Out of innocence, imminence, proportionality, reasonableness, and avoidance in regard to self-defense, I've spent a lot of time on avoidance.
Regardless of where you stand on the George Zimmerman verdict more than a decade ago, it was polarizing. A friend of a good friend blanked me after I said that the prosecution's evidence never came close to proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The last thing that she said to me was that the dead body was the proof.
During the Rittenhouse trial, the assistant prosecutor had the audacity to say that, "sometimes, you just have to take a beating." in regard to Rittenhouse shooting his attacker, Joseph Rosenbaum.
Austin Simon was armed with nothing but his body when he was (by legal definition) assaulting Jose Alba, with Alba being twice Simon's age and half his size. While Simon was leading Alba out by the collar, Alba grabbed a knife in a ditch effort and managed to kill Simon. Alvin Bragg decided to charge Alba with murder. Thankfully, the charges were dropped.
Now we have Jordan Neely, a clear assailant in the same district as the Alba case with the same DA, in which one of the brave souls that subdued him, Daniel Penny, is facing life in prison.
In all of these cases, proportionality is in question. The interesting thing is that, the people who want these defenders in prison might, at times, particularly in New York, have a legal case. As an ethical case or a logical case, I honestly think that they have nothing.
Every act of self-defense that results in a death is a case in which a would-be victim won a fight against a would-be murderer, or rapist, or batterer or something along those lines.
Every one of these cases is a homicide. The question is whether or not the homicide was justified.
Proportionality needs to be established to justify the legal killing of another person.
So, the mistake that I've been seeing made for more than a decade now is that the outcome of the encounter informs the proportionality of the defendant's actions.
No, in every self-defense killing, we're dealing with an uncertain future, we're assessing reasonableness in relation to proportionality, and we're dealing with people who think that their hind-sight is 20-20 (especially in New York).
Could Austin Simon have led Jose Alba out to a public street to have a calm and cordial conversion with Alba about why he should have just given the chips to his girlfriend who couldn't afford them after Simon had roughed Alba up and invaded his space? We can imagine that.
Most of us experience this thing called "empathy." I'm low on empathizing and high on systemizing myself; but, I've been given unwanted attention by a homeless guy who just got out of Rikers Island on the New York subway myself and, to be honest, I would have been more comfortable if I had a gun -- I'm not saying I would have pulled it; I'm just saying that it would have been nice to have it if things went south and I couldn't deescalate. I can empathize with Alba. I can understand that my after-the-fact ability to reason is different from a guy who is being actively assaulted. I know that I can imagine that Joseph Rosenbaum would have just taken Rittenhouse's gun and given him a calm lecture about social justice; but, I'm also not an idiot, and I can put myself in Kyle's shoes, and understand that giving my gun to that maniac would likely result in my death.
Proportionality isn't, and can't be, strictly about outcomes.
I carry a gun on me every day. If somebody pulls a knife on me, a lot of these morons would say that it wouldn't be proportional for me to pull my gun if I don't have a knife. Hell, I'm almost thirty-eight -- even though I'm still active and in pretty good shape, I'm not gonna win a fist fight with a majority of twenty-year-olds. This myopic view of proportionality from far too many people would tell me that an assailant in downtown Phoenix should just "give me a beating" and that I should just hope for the best because, if I pull my gun, that's not proportional.
There's a reason why most of these laws involve wording including "reasonable." Reasonable people don't expect clairvoyance. Reasonable people don't expect would-be victims to let the rapist have his way before they put a bullet in him. Reasonable people don't expect would-be victims to let assailants inflict every damage upon the victim before they respond.
Proportionality isn't about the results as a univariate analysis regarding outcomes. That's really a small component. Proportionality is what a reasonable person can expect that he or she is imminently going to happen to him or her.
There was a recent story of a bad guy brandishing a gun and holding up a diner. One of the patrons had a gun and managed to take down the bad guy while the bad guy was sticking up another patron who clearly feared for his life.
It turned out that the bad guy's gun was fake.
The result was that an armed person killed a person with a fake gun.
The reality is that a dozen people recognized a direct, imminent threat from a bad guy committing a felony with a gun that was meant to look real, and a good person reasonably reacted with a real gun to subdue the threat.
With perfect knowledge, the bad guy would still be alive, while hopefully serving a lengthy prison sentence. But, you and I don't have any knowledge more perfect than the guy who shot the bad guy.
Let's stop pretending that we have perfect knowledge of the immediate future, especially when we're under pressure.