People v. State

“Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out to a correspondent who had been complaining about the inefficiency of the police, that any citizen has the right to arrest a malefactor and bring him before a magistrate. “The law of England and of this country,” he wrote, “has been very careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on every citizen.” State exercise of that right through a police force had gone on so steadily that not only were citizens indisposed to exercise it, but probably not one in ten thousand knew he had it.” — Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (1935)

Seattle crime-fighting “superhero” Phoenix Jones knows he has it, and more power to him.

The Indiana Supreme Court, on the other hand, despite all the public outrage over its decision in Barnes v. State, continues to insist that in Indiana the Castle Doctrine is no longer a defense to the crime of battery (defined by the Indiana Code as “touch[ing] . . . in a rude, insolent, or angry manner”) when it’s a police officer rather than a mere mundane (whom Hoosiers are as free to batter as before) whose unlawful residential entry a homeowner tries to prevent or terminate by such “touching.” (Interestingly, the Court’s opinion on rehearing doesn’t mention the statutory definition of battery, and appears to implicitly broaden it, by denying the right of homeowners even to “get physical” with police officers. But I can easily imagine “getting physical” in ways that don’t necessarily involve touching in a “rude, insolent, or angry manner.” Can a bouncer who bodily and forcefully but otherwise calmly and non-violently removes a belligerent drunk from a bar automatically be said to touch him “rudely” or “insolently” or “angrily”? This would seem like exactly the kind of question a jury should decide. But the very point of Barnes v. State was to preclude the jury from deciding this kind of question.)

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