A young man has had his house broken into
and two of his laptops as well as a game console have been stolen. Some hours later, around midnight, he hears
a noise coming from his garage. It sounds like someone is in there. As he hears a volley of bangs and the sound
of rummaging, he’s scared and not quite sure what to do. But he doesn’t call the cops. Instead, he grabs his Samurai sword and slowly
creeps through the yard, his presence barely perceptible in the pitch-black night. When he gets closer to the garage, he sees
that the door has been forced open. He slowly moves inside only for a burglar
to attack him, at which point the man swings his sword. The upshot of that is a dead intruder and
a homeowner looking at a lengthy stint in prison. The question is, should the man be charged
with murder? Or what about involuntary manslaughter, seeing
as he likely didn’t intend to kill the intruder? Or do you think the man didn’t commit a
crime at all? Do you think the killing was justifiable? Think about that for a second or two. It’s not so easy to answer, is it? As you’ll see many times today, sometimes
you can lawfully kill someone, but it’s usually a matter of intense controversy. The scene we just talked about actually happened. In 2009, a student at Johns Hopkins University
took his sword and slashed an intruder who’d lunged at him after trying to steal from his
garage. The sword was legally owned, and the cops
later said anyone has the right to defend their property. The court found that the student “reasonably
believed he was in danger of death or serious bodily injury” and so he wasn’t charged
for killing the man. Would the same have happened elsewhere? It’s debatable. In the UK, you can use reasonable force against
someone who has broken into your house, and that includes picking up an object to use
as a weapon. But it’s very likely that if a student over
in the UK slashed and killed an intruder with a sword, they’d have a harder time staying
out of prison. It all depends on the circumstances. A court in the UK would have to hear that
the person was in fear of his life and had a very good reason to believe that. The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service states
that if a person goes “over the top” in their actions they are not protected by the
law. As you’ll see, going over the top in the
UK and in the U.S. might not be the same. In the U.S., you are also expected not to
go over the top. If someone is, say, stealing flowers from
your garden and you knock them out and then bounce large stones off their head, you are
going to be prosecuted. Still, the U.S. stakes something quite seriously
called the “Castle Doctrine”, which relates to the saying your home is your castle and
so you have the right to defend it by any means. How it’s applied depends on which state
a person lives in. For instance, in some states, you might get
away with using deadly force even if you just found an unarmed intruder going through your
collection of Playstation games. In some other states, you might only have
some immunity from prosecution if you can prove the intruder was about to inflict serious
harm on you or your family. Some states may prosecute if the victim could
retreat but instead went on the attack, while other states fully embrace the “Stand Your
Ground” laws wherein a homeowner has every right to attack even if there is the possibility
of retreating. It’s complicated, so let’s have a look
at some other controversial cases and you can act as judge and jury. An extremely sad and very divisive case involved
a young Japanese guy named Yoshihiro Hattori. In 1992, he made the fatal mistake of going
to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the U.S., to join an exchange program. After about two months he was invited to a
Halloween party as part of the program and so he dressed up as John Travolta’s character
from the movie Saturday Night Fever. That all sounds innocent enough, but Hattori
and the son of the American family he was staying with got the location of the party
wrong. Dressed up in strange-looking costumes they
rang for the doorbell of the house. A woman answered only to see a young American
man dressed in bandages and another guy looking that might have reminded her of the fictional
gangster Tony Montana from the movie, Scarface. She panicked and told her husband to grab
his .44 Magnum. “We're here for the party,” Hattori said
innocently, now looking down the barrel of a gun once called was the most powerful handgun
in the world. The husband shouted, “Freeze”, which was
an expression the Japanese student wasn’t familiar with. He kept walking towards the husband, and then
he was fatally shot. Ok, so you are the judge and jury. Was this a justifiable homicide? Was the husband’s and his wife’s life
threatened? Was there going to be imminent violence used
against him or his wife? Could he even have fired a warning shot? Do you think he was guilty of a crime? Well, the courts thought the killing was justified
and the man was acquitted. This caused a huge stink in Japan, as well
as in the U.S. among some people who espoused stricter gun control laws. In fact, for years after, Hattori’s family
and the family of his hosts in the U.S. campaigned for gun law reform. Not much ever really got reformed, as you’re
about to see. When it comes to defending your castle, the
U.S. could be said to embrace the use of deadly force more than most developed countries. But what if you intentionally plan to kill
someone in the U.S.? What if you set a trap for criminals? We saw if that happens in the UK the law will
definitely not be on your side. It’s usually the case in the U.S., too,
but not always. We might take the 2001 case of two brothers
