Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Frequently Cited Sources
- Dedication
- 1 Justification Defenses: The Issues
- 2 Justification Defenses and the Conventional Public Morality
- 3 Self-defense
- 4 Self-defense and Battered Women
- 5 Duress and Systemically Complete Mitigation
- 6 The Limits of Justification: Necessity and Nullification
- 7 Conclusions
- Index
6 - The Limits of Justification: Necessity and Nullification
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Frequently Cited Sources
- Dedication
- 1 Justification Defenses: The Issues
- 2 Justification Defenses and the Conventional Public Morality
- 3 Self-defense
- 4 Self-defense and Battered Women
- 5 Duress and Systemically Complete Mitigation
- 6 The Limits of Justification: Necessity and Nullification
- 7 Conclusions
- Index
Summary
Consider three types of atypical criminal defendants. The first trespasses at a nuclear weapons plant (or a segregated bus station or women's health clinic) in order to publicly protest some law or public policy represented by that facility or by the activity that occurs there. The second operates an underground railroad in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act (or smuggles South American residents into the United States or breaks into a women's health clinic in order to disable equipment and prevent scheduled abortions). The third causes the death of a loved one by disconnecting that person from life-sustaining medical machinery in order to fulfill a promise to that person or to spare that person the pain or indignity of such an existence.
All three types of defendants violate valid law from a sense of conscience. All understand the nature and consequences of their acts, and none suffers any disability that might ground a legal excuse. No ordinary defense clearly applies, yet punishment may raise intuitive discomfort. Many readers might ask, “Are these the types of people and conduct we had in mind when we built the prisons?”
Such defendants sometimes seek judicial instructions regarding either the necessity defense or jury nullification. Appellate courts almost universally reject these requests, although trial courts occasionally instruct regarding the necessity defense, and these instructions sometimes generate acquittals.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Justification Defenses and Just Convictions , pp. 153 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998