LOL amazing discussing you guys are having. I wish Canada would follow along soon with the States and the UK. Not too long ago in Toronto's Chinatown a grocery store owner saw a guy doing a five finger discount on some store products. The owner chased this thief down an alley and detained him and called the police. The police showed up and let the thief go and instead arrested the store owner and charged him with something like kidnapping! How ridiculous is that!!!
Exactly. under no circumstance is a robber a victim in the scenario, if a robber breaks into a house owned by a person they really don't want to cross under those circumstances then they may well just have to face the consequence.
its like.... how can a burglar decide not to rob a place once he is caught and get away with it lawfully? What if i attempt murder and fail and just run away...
True, it'd be said that an owner has every right to defend himself from anything but the problem is there's a fine line between reasonable force and excessive. and Also, everyone can have a different perspective or opinion on how much reasonable force can be. That term is ridiculously ambiguous.
They said what reasonable force was already. If someone enters your house you can do what you need to do to protect yourself and your property. What is excessive force is when you are chasing a person outside and giving them a beating, you can subdue them (citizens arrest) but you cant give them a beating. What a copper said is you can whack someone and knock them down and whack them again to make sure they stay down, but after that you stop or it becomes excessive, its not based on how hard you hit them or what you use.
Forgive me, but says who? This is the crux of the issue. The whole ideal of rights also is a part of this process; how much we can do, under what circumstance, et cetera; that we can do lethal things to another human being. The importance that I'm driving at is, the whole rights concept is but an illusion. You only have such rights if you live under the purview of laws, as defined and promulgated by sovereign or state legislature, that support such ideas. Otherwise, no one ever has any right to do anything except die. I once had a debate here with a libertarian who claimed that we have certain rights "bestowed" (or given) upon us at birth. I thus asked, who was the bestower? In other words, who gives us those rights, ie. as in "says who?" The answer is, a group of like minded individuals that conceive rules and laws under which we all live and function. If those like minded individuals turn out to be assholes, then we have asinine laws where people could legally do things that would seem unjustified. Like, as in your stated example of beating the piss out of someone after you caught them trying to steal your shit. An another example is, if we live in Saudi Arabia, they can surgically remove the offending body part as perfectly legal punishment (cut off the hands of thieves). For treasonous activity, it was required that all members of a family be executed, even down to the babies; under Qing law. Thus, what one has the right to do or not do, is but an illusion granted only by civil construct; that which that can be changed at the drop of a hat, or perhaps by enough ducats into the right pocket.
Forgiven. hmm ok, says who.. Justice Secretary Ken Clarke. But keep in mind i am only talking about the UK. something i find interesting though is you can shoot them indoors. over here we tend to have crossbows rather than shotguns.
I completely agree with you that by laying the law down, it gives solidity to the term reasonable force but that said, I dont enjoy the fact that people might over-extend the amount of force used. Yeah sure an old lady has every right to defend herself from an 18year old by sticking the dude but thats kind of a bias circumstance. What about a healthy Middle aged man, easily apprehending an intruder and beating the hell out of him just out of the fact of self-defence? Im not arguing against you, but i only wish that laws can be more specific and flexible in order to not be misinterpreted by people who just generalize the term of force. This reminds me of a Canadian law case i studied where a Shopkeeper in Canada was being victimized by a series of thefts and he installed cameras to supervise his goods. He caught the thief who tried to bike away but caught up and brought him into the shop to be detained with ropes while he called police. Sounds like a clear-cut example of a citizen's arrest right? Turns out the shopkeeper and 2 of his grocers were arrested for "assault and forcible confinement" due to excessive force. Anyway, the shopkeeper was later cleared, but the point is, as much as the concreteness of law is useful, its still ambiguous. People misinterpret law all the time and its stupid,
^the shop keeper thing if true thats probably the dumbest law ever... just ridiculous ok imma go dexter strap them to a bed follow harrys code and dump the body in the bay.
I see what you are saying about the younger guy, i think it will just depend on who the robber crosses, some people are able to handle themselves in those situations and will probably do what's needed to subdue the person and wait on the police. Others may react badly and feel threatened and fight. and there are others who may look at it as an opportunity to give the robber a pasting. Remember, there are old woman more brave than healthy middle aged men, its not a matter of age but state of mind. But the key is the robber, this wont happen if the robber keeps his/her self out of someone elses house. Mr Clarke said the law will be made clear, its actually as i said. indoors, you do what you need to do and this includes giving them a beating but you cant chase them out and still have those rights because you and your property are no longer in danger. so when you chase them outside, you are in a grey area, now i conciser that to be ambiguous. NOW whether the beating you deal out was ethical or not is another matter, but the law wont prosecute an unethical beating as long as it is done within the law. This is as big a warning as it gets to robbers in the UK, break into a property and you may not crawl out the same way you crawled in.
Well the ground rules seem straight forward enough.... Catch someone in your house trying to rob you? Do everything in your power to teach that person a lesson or maybe even his final lesson.
That could be true, but like i mentioned before, a copper advised that you can hit a person and cause a knock-down and hit them again to make sure they stay down, if you managed to kill them in that process, you are covered. but if you kept battering them then it would become unreasonable force. I doubt most citizens in the UK are out to hurt people for the sake of it, most of us are not going to kill someone, i wouldn't knowingly kill a robber and i cant stand them but manslaughter is always a possibility, the law will allow us to do what we have to do, as we have always been doing till now, but we will now have the law on our side. Thats the only difference to how we operate today, we just wont get done for it and we wont get sued by a robber when he hurts himself in the process of robbing your house (true story). The best way to prevent any problems happening is the robber not robbing houses in the first place. We will have to wait and see when everything is finalised.
Problem with UK law is that our law is not constitutional like USA or France etc. Therefore nothing is explained by writing properly and it's mostly down to the ideology of a "reasonable man" and who is to say who the reasonable man is? The whole legal system in the UK is a bit ambiguous to me anyways.
Well its a democracy, laws are based on pop thought for the most part in the UK, people are typically disgusted when home owners are arrested for hurting robbers so the government must do something about it. This also explains the power of media, if the few that control the media can control the minds and thoughts of the masses as they do, they can also influence the laws of the land. The 'reasonable man' is another way of saying common thought, kind of like averages really, its not based on any one persons thought.
