The urban survival syndrome, in United States jurisprudence, can be used either as a defense of justification or of excuse. The first case using, unsuccessfully, the defense of "urban survival syndrome" is the 1994 Fort Worth, Texas murder trial of Daimion Osby. The use of the urban survival syndrome as a defense to criminal charges followed the success of the battered woman syndrome defense in State v. Kelly (1984), which was based on the acceptance that the presence of such a syndrome may cause the defendant, a victim of domestic violence, to reasonably believe she was in peril and was therefore justified in using deadly force, given the circumstances.
Defense As an excuse defense, the urban survival syndrome is presented as a version of the abuse defense. Here an individual experiencing the daily life of racial segregation and violence common in many inner cities in the United States causes a subjective state equivalent to that caused by survival in a violent battleground of war. As such it leads to a condition similar to a syndrome already recognized in both psychological and psychiatric practices, that is, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As a justification defense, the urban survival syndrome is offered to bolster self-defense claims in which a defendant argues that he or she should not be held criminally responsible for actions which broke the law, as the defendant was objectively reasonable in believing his or her lethal actions were necessary for survival. In this case, the act would be termed justifiable homicide. A defense of justification is a codification of the common law defense of necessity.
History
State v. Brown In State v. Brown, 91 N.M. 320, 573, P.2d 675 (N.M. 1977), the court was dealing with a similar situation to that of Osby, and a justification defense was used. The term, urban survival syndrome, had not yet come into being. Brown, a black man living in an inner city neighborhood, was charged with two counts of assault with intent to kill upon a police officer. Brown said that he was in fear of the police officers and acted in self-defense when he shot them. The court allowed defense witnesses to describe the verbal and physical harassment of blacks by police officers, including Brown, although the court refused to allow a social psychologist to testify describing studies of police conduct toward minority groups, nor those that concluded that minority groups might perceive police officers as hostile to them and would be apt to fear them in any street encounter. These studies could offer evidence of justification. Brown was convicted and appealed. The New Mexico Court of Appeals reversed the decision to exclude expert testimony and remanded the case back for a new trial. The court felt such testimony supported Brown in his claim that he was in fear of immediate bodily harm when he shot the police officers, rather than acting out of anger and rejection of authority, as the prosecution alleged. Therefore, evidence bearing on Brown's state of mind at the time of the offense had been excluded as a reversible error.
People v. Goetz In People v. Goetz, 68 N.Y.2d 96 (N.Y. 1986), Bernhard Goetz, a white man, used the defense of a subjective state of terror and fear to justify the shooting of four black teenagers on a New York City subway. The court held that the test for whether the use of deadly force is justified should be entirely subjective and focus on the defendant's state of mind at the time of the incident and dismissed the criminal indictments of attempted murder, assault, and reckless endangerment. However, upon appeal the New York Court of Appeals, in a unanimous finding, held that the use of an entirely subjective test to determine the appropriateness of deadly physical force by a defendant could permit a jury to acquit every defendant who believed that his actions were reasonable, regardless of how bizarre the rationale, creating a slippery slope. The jury could determine a different reasonable test for every single defendant claiming justification. The Court explained that the justification statute requires an objective element; deadly physical