‘Reasonable Belief’ in Proving Justified Deadly Force

What is the Reasonable Person Legal Standard?

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(I have yet to find a new proofreader so if there are mistakes, typos, etc. I apologize.)

Today’s Lawful2Shoot? Focus: What does it mean to ‘reasonably believe’ when you’re in a situation where deadly force is necessary to defend yourself from an imminent threat of great bodily harm or death or to prevent an imminent commission of a forcible felony as stated in Florida state statute 776.012 (2)  

When it comes to determining what reasonable belief is in the legal system process, there are two perspectives, yours and five groups of persons involved in legal process, which most likely will be, a witness, law enforcement responding officers and investigators, a prosecutor, judge, and the wildcard, a jury.  

When you kill a person and claim it was in self-defense your subjective reasoning and overall mindset will be judged by the five groups of persons state above to determine if they too would have acted as you acted, when faced with that same situation. Their evidence-based objective reasoning combined with the applicable state statutes, case law, and jury instruction, will all be used to determine if your deadly force actions were lawful.   

The five groups of persons will analyze the evidence collected from the scene and from investigative efforts of law enforcement and the prosecutors. This two-tiered production of evidence and the efforts of persuasion via legal arguments in court by the state verses your lawyer, will prove or disprove your ‘reasonable belief’ to be lawful or unlawful.

It is the production of the evidence and then the persuasion arguments by the prosecutor and your defense lawyer, both offering their opposing interpretations of the evidence, which establishes your subjective belief and reasoning. Then your reasonable belief is compared to what the legal system’s objective reasoning is, which will either agree with or reject to some degree your claim of good faith reasonable belief that it was a lawful killing.  

Obviously, your reasonable belief is a byproduct of your subjective understanding of what you reasoned to be happening at the moment of crisis and jeopardy.  And your subjective belief might or might not remain credible if by the evidence it was later proven you were mistaken in your belief. But if that was the case, would you face legal culpability even if the evidence proves your perspective was wrong?

It all depends if you can prove your action in killing in self-defense was reasonable and any reasonable person would have done the same thing in the same situation----act as you acted. In other words, your mistake in judgement in the moment was understandable and anyone else would have made the same mistake.

The legal claim of self-defense comes down to how you produce evidence that your subjective belief would in fact, be the same belief any ‘reasonable person’ in the same situation would conclude; to use deadly force how you did, in the manner in which you did, knowing what you knew at the time.