The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 14: Do or Die
Necessity pg 1: The Golden Horde
Meet the Golden Horde, a local “outlaw” motorcycle club.
Buncha guys in a biker gang, all shaved bald except for a topknot/ponytail looking thing.
They live for violence, mayhem, and stimulating intellectual debate.
Members of the gang all fighting among themselves, while discussing
BIKER 1 (while getting punched)
Explain again why Schrödinger’s cat is not in superposition?
BIKER 2 (swinging lead pipe)
Because that only works in isolation!
The cat’s environment constantly collapses the cat-box system.
…dumbass.
The fact that they are actually having a stimulating intellectual debate… priceless. I love your thugs.
Thanks! I love those guys, too. Just don’t say that… you know… out loud. Not in front of them, anyway.
I love them too.
Nathan, If I may pose a question to you to pick your brain and also to leave a comment.
Bought the book and showed it to a couple of my Under Grad Prof’s they loved it – So I plan on ordering each of them a copy when I graduate.
Secondly we were posed a hypothetical in class today and I immediately thought of your book. In a conspiracy/accomplice liability – lets say someone gets kidnapped and then told at gun point they will be robbing a bank. During that armed robbery an innocent bystander gets shot (and dies). My question is since duress can never be used as a defense against murder – does the kidnapped person have a defense or is he up a creek?
I would expect that, while duress is not accepted as a defense for murder normally, it would be an accepted defense for conspiracy, so you wouldn’t be liable in the first place.
Duress is a complete defense, removing all guilt for the crime. While it doesn’t exist for murder, it does for armed robbery. And if you aren’t guilty of committing a felony, you can’t possibly be guilty of felony murder based on that felony. So I’d guess that in your hypothetical, the defense would work.
Though it does seem like the sort of thing where one could also just say “no, because duress is no defense to any murder charge”. Case law notwithstanding, I think it’s not necessarily a question with a clear-cut answer.