What counts as self-defense legally?
Hripsime Bagdasaryan's Answer
Criminal Lawglendale, USA8 years experience
Full Transcript
Below is an AI-generated transcript of the video answer.
Question is what counts as self-defense legally? So in California, self-defense means using
reasonable force to protect yourself or someone else from immediate threat of harm. So that means
the danger must be happening or about to happen right away. The force that you use to protect
yourself has to be necessary and proportional to the force used against you, meaning you can't bring
a gun to a fistfight and then claim self-defense. You generally can't use force after the threat is
over. So if the threat being used against you has subsided, you can't then do something and
then claim self-defense. Deadly force is only allowed if you reasonably believe that you're
about to be seriously injured or killed. That is the only time that you can use deadly force.
And you can't use self-defense as revenge or retaliation. So with that being said, I would like
to say definitely that self-defense is a very nuanced area of law and it is very, very case
specific. So there are facts that can be provided to an attorney and small things can be used to
strategically craft a self-defense claim or a defense that whatever force was used against
another person was in self-defense. So you definitely want an experienced criminal defense
attorney that understands the nuances of self-defense before, you know, crafting the
strategy behind your case. But that is just a legal definition of self-defense.