in Baltimore who shot one man dead and injured two others after they’d set a trap at the
concrete plant they owned. The brothers were sick and tired and having
their plant burgled, so one night they armed themselves and waited for the thieves. When the thieves arrived, the brothers opened
fire. The men were not indicted by a grand jury,
even though some law experts said the brothers were not in any kind of danger. You might be wondering, how does a jury assess
a clear and present danger? Well, that’s also complicated. In 2019 in the UK, a 79-year old man was found
to have lawfully killed a burglar. The man said a man had entered his home and
was armed with a screwdriver. He said he confronted the man with a kitchen
knife, after which the burglar just walked into the knife. The court ruled that the man had given the
intruder every possibility to leave his house and he had only acted in self-defense. It doesn’t always happen that way, not in
the UK or the U.S. or elsewhere. There was a recent incident in Scotland in
which a man’s house was broken into and the burglar armed with a knife threatened
to kill a man and his wife if they didn’t hand over some money. A fight ensued and it ended with the burglar
being stabbed 17 times. Ok, so it seems the burglar was armed, and
he was certainly threatening, and the man had every right to think he and his wife were
in imminent danger. Even so, the jury found the man to have acted
over the top and he was convicted of culpable homicide, meaning he killed someone but hadn’t
intended to do so. Similar cases have happened in the U.S., too. In 2014, in the state of Montana, a man was
found guilty of killing an intruder even though the state has the Castle Doctrine. In that case, a homeowner discovered a young
man in his garage. He didn’t ask too many questions and just
opened fire. During the trial, it was revealed that the
man had been the victim of burglary before and so he laid a trap by leaving his garage
door slightly opened. He even told a friend, “I've been up for
the last three nights with a shotgun wanting to kill some kids.” The defense argued that the man had only been
protecting himself and his family, but he was found guilty of deliberate homicide. Strangely, the 17-year that was killed was
another exchange student, this time from Germany. So, there have been cases when it looked like
people went completely over the top but weren’t convicted of a crime, and there have been
cases when people seemingly acted in self-defense but were convicted. As we said, there is a lot of grey area. Possibly the weirdest case we could find that
seems to defy any kind of reason happened in 2009. Some of the American press simply called it
“lunacy”, further demonstrating that lawful killing is very controversial. In this case, a man was bored on Christmas
Eve and so decided to find a female escort on Craigslist. He talked to a woman but they didn’t go
through all the services included in the fee. The parameters of services should always be
discussed prior to any payment being made, but that didn’t happen. It turned out that the man expected more than
a chat at his house for the $150 he’d paid. The 23-year-old woman stood up and said she
was going, which infuriated him. He thought he’d paid for sexual services,
which was actually illegal in Texas and still is. The woman managed to get into her driver’s
car, but the man chased after it while firing a gun. He hit the woman in the head and neck, which
paralyzed her. She died from her injuries several months
later. Surely that was a clear cut prosecutable crime? The jury acquitted the man because it was
deemed that his property had been stolen. It was found that he’d used deadly force
on a person who was in the commission of stealing from him. As some U.S. media later pointed out, does
that mean if you advertise something for sale and someone turns up to buy it, they have
the right to return with their gun if they find out what you sold them was not worth
the price they’d paid for it? Yep, that doesn’t sound right at all. Ok, let's move on. You won’t be surprised to hear that you
can lawfully kill a person during a war or in a conflict when you are hired to do so. But you can’t always just kill with impunity,
and you shouldn’t kill noncombatants. There’s something called “hors de combat”,
which is international law and relates to times when you can’t lawfully kill people
in a conflict situation. So, if a soldier is lying on the ground disabled
after being hit, you cannot by law finish him off. You shouldn’t kill someone jumping out of
an aircraft that’s going down and you shouldn’t kill a prisoner of war, but of course, it
happens. In 2020, the UK media talked about British
Special Forces in Afghanistan. An investigation found that during night raids
the special forces would look for the Taliban, but it seems that’s not only what they were
looking for. They also killed quite a few unarmed innocent
civilians. This is called a war crime, and it seems in
Afghanistan both the U.S. military and Australian military have committed their own war crimes. A notable war crime was that of U.S. Army
Staff Sergeant Robert Bales who in 2012 went on a killing rampage. He murdered 16 civilians in Kandahar Province
in Afghanistan, many of whom were just children. He’s now serving life without the possibility
of parole. Those were unlawful killings since the enemy
wasn’t killed. But there’s more grey area regarding this
topic. There are rules of warfare, but they don’t
always apply. Let’s say the military wants to take out
a terrorist leader, but by doing so there will be some innocent bystanders that get
hurt. This happens, and it happens a lot, and almost
