The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 14: Do or Die
Duress pg 25: Your Own Fault
You can’t put yourself into a situation where you might be placed under duress, and then expect to be held blameless for the crimes you then commit as a result.
Aaand that’s pretty much it for Duress, really.
Average Joe explaining
AVERAGE JOE
You know, Necessity and Duress are interesting an all, but they don’t come up in real life as often as you might think.
Self-defense, on the other hand, comes up all the time.
And it can be tricky, especially when someone kills in self-defense.
That’s right, and we’ll cover all of that stuff next time…
AVERAGE JOE
NEXT time?
in Part 15: “It was either Him or me.”
You can read this entire chapter in its original single-page scroll on the comic’s old Tumblr site here.
The phrasing ‘might’ is troublesome to me. There’s a great many things that ‘might’ happen as a result of your actions. There’s no mention here of where the line is drawn for ‘might’. How much, if any, foreknowledge is required to satisfy this standard? Is the test the sincerity of the defendant in not seeing the possibility, or whether a reasonable person could?
For example, what if the gang was running a front that appeared to be a legitimate business? If I got a job there, believing it was legitimate and legal employment, and then they put me under duress to commit a crime (that doesn’t result in death or serious injury, since you covered that) doesn’t that qualify as something that ‘might’ happen?
Going another step in, it could be argued that I would have researched the business ahead of time and its owners, and since criminal records are public records, if they had a criminal record, wouldn’t that be sufficient to establish ‘might’? But is that something a reasonable person would do for every job they take?
Obviously not looking for legal advice here, just what, exactly, the definition of ‘might’ is — A line has to be drawn somewhere, and the definition of ‘might’ doesn’t seem very lawyer-esque. It’s too vague to be a legal standard, I’d think.
Yeah this part bothers me too. How far back does it go, and to what degree does the law consider previous events to be causes of subsequent events? Does walking out your front door that morning count as ‘putting yourself in the duress situation’ that occurs in the afternoon? After all, you exercised a choice to leave your house, and if you hadn’t you would not have been in put in that situation otherwise…