Posted by xcgates: I am of firm mind that if someone is destroying the property, or attempting to take property from (for example) a detached garage/workshop, that is the same as a threat to the continued liberty and security of the property owner.
Perhaps it does present some level of infringement of the property owner's rights, but it does
not constitute an
imminent threat of
death or
serious bodily harm, which has been the threshold for justifying the threat or use of deadly force for centuries, if not millennia, in most structured, non-totalitatian legal systems.
Think about it--a person sees someone taking moveable, tangible property, and elects to employ deadly force. The state, faced with evidence that the actor employed deadly force against another person, must then decide whether there is evidence that clearly indicates that actor was justified, and if they conclude that the answer is no, the actor will then be faced with mounting a defense to justify his action.
How can either
ever reasonably conclude that the harm caused by the actor outweighed the harm prevented?
Bottom line, I don't believe there should be distinction to whether a person has gone outside their "house" to stop theft/destruction of their property or they remained inside, and the threat continued into their house.
Think about this: if the actor remains inside, and someone forces his way inside, the actor has every reason to believe that he or someone else in the house is faced with an imminent threat or serious bodily harm. Should he find it immediatey necessary to employ deadly force to
defend against that threat, he is justified.
In either case, the threat has come onto the property, made itself known as a threat that has no regard for the victim's security on their property.
There are threats, and there are threats involving imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm that result in the immediate necessity to employ deadly force.
The fact that someone with no regard for someone else's security has come onto the property of the latter simply does not present that kind of serious threat.
It all comes back to necessity, and to whether the harm done by the actor in taking a life would outweigh the harm prevented.
You do not have to like it, but you should understand that the most learned judges in England worked long and hard to develop legal constructs that would fairly define the circumstances under which one subject (citizen, for us now) might be justified in harming another, and when inflicting such harm would involve a criminal act. Without such a set of determinants, the society would have been lawless--either mayhem would have run rampant, or persons attacked by the lawless would have been denied the natural right of self preservation. The laws of every one of our states but one (Louisiana) stem from the English Common Law.
Now, the law in Texas today does provide for the use of deadly force, if it is
necessary, to prevent theft of tangible moveable property or the destruction of property at night, and to prevent the taking of property, if it is necessary, and when there is no safe alternative, immediately after some forcible felonies at other times of day. The former goes back to very early Judaic law. However, that only applies in Texas, and even there, the consequences of failing in a defense of justification are so severe that it would not be a very good bet for most people even if the likelihood of losing were less than 3%.
