Before The Tony Martin Case
1) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_%28farmer%29 In my former life I was a farmer. The next door neighbours had been burgled and of course The Police went around asking the locals if anyone had heard / seen anything suspicious etc. Anyway 2 plain clothes guys interviewed myself and my dad and during the conversation one of the detectives asked dad if we had ever had any 'trouble' here. "Well the only problem we get is youths on motorbikes smashing down our fences so they can do short cuts across our grass fields which scares the heck out of our cows and also of course lets them out through the holes they have created" Dad replied. I kid you not the Policeman replied "Well you wanna go and do a bit of rabbit shooting and accidentally aim a bit high!"
2) A friend of mine told me another story. His mate heard a noise downstairs one night, he crept down the stairs only to find a burglar rootling through his stuff. Well unbeknownst to the burglar the friend of the friend was a Black belt or something in Tae Kwon Do and he "Apprehended the offender using reasonable force" i.e. pinned the bugger to the ground while his Mrs. phoned The Police. The result? The Police came and arrested the burglar but later on came back arrested the householder and charged him with assault!
3) The Police Officer that granted my uncle his shotgun certificate was later arrested for handling stolen firearms
(Mackeson_drinker, Wed 11 May 2011, 7:39, 10 replies)

Re: #2
This is one law I would examine if I were Prime Minister. If a burglar enters a property then they give up any "rights" against the householder, except in the most extreme cases.

For example if your friend of a friend used reasonable measures (i.e pinning him to the ground) to apprehend the criminal then the criminal doesn't have a leg to stand on.

If the householder were to have apprehended him, strapped him to a chair and tortured him then that would be unreasonable and extreme.

But unless there's such an extreme scenario, burglars should have no rights. The law should protect the innocent.
(EuroSong I love horse meat: best of all the animals, Wed 11 May 2011, 7:59, closed)

^ This
The whole problem is the vague subjectivity of 'reasonable force'. How much is reasonable? A third-dan judoka who finds someone breaking into his house might think that putting the intruder in a joint-lock until the police arrive is perfectly reasonable (given the size of the tin of whupass he's able to open) but to the average person who knows no martial arts, it might seem cruel and unusual punishment.

It's like the offence of using insulting behaviour. The legal definition of insulting behaviour? Behaviour that is insulting. Glad we cleared that one up, then.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Wed 11 May 2011, 8:43, closed)

^^This^^ also
I'm sorry Mr Drug-addled burgling Chav, but if you come into my house I shall defend myself and my family, and I shall do so 'robustly'.

It's ridiculous that so many rights are afforded to people who shouldn't be on your property in the first place. Embedding broken glass in the top of a yard wall (old terraced house favourite), or running barbed wire around the top of the fence at a storage yard are effectively banned now in case you injure the poor dear climbing over to steal something the scariest deterrent you can resort to is security lighting. Ooh, scary.

Left to me, the security lighting would be accompanied by machine-gun towers and dogs on running leashes, with the odd land mine thrown in to keep it interesting. Hmmm, I might just phone Omnicorp to see if they've got any spare ED209s lying around that I could have.
( Snappyuk gets BIGGER with free sample., Wed 11 May 2011, 10:36, closed)

When my Grandma was alive and living in the states....
...her apartment block had a small break in...the police came knocking on the doors over every apartment to see how secure they all were...my Grandma said she was fine and protected...the police officer asked how as there was no alarm or way to get help if anything happened...she then took out the double barrelled shotgun from the cupboard (not even a gun case!)...The officers reaction..."when the body falls, make sure it's in your apartment otherwise you could be arrested for shooting a man running away from you" i.e. murder...he then continued "if he falls outside of your apartment, drag the body back in before you call us."
(Bushcricket, Wed 11 May 2011, 14:01, closed)

#2: no second blow
My mate's brother caught a burglar coming up the stairs and hit him once. With a cricket bat. Instant cabbage. Plod tried their hardest to charge him with GBH with intent (life sentence), but the CPS wouldn't go for it as there was no second blow, the bat was in a cupboard with other sports kit next to the bedroom, and the perp had an object in his hand (a switched off torch).

BTW, Tony Martin was a complete loon who boasted repeatedly to his neighbours, one of whom I worked with, that he had set the house up as an ambush zone and that he lived for the day he could kill a gypsy.
(all my scars face forward possesses 2.5% of a hyperalloy combat chassis, Wed 11 May 2011, 22:14, closed)

The main outrage
About Tony Martin wasn't so much that he was defending his home (there's a huge difference between warning shots/self defence and shooting someone in the back who's running away) but that he wasn't able to rely on his psychiatric illness in court.

Basically if you're a little old lady being accosted by two large chavs, your comparative physicality (or lack thereof) allows you to do pretty much whatever in self-defence, which is a complete defence. However if you have a paranoid personality disorder (as Martin did) you can only use it as a partial defence for diminished responsibility, which hardly seems fair.

As far as 2) goes it's not really up to the police what counts as 'reasonable'. They have to follow up any complaint like that regardless. It's then up to the CPS whether it should go to court and then it's a question of fact and is entirely a matter for the jury.
(Milo Minderbinder, Wed 11 May 2011, 10:43, closed)

My point was about story 1
Not about the defence of the property thing, it was the ironic way the cop basically said to my father "Oh point your 12 bore at the sods and let fly!" I was talking to a plain clothes cop one day ( I forget what rank he was ) just after the Tony Martin thing. I asked him what he thought of the situation. He said "Well, do you want the honest truth? this is OFF the record OK? we honestly wished he had killed both the buggers, they were low life scum!
(Mackeson_drinker, Wed 11 May 2011, 12:06, closed)

Whilst accepting that a single person living in isolation & plagued by burglars may feel measures that would seem excessive in other circumstances are reasonable,
there is the question of why someone with a paranoid personality disorder is allowed to own a shotgun.
(sarcastic fringehead feet of clay, buns of steel, head of lettuce, Wed 11 May 2011, 13:27, closed)

I'm a slobby middle-aged alcoholic.
The only way I could stop someone taking my property would be to injure them significantly.
So, apparently, any old shit is allowed into my home to take anything I own because if I were to prevent them I'd go to prison.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Wed 11 May 2011, 19:07, closed)

In one case where a homeowner was prosecuted
for using 'excessive and unwarranted force' against an intruder, his QC made the point that it is often the case that the 'minimum force required' is the maximum force available.
( ThisCaledonianClown has left it far too late, Wed 11 May 2011, 21:29, closed)