Defense of Others
The rules are the same when force is used to protect another from danger. Generally, the defendant must have a reasonable belief that the third party is in a position where they would have the right of self-defense. For example, a person who unknowingly chances upon two actors practicing a fight would be able to defend their restraint of the one that appeared to be the aggressor. However, in many jurisdictions a person who causes injury in defense of another may be liable to criminal and civil charges if such defence turned out to be unnecessary. Most courts have ruled that such a defense cannot be used to protect friends or family members who have engaged in an illegal fight. Likewise, one cannot use this to aid a criminal.
Defense of others is called pikuach nefesh in Jewish law. One may violate most negative commandments of the Torah in order to save someone's life.
Read more about this topic: Right Of Self-defense
Famous quotes containing the words defense of and/or defense:
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
—Barry Goldwater (b. 1909)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)