Case Study: Self Defense

Assignment:

• State v. Norman (Norman I)

• Norman v. State (Norman II)

• John Inazu, Learning to Disagree, October Chapter

Some disagreements can be managed through negotiation, partial agreement, or creative workarounds. But criminal law often forces zero-sum judgments: guilty or not guilty, justified or unjustified, prison or freedom, life or death. Self-defense makes this especially clear. If a person kills because they reasonably believe they are facing imminent deadly harm, the law may treat the killing as justified. But the word “reasonable” does enormous work. It does not simply describe what happened; it requires judgment.

Judy Norman’s case presses this problem to its breaking point: a horribly abused woman shoots and kills her abuser while he is sleeping. The legal problem is that self-defense usually requires an imminent threat, and a sleeping person does not fit that category easily. The human problem is that Judy’s life of terror makes it hard to say, from the outside, what choices she really had. Hard cases do not always produce middle ground. Sometimes we must make a judgment, but we perhaps we should make it with humility about what we do not know and with honesty about the assumptions we bring to words like “reasonable,” “imminent,” and “choice.”