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papajohn1964 wrote:With all of this being said. Would deadly force have been justified? Can you draw on and possibly shoot someone to protect others?

Dirty Bob wrote:One of my chief problems -- in retrospect -- was that I had only one level of force to apply if words didn't work. If I'd had pepper spray, or a cane, I might well have used it to try to stop the two strangling Yellow Shirt. As it was, if words were unsuccessful, I would have had no option open except to shoot. All three were large men, and all were about 30 years younger than me, so I was not confident that I could jump into the fray empty-handed. I would not, by the way, ever consider using the pistol as a striking instrument. It would be difficult to justify a situation where "pistol whipping" was appropriate, but shooting was not.

Ya'll have had some very insightful replies, and I believe that a discussion like this helps me (and others, I hope) to think about such a situation and to perhaps try to decide if there's a "trigger" action which would justify taking action.

Regards,
Dirty Bob

Keith B wrote:

Crime: In the early morning hours of April 12, 1978, cousins John Arnold and John Plath, in their early twenties, along with their respective eleven-year-old and seventeen-year-old girlfriends, Carol Ullman and Cindy Sheets, borrowed a friend's car and went looking for wild mushrooms in Beaufort County. They encountered farm worker Betty Gardner as she walked along the side of the road. Gardner was alternately sexually assaulted, urinated on, stomped, beaten with a belt, hit with a jagged bottle, stabbed with a knife, and choked with a garden hose. All four persons at one time or another participated in physically assaulting Gardner. Testimony also indicated Arnold dragged Gardner into the woods to complete her murder, which he did by strangling her with the garden hose, getting leverage by putting his foot on her.