always no one is held accountable. So, we could call this getting away with murder. According to a non-profit human rights organization
called Reprieve, for every person the U.S. tries to assassinate, nine innocent children
will die. In fact, it’s thought that the failed assassination
attempts on Egyptian terrorist Ayman al-Zawahri led to the deaths of 29 innocent bystanders
and 76 kids. Some people call this a kind of state-sponsored
murder, but others say it’s just the unfortunate consequence of fighting a war on terror. It’s hardly a one-off, though, when innocent
people get hurt during targeted attacks. Leaked Pentagon documents showed that in one
drone program that lasted five months in 2013, 90 percent of strikes didn’t hit the intended
target. That doesn’t necessarily meant that the
strikes hit only civilians- simply that the intended target wasn’t present. As for how many collateral deaths there have
been over the last decade or so, it is very hard to say. Not many people in the know would deny that
hundreds of civilians have died as a result of targeted killing, and no one is going to
be arrested for it. In 2016, the UK Prime Minister called such
strikes, “an act of self-defense” while the U.S. has been accused of secrecy and having
impunity. Under Obama, U.S. officials said the bombing
was lawful, but as was pointed out, the laws were written out of sight of the public and
even Congress. One must always question however, how much
life was spared by the killing of terror VIPs, even if innocent life was taken in the attempts. That’s an extremely gray area, and it doesn’t
help that terrorists often purposefully use civilians as human shields. Most times, those same civilians know they
are being used as shields- so does that now make them enemy combatants if they have full
knowledge they could be targeted and are being used? Welcome to the gray zone. You could call the next part of this video
almost-lawful killing. You’ve all heard about honor killings, notably
in the countries of Iran and Iraq. We found a fairly recent case in Iraq in which
a bride was sent back to her family because the groom complained she wasn’t a virgin. The reports say a relative killed her because
she had dishonored the family. A man was actually arrested for murder, but
the reports say his sentence will be very short because he killed in the name of honor. We found another case in Iraq where a father
shot and killed two of his daughters and badly injured a third daughter. He’d accused them of not being virgins,
and it turned out he was very wrong. His sentence: two years! That sounds close to lawful murder. On the other hand, if a person in the West
has suffered terrible domestic violence and they kill the perpetrator of that violence,
in many cases they might receive a lenient sentence. That said, most of the time they will still
do time behind bars. We found some data from an Australian University
that told us over a period of 20 years women who killed their husbands after years of domestic
violence usually went to prison for the crime of manslaughter. Few were sentenced for murder and even fewer
were acquitted. In such cases where a person has been abused
their defense might invoke what’s called a provocation defense. If a person can prove circumstances led them
to explode and murder a person, they might receive a reduced sentence, but they rarely
get an acquittal. A well-known case of a woman who was acquitted
after murdering her spouse was the case of New Yorker, Barbara Sheehan. She shot and killed her violent husband during
one of his rampages. She said she was protecting herself and her
kids. Her use of deadly force was deemed lawful. We found some other cases when a wife’s
killing of her husband was found to be justified by the courts, but again this is quite usual. We aren’t going to talk about capital punishment
because we think all of you are aware in a few countries in the world it’s still legal
to execute a criminal. One thing you might not be aware of is something
called euthanasia. You have “active euthanasia” and it’s
currently legal in the countries of the Netherlands, Belgium, Colombia, Luxembourg, Western Australia,
and Canada. This is like someone asking to be professionally
killed. An example we can give you is of a British
guy who was the victim of a horrific acid attack by a jealous girlfriend. The attack left him almost blind, paralyzed,
and in constant pain. All he could do was lie down and suffer, only
able to move his tongue. He wanted to be euthanized, but that isn’t
legal in the UK, so he was taken to a clinic in Belgium. There three consultants agreed that his life
was unbearable. He was given a lethal injection into his heart
and he was gone. Passive euthanasia is very different and is
legal in many more countries. That’s just not giving a person something
that is keeping them alive, possibly drugs, or the use of a machine. Then you have something called “assisted
suicide”, something sometimes called a mercy killing. Imagine someone you dearly love is terminally
ill and in constant pain. Imagine they tell you they want to die, maybe
they say they’ll do it the hard way if you don’t help them. In a handful of countries and in some U.S.
states a medical professional can legally help with this kind of killing. They can give the person drugs they can administer
to themselves, which will result in death. In some cases, the drugs can be administered
by someone else, and that’s why we are calling it lawful killing. It’s still a very touchy topic in the U.S.,
hence it’s not legal in most states. Now you need to watch, “Brothers Confess
To Murdering Parents - But Are They Innocent?” or for something completely different, “I
Was Swarmed By Fire Ants And Survived (True Story)”
