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Was Bernie Miller's The Definition Of Self Defense Or Self-Defense?

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The case presented to us, was about Bernie Miller, a 26 year old man, who stabbed Troy Counts, a 27 year old man, after a game of poker. The defendant admitted to stabbing the victim twice but he was arguing the reason for the stabbing was legitimate under self-defense. After the arguments were done in the courtroom, we were sent into separate rooms to deliberate and to come up with a verdict for the crime. In my group, we decided to start off by reading the jury instructions page by page. We talked about whether there was enough proof to show malicious intent behind the stabbings. After a brief discussion, we agreed that we had doubts whether the stabbings were done with malice. Our conflict came when deciding between the meanings of unlawful wounding and self-defense. …show more content…

I brought up the question about the definition of self-defense because I started to believe that there was just not enough proof about the events that had accorded in the stabbing. I asked the group twice about their views of how they saw the events evolving throughout the “incident,” to be able to say firmly that the defendant was not simply in fear of his life, and that was the caused the stabbing. There were just too many a doubts, for me, of how the events could have spanned out. In the end we agreed that the crime was an act of self-defense and we were giving him the verdict of not guilty. I felt that my group decided upon a good method of coming to our decision. We worked together to read through the jury instructions and there were two people in my group who were far more knowledgeable and they helped us understand when we were confused. We basically broke down the instructions step by step and narrowed down our thought process to come to an agreed guilt and

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