KIRKSVILLE, MO. -- Fact Finder investigates a Missouri state law that may not be very clear to some people.
The Castle Doctrine is a little more than a year old and allows you to protect yourself in your own home.
We asked a local legal expert to explain the fairly new law to us.
“If the person is illegally in your house, whether that was because the entry was unlawful, they broke in, or whether that, and as a homeowner you have the ability to tell people, this is my property leave, and they're supposed to do that in some reasonable amount of time. And so, they're unlawfully there and you think force is necessary to end the trespass, then you get to use deadly force to do that,” says Truman State Professor of Justice Systems Martin Jayne.
Jayne tells Fact Finder the Castle Doctrine is a little different than other self defense laws.
He says according to the law, the use of deadly force in any other situation is acceptable if somebody is threatened with death.
Fact Finder also asked Jayne why such a law is necessary.
“Somebody would make a wrong decision about the need for the use of force. Some drunk comes in my house that thinks he’s in some other place, for example he’s not trying to hurt me. But I think he is and shoot him. And the jury would decide that it was unreasonable for me to have thought that I needed to do that to defend myself. And so they wanted to provide broader protection in the house,” says Jayne.
Jayne tells Fact Finder the idea behind the law was to allow greater use of force.
Fact Finder discovered the reason the law is unclear is partly due to the lack of instructions from the Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court has also not handed down the standardized instructions the courts are supposed to use. So if you're in the trial or if you're in a Coroner's Inquest, and you want to tell the jury what the law is, the prosecutor's left with trying to decide in his own because he doesn't have any directions from the Supreme Court,” Jayne says.
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