it’s not self-defense because you were the aggressor, and entering someone’s house is not an “assault”.
I’m not an expert and I’m not pretending I am, but this is my understanding. Maybe my understanding is indeed incorrect. Maybe you have a better understanding. Either way I hope to never be in a position where I would have to test it.
This says the man confronted him.
I’ve not seen any reporting to that effect. You’re welcome to provide a source.
If you go after a guy who’s broken into your house and you’re wielding a baseball bat, that is, at least as far as I understand it, assault with a weapon. It doesn’t matter that he was in your home, and it’s not self-defense because you were the aggressor, and entering someone’s house is not an “assault”.
Correct. If an altercation is not necessary, and you chose to make one happen anyway, you are the aggressor.
It’s literally in the title: “Assault charges dropped against Ontario man who confronted [emphasis mine] home intruder”
My point of view is that the altercation became necessary the moment someone smashed windows and used the smashed window to gain entry into the house. You’re forcing someone into making a split second decision at that point, and you can’t expect those decisions to always be the correct one, and I don’t think it is criminal to make what might be the wrong decision (or might be exactly the right decision) in such an extreme situation. In the even more extremely unlikely event that the intruder actually had a legitimate reason to be breaking windows and entering the house that way I would call it a very regrettable and unfortunate accident, and it is a very difficult stretch to imagine that actually happening in the real world. But accidents do happen, and they are unfortunate. I don’t think that kind of accident would happen very often.
Otherwise I have to assume they are probably either going to try to get the fuck out as promptly as possible which I would strongly encourage them to do, or they are armed and are going to be starting an altercation themselves with me in the very immediate future which will likely result in my demise. And it’s definitely self-defense at that point. I don’t think it is reasonable to be waiting for proof of the need for self-defense to actually start, because by that point it’s probably too late.
It’s literally in the title: “Assault charges dropped against Ontario man who confronted [emphasis mine] home intruder”
You’re reading a LOT into a choice of wording in a headline there. We do not know anything about the circumstances of the “confrontation” in question. Nothing there indicates that he, for example, went out of his way to get into a fight when he didn’t have to.
You’re forcing someone into making a split second decision at that point, and you can’t expect those decisions to always be the correct one, and I don’t think it is criminal to make what might be the wrong decision (or might be exactly the right decision) in such an extreme situation.
Correct. It is not, in fact, criminal to do that. Defendants are given significant leeway in self-defence claims. If you responded to a seemingly legitimate threat in a moment of panic, that’s still covered by self-defence. What’s not covered is a) going out of your way to get into a fight, and b) using force that is clearly unnecessary or disproportional to the threat against you. Everything else is fair game.
Remember, the charges against this guy were dropped. Even though his assailant ended up on death’s door, in an emergency room, covered in lacerations and bleeding to death, that was still considered fair and reasonable self-defence. You’re panicking over nothing.
Where did I sound like I was panicking? All I’ve been trying to do is have an opinion, share that opinion, discuss that opinion, and defend that position when it is attacked by people turning the things I’m saying into catastrophic strawmen.
It’s not even that strong of an opinion, if I’m being honest, but I do believe in the principle that these are discussions worth having and if that means I have to be devil’s advocate then so be it, but it doesn’t mean I have to be treated like the literal devil.
DarylInCanada
Ricky Rigatoni