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State (1877), the Indiana court rejected a duty to retreat, saying, [1]: 551–2 [5] "the tendency of the American mind seems to be very strongly against" a duty to retreat. [5] The court went further in saying that no statutory law could require a duty to retreat, because the right to stand one's ground is "founded on the law of nature ; and ...
Eleven states impose a duty to retreat when one can do so with absolute safety: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. New York, however, does not require retreat when one is threatened with robbery, burglary, kidnapping, or sexual assault.
State v. Abbott, 36 N.J. 63, 174 A.2d 881 (1961), [1] is a landmark case in the American legal doctrine of retreat.In it, the New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously adopted a duty to retreat—a legal requirement that a threatened person cannot stand one's ground and apply lethal force in self-defense, but must instead retreat to a place of safety. [2]
A majority of U.S. jurisdictions do not follow the common law rule that a person must retreat prior to using deadly force, [11] but rather have rejected this theory via statutory law in what are known as "stand your ground laws", which explicitly remove the duty to retreat. [12]
New York v. Tomlins , 107 N.E. 496 (N.Y. 1914), is a criminal case in which it was found when a defendant claims self defense , that there is no duty to retreat from one's own home. The court wrote, "It is not now and has never been the law that a man assailed in his own dwelling is bound to retreat."
On Dec. 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot a group of would-be robbers on a New York City subway car in a case that has been compared to Daniel Penny's chokehold charges.
Previous revision by Eugene Volokh has been changed to reflect that Wisconsin is a middle-ground state. Washington D.C. does not require duty to retreat, but duty to retreat is specifically exempted when defending oneself in the home, and juries can consider duty to retreat outside the home.
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