FBI: Justifiable homicides at highest in more than a decade

[Phil Lee]

Jeff White gave a link to the UCR Reporting Handbook. The Handbook provides great insights. It appears he has taken his quote from printed page number 17. Notice the red part of the note in that quote given again here:

NOTE: Justifiable homicide, by definition, occurs in conjunction with other offenses. Therefore, the crime being committed when the justifiable homicide took place must be reported as a separate offense. Reporting agencies should take care to ensure that they do not classify killing as justifiable or excusable solely on the claims of self-defense or on the action of a coroner, prosecutor, grand jury, or court.

(as an aside, I've deleted the part of the quote of the note which is really the book title and page number that Jeff included by his cut-and-paste)

So, depending on how the actual circumstances played out in the Handbook's example #17, a jury might conclude that shooting death was justified. The Handbook clearly establishes a criteria for justified homicide that doesn't match the usual notions of self-defense -- in fact, it obviously promotes a policy of police determining whether a homicide is justified notwithstanding findings by a "coroner, prosecutor, grand jury, or court".

Obviously, a claim of self-defense doesn't mean the homicide is justified. Just as obviously, according to Jeff White, the FBI is too busy to check that submissions are correctly performed. And, even more obviously to some of us, the FBI and local police authorities are too busy with real police work to go back to correct reporting the classification of homicides weeks, months and even years later based on the results in courts or other extended evaluations of the circumstances.

The real question to those of us not enthralled by the bureaucracy (and the desire to defend their work) is "what are the annual numbers of homicides that comport to our notions of self-defense -- especially those from legal defensive shootings?"

The Time articles I've linked elsewhere suggests that "coroners, prosecutors, grand juries, and courts" find the number of justified homicides in the real-world sense is several times that reported by the FBI. So, who are you going to believe, "coroners, prosecutors, grand juries, and courts" across the country or the police-FBI?

 

[jeepmor]

Maybe the number of shootings follow the crime rate... maybe even follows certain types of crimes...

That's simply called correlation. The difference between the two by way of percent is important, is that changing?

 

[Beagle-zebub]

He may be charged with other crimes related to the criminal activity he was involved with that are discovered during the course of investigation of the alleged self defense killing, but if it is found he was justified in his use of deadly force, he won't be charged with murder just because he was defending his life while engaged in a criminal enterprise.

Wellllll, maybe. I know that with certain felonies, there are a lot of cute tricks used to tag on large sentences. In CA, according to a class I took in high-school, if you accidentally kill a person fleeing from the scene of your bank-robbery, they charge you with first-degree murder. If they can construe a person's negligent homicide as being more onerous when committed during the undertaking of a felony, I imagine they could get away with saying that a self-defense killing is malicious when committed in the context of a criminal enterprise.