Community perceptions of allowable counterforce in self-defense and defense of property.

What level of force do people believe is appropriate to use in self-defense and defense of property? One answer is that a person may use only the bare minimum of force necessary to terminate the threat in self-defense and must retreat if it is possible. One may not use deadly force in defense of property since that would be disproportionate. This set of rules is in the Model Penal Code (MPC). The current research explores the patterning of lay views about the use of counterforce in defense of self and property. Several New Jersey samples (N = 197 total) made liability ratings for four self-defense and four property defense case vignettes that differed in their underlying rationales for action. For both the self-defense and property defense cases, participants gave much lower sentences for cases in which a person kills a thief who is stealing his car, kills an unarmed attacker, or kills an attacker even when he could safely retreat, as compared to a control case in which the person is killed in response to a trivial threat. Participants' sentencing ratings were predicted by their beliefs about whether the force the defender used in the situation was necessary. In addition, participants who lacked confidence in the ability of the criminal justice system to protect them and their property recommended shorter sentences; those with less confidence in the system seemed to believe that a person should not be punished as much for taking the law into his own hands. Further results suggest that participants believed that their sentencing judgments mirrored the New Jersey Criminal Code, modeled after the MPC, although they were actually discrepant from it. We consider implications of these results for legal codes.