Self-defence in English Law - Law Enforcement By Police Officers

Law Enforcement By Police Officers

The use of force to prevent crime including crimes against property should be considered justifiable because of the utility to society, i.e. where a police officer uses reasonable force to restrain or arrest a criminal or suspect, this bring the greatest good to the largest number of people. But, where the officers make mistakes, the law can be unpredictable. In R v Dadson (1850) 2 Den 35; 169 ER 407, a police officer shot and wounded an escaping thief. At the time, any degree of force could be used to arrest a fleeing felon but, when he fired the gun, he did not know who the thief was. He was convicted of intentionally causing grievous bodily harm because the thief was shot and the gun was fired by a man not caring whether the shot was lawful or not. That the thief was later proved to be a felon did not prevent a concurrence between actus reus and mens rea at the instant the shot was fired, i.e. no retrospective justification is allowed. It is noted that the death of Jean Charles de Menezes at the Stockwell tube station, south London, on July 22, 2005 resulted from the use of a then secret shoot-to-kill policy called Operation Kratos. English law has no general defence of superior orders and the conduct of every police officer has to be judged on the facts as they believed them to be. (For comparative purposes, see *Keebine-Sibanda, Malebo J. & Sibanda, Omphemetse S. "Use of Deadly Force by the South African Police Services Re-visited" ).

In R v Pagett (1983) 76 Cr. App. R. 279, to resist lawful arrest, the defendant held a pregnant girl in front of him as a shield and shot at armed policemen who returned fire as permitted under their rules of engagement, killing the girl. It is a proportionate response to shooting, to shoot back. In balancing the harms, the greater harm to be avoided is a violent suspect firing and killing a police officer or any other bystander. On the issue of whether the defendant caused the victim's death, the Court of Appeal held that the reasonable actions of a third party acting in self-defence and defence of others could not be regarded as a novus actus interveniens because self-defence was a foreseeable consequence of his action and had not broken the chain of causation.

In Beckford v R the defendant police officer was told that a suspect was armed and dangerous. When that man ran out of a house towards him, the defendant shot him because he feared for his own life. The prosecution case was that the victim had been unarmed and thus presented no threat to the defendant. Lord Griffiths approved a model direction to juries, laid down by Lord Lane in "R. v Williams:

"Whether the plea is self-defence or defence of another, if the defendant may have been labouring under a mistake as to facts, he must be judged according to his mistaken belief of the facts: that is so whether the mistake was, on an objective view, a reasonable mistake or not."

The defendant therefore, had a defence of self-defence because the killing was not unlawful if, in the circumstances as he perceived them to be, he had used reasonable force to defend himself.