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Notes -
<law geek mode> The Castle Doctrine is irrelevant here - the Castle Doctrine (which applies in every DTR state except Nebraska) says that even in duty-to-retreat jurisdictions you don't have a duty to retreat if a self-defence situation arrives in your own home. It isn't relevant in jurisdictions with strong stand-your-ground laws. I strongly suspect you mean SYG states for the win.
This is definitely a case where the SYG vs DTR scissor I wrote about previously applies, in that if you aren't familiar with the basic assumptions of SYG culture Penny is obviously a murderer and only a moron could acquit, and vice versa for someone unfamiliar with the basic assumptions behind DTR culture. But I don't think that SYG vs DTR (NY is DTR) as a legal issue will be relevant in this case - the trial is going to be about whether the length of time Penny maintained the chokehold after Neely passed out is so excessive that in constitutes either negligent or reckless homicide. </law geek mode>
Thank you for this!
What's say about DTR vs self-defense for a situation in which an obviously mentally unwell person is making unpredictable and violent gestures but not necessarily at a direct target.
"obviously mentally unwell" = Would pass the "reasonable person" standard. (i.e. mumbling to themselves, does not respond to verbal interaction in reasonable ways, seems to be addressing things that are not there etc.)
"unpredictable / violent gestures" = Gestures with any body part that resemble violent actions - strangling, clawing, punching, kicking etc. Presence of a weapon not necessary.
If both of those conditions are present in a public setting, what's the law geekery I need to be aware of?
I don't think it is actually a DTR vs SYG situation - what my effortpost was trying to say is that the fundamental difference between DTR and SYG is how you think about a situation where both sides contributed to a dispute escalating to violence but one side was clearly "in the right" on the merits of the original dispute that was being escalated.
Your question is closer to "When is the threat posed by a dangerous-looking crazy person sufficiently grave and imminent that you can take them out?", where as far as I am aware the answer is "Whatever the jury thinks is reasonable."
Given that Penny isn't being charged with murder or 1st degree manslaughter (in NY, any intentional, unlawful violence which ends in a death and doesn't qualify as murder is 1st degree manslaughter) it looks like in this particular case the prosecution are planning to concede that Penny could legally take down Neely if he did so competently, and instead are going to argue that Penny was criminally irresponsible in the way he did it.
"All good Samaritans must be licensed and up to date with their paperwork"
-- New York State, 2025.
It wasn't a paperwork violation - it was a competence violation.
"All good Samaritans must know the difference between lethal and less-lethal violence and make an honest attempt to act on that knowledge" is sufficient to condemn Penny (unless you are the kind of right-winger who favours summary execution of street crazies)
This is the kind of misapplication of scientism and legalism that is divorced from the real world. This is the same line of thinking as "just shoot the bad guy in the leg!"
Immediate personal combat is pretty much a zero-to-100 situation. If a body decides to stay and fight instead of flee, cognition hyperfocuses on the swift application of violence until the thread is wholly neutralized. There are no half measures. You see this even in professionals where many cops - experienced ones, often - will mag dump into a suspect, only stopping to assess the situation when they've finished all of their rounds. Trying to calibrate an in-time response is asking a human being to perform a level of parallel cognition that is simply impossible. You are asking them to slow down time. You are asking them to read the minds of others. You are asking them to simultaneously put personal safety concerns aside in order while also adhering to codified law they probably are not personally familiar with.
Can a punch be either lethal or less-lethal? What's that dependent on?
What if you are, in fact, a professional, using professionally sanctioned techniques to subdue but, because of unknowable physical and pharmacological conditions, the restrained person dies? (I am talking about the George Floyd case here).
Again "know the difference between lethal and less-lethal violence and make an honest attempt to act on that knowledge" has so many failure modes built into it that it reads to me as "You can defend yourself, but only if you don't, you know, defend too hard." What's too hard? I agree that it's "whatever the jury says" - which is going to be influenced by a bunch of circumstantial factors like race, gender, occupation, cultural history etc. And this is because there isn't a good standard here. And this is because we have a weird societal deference to the crazy and homeless (see recent main thread on homelessness).
This is an unfair hyperbole.
I am the kind of right-winger who doesn't want to wait until the street crazy has the knife to my neck before responding. That's why my initial question involved a circumstance in which violent gestures were already present. If I feel like someone could, in a matter of seconds, represent a clear physical threat to me or others, my first instinct is going to be to get the hell out of there. But, failing that, I need to know what my options are. If the other party isn't mentally capable of perceiving reality, then I really need to know what actions I can take to defend myself (or others) because that person, by definition, cannot be reasoned with, cannot be expected to respond in "normal" ways and, in fact, may have a perception of the situation utterly divorced from the reality around them.
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Even in Texas and Florida, that would not meet the legal threshold for self defense of any sort, let alone lethal violence.
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