'Stand your ground' and 'castle' doctrines

Defense of a dwelling or other places from Anglo-American and European legal perspective

Abstract

Although self-defense belongs to the classical criminal justice institutes, over the last few decades its boundaries have been re-examined in the legislation and comparative case law. While European law traditionally consider that the attacked person is not obligated to retreat from the attacker, in Anglo-American law this rule was only effective when it came to the defense of dwellings. At the beginning of the 21st century, the self-defense was reformed in many US states, with the introduction of a subjective criterion, when the rejection of the attack by the deadly force is to be considered necessary, and the introduction of several legal assumptions, which, in effect, greatly increased the number of cases where the murder of the attacker was justified. While extending the right to a self-defense increases the likelihood of possible abuse, the fact that in the Serbian judiciary the justification on this basis applies very restrictively does not encourage. The author points out that it is necessary to allocate defense of dwellings from the general regime of self-defense, and to overcome the inertia of courts on that basis by a different legislative approach.