Claiming That Somebody Was Suicidal as a Defense to Battery or Unlawful Restraint

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Quoting Taxing Matters

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When she was leaving, any immediate threat to anyone was over.

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Maybe the threat to the OP was over. But the woman would still have been a threat to herself and to people outside of the apartment.

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Quoting Question4law

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I'm just trying to figure out if he has any viable defenses here. Based on the skepticism I've heard here, it sounds like he's going to have to prove his innocence to any jury if he was witnessed cursing and yelling in an argument, pinning a girl to the sofa and seem pulling a distressed person back into his apartnent. I was just surprised the fact that they found her with a slashed wrist and found knives all over the apartment didn't cooberate his story more than what they were able to come up with. It's almost like they were LOOKING for something to charge home with when they didn't even have to, and there were so many other obvious countervailing facts.

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That is not up to you to find out. That is up to his lawyer to figure out and defend him. You cannot do anything to help. In fact you will likely do more harm than good. Yes if it goes to trial if he pleads not guilty, then he and his lawyer will have to convince a jury of his innocence.

Again you were not there. So you cannot accurately judge the situation. Yes I am sure it is a big conspiracy against your friend by the police.

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Quoting TechWorker

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Maybe the threat to the OP was over. But the woman would still have been a threat to herself and to people outside of the apartment.

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How? No one else was outside the apartment based on the OP's story. If they heard the fighting they were not going to answer their doors if she knocked. The only person she may have been harmful to is herself. IF the story is true.

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Quoting TechWorker

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Maybe the threat to the OP was over. But the woman would still have been a threat to herself and to people outside of the apartment.

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She was not an imminent threat to anyone else. Sure, it’s possible that after she walked outside she might encounter someone and attack them, but she wasn’t threatening to attack someone right outside the apartment door. Indeed, nothing in the OP's story suggests she threatened to harm anyone but herself. The statute only protects him if he had to act to prevent the imminent threat of harm to another. That she might attack someone at some future time (which might be hours away) isn’t good enough to justify his attack on her as she left the apartment. In that situation the thing to do is call 911 and let the authorities intervene to deal with her suicidal issues.

I’m not saying that the state will necessarily succeed with the particular charges it has brought against the friend — a simple charge of battery might be more appropriate — but I do not see him as completely innocent under the facts the OP has stated either.

Not trying to change the story. Was just remembering some additional details I didn't include in the original story, and was wondering if they are even viable defenses, for my own curiosity about his chances here.

I do see a situation where this would look very bad to any witness. Obviously bad to them. But I also see a situation where the victims wrist was badly lacerated from a self inflicted wound, I see that and witness testimony of her verbal threats to kill herself as proof that she was using the weapons in some maleficient and dangerous way, I see the fact that she was sent to the psych ER as proof that this was not a competent person during the hysteria, and I see how if a person is in fear of their immediate personal or immediate general safety of the community they wouldn't be concerned about how and what kind of force they had to use to contain the threat or prevent it spreading by allowing her to leave with a knife in her hand.

Put simply, if she had a knife in her hand at the door, and she was acting hysterically, I don't see any moral quandaries with him doing what he did. I think it was ultimately an ignorance of the law issue for him, and I also think there are several case law precedents for situations where an uncontrolled and unsafe person had to be physically restrained to eliminate a threat.

I would consider any individual who had just cut their wrist with a giant knive to be an immediate threat to others, BTW. That person is not in their right mind, and they could do ANYTHING spontaneously. I don't see why she has to verbally communicate a threat for it to actually be a threat. I'd rather someone else stayed safe than worry about 5 fleeting minutes of their liberty during a state of psychosis.

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Quoting Question4law

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Not trying to change the story. Was just remembering some additional details I didn't include in the original story, and was wondering if they are even viable defenses, for my own curiosity about his chances here.

I do see a situation where this would look very bad to any witness. Obviously bad to them. But I also see a situation where the victims wrist was badly lacerated from a self inflicted wound, I see that and witness testimony of her verbal threats to kill herself as proof that she was using the weapons in some maleficient and dangerous way, I see the fact that she was sent to the psych ER as proof that this was not a competent person during the hysteria, and I see how if a person is in fear of their immediate personal or immediate general safety of the community they wouldn't be concerned about how and what kind of force they had to use to contain the threat or prevent it spreading by allowing her to leave with a knife in her hand.

Put simply, if she had a knife in her hand at the door, and she was acting hysterically, I don't see any moral quandaries with him doing what he did. I think it was ultimately an ignorance of the law issue for him, and I also think there are several case law precedents for situations where an uncontrolled and unsafe person had to be physically restrained to eliminate a threat.

I would consider any individual who had just cut their wrist with a giant knive to be an immediate threat to others, BTW. That person is not in their right mind, and they could do ANYTHING spontaneously. I don't see why she has to verbally communicate a threat for it to actually be a threat. I'd rather someone else stayed safe than worry about 5 fleeting minutes of their liberty during a state of psychosis.

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Your thoughts on the subject are utterly irrelevant and for the umpteenth time, you were not there. You do not know what happened. And your friend needs to be discussing this with his attorney.

Now are you really going to force the horse to go to the glue factory?

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Quoting Question4law

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I would consider any individual who had just cut their wrist with a giant knive to be an immediate threat to others, BTW. That person is not in their right mind, and they could do ANYTHING spontaneously. I don't see why she has to verbally communicate a threat for it to actually be a threat. I'd rather someone else stayed safe than worry about 5 fleeting minutes of their liberty during a state of psychosis.

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Understand that the vast majority of persons who are suicidal are no threat to anyone but themselves; they do not intend to hurt anyone else and in fact do not end up hurting anyone other than themselves. It is an error in logic to assume that because a person wishes to hurt herself that she also wishes to hurt others. It is relevant that she never apparently communicated, verbally or otherwise, any threat of imminent harm to anyone else because it is only in the circumstance that she poses an imminent threat of harm to another person that his use of force would be legally justified. She did not pose such a threat while walking out of the apartment. And whether she had a knife while she walked out is even apparently a contested factual issue. The neighbors evidently didn’t see her with a knife, and one would think they would if she had, as you put it, “a giant knife” in her hand, wouldn’t they?

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Quoting Taxing Matters

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Understand that the vast majority of persons who are suicidal are no threat to anyone but themselves; they do not intend to hurt anyone else and in fact do not end up hurting anyone other than themselves. It is an error in logic to assume that because a person wishes to hurt herself that she also wishes to hurt others. It is relevant that she never apparently communicated, verbally or otherwise, any threat of imminent harm to anyone else because it is only in the circumstance that she poses an imminent threat of harm to another person that his use of force would be legally justified. She did not pose such a threat while walking out of the apartment. And whether she had a knife while she walked out is even apparently a contested factual issue. The neighbors evidently didn’t see her with a knife, and one would think they would if she had, as you put it, “a giant knife” in her hand, wouldn’t they?

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While I totally understand that intellectually, I do not think that I could stop myself from trying to stop someone who was a danger to themselves, if that person was someone I cared about.

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Quoting Dogmatique

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Your thoughts on the subject are utterly irrelevant

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I guess the part I'm struggling with is WHY those points are utterly irrelevant. To me they all seemed like common sense defenses, but all the volunteers here are saying they count for nothing or they are just flat out lies. Is it irrelevant purely because because of the fact that I wasn't there, or because they have no mitigating factor on the facts that a person was unwillingly restrained, regardless of circumstances.

Not trying to beat a dead horse here. Just trying to figure out why what seems to me like a common sense situation isn't so common sense at all, and why my points if true, don't actually count for anything. This is more instructive to me than I am trying to use advice to to help him. I'm just trykng to wrap my mind about why the heck a good guy like him is facing up to life in prison for something that could happen to almost anyone.

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Quoting llworking

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While I totally understand that intellectually, I do not think that I could stop myself from trying to stop someone who was a danger to themselves, if that person was someone I cared about.

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I understand first hand the emotions behind it, but I also know from having seen it that the impulse to intervene in the manner the boyfriend did not only risks ending up being on the wrong side of the law but also risks actually making the outcome potentially much worse. He was presumably not an expert in dealing with suicidal persons and did not know how to handle the situation. Getting involved in a physical fight with someone who has a “giant knife” runs the very real risk of severely injuring or killing either her or himself. This is a situation in which one has to keep control of their emotions and try to think clearly about the best way to deal with it. I’m not saying it’s easy to do. I was once in a similar situation with a friend who was trying to commit suicide, in his case by trying to leap out a window six stories up. The immediate impulse of my other friends and I was to grab him and pull him from the window, but had we done that and he fell out the window in a struggle with us, he could have taken others with him as well. Instead, we kept him talking while one of us called campus security and we got expert help for him to ensure everyone was safe. It wasn’t easy, waiting for the police and rescue folks to arrive, as they did about 5 minutes later, but it was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, that friend succeeded later in another suicide attempt when there was no one around to help him. There is only so much that one can to stop someone intent on killing himself. But whatever you do ought not risk even more harm to that person, yourself, or others.

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Quoting Taxing Matters

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Understand that the vast majority of persons who are suicidal are no threat to anyone but themselves; they do not intend to hurt anyone else and in fact do not end up hurting anyone other than themselves. It is an error in logic to assume that because a person wishes to hurt herself that she also wishes to hurt others. It is relevant that she never apparently communicated, verbally or otherwise, any threat of imminent harm to anyone else because it is only in the circumstance that she poses an imminent threat of harm to another person that his use of force would be legally justified. She did not pose such a threat while walking out of the apartment. And whether she had a knife while she walked out is even apparently a contested factual issue. The neighbors evidently didn’t see her with a knife, and one would think they would if she had, as you put it, “a giant knife” in her hand, wouldn’t they?

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Great, so for my friend to have handled this situation legally, he would have first had to know from psychological research that crazed suicidal people wielding weapons do not statistically pose a risk to others, he would have had to know the criteria for constituting a threat to others had to be immanent and explicitly communicated, he would have had to know the threat could not be to herself, and he would have to let the girl leave far enough out the door to for witnesses to see the weapon in her trailing hand.

He would have also had to take a break from restraining the suicidal person who is actively harming herself to call the police. Then he'd have to either ask for the weapon or sit around and watch her hurt/possibly kill herself and hope she didn't turn the knife on him. And if she successfully kills herself, well you just watch your girlfriend die and that's perfectly fine because you followed the law.

I know ignorance of the law is no excuse at all, but honestly how many people in society actually KNOW these things. I don't find it so common sense like you all do. And how many nuances like this are there in our laws? That's frankly terrifying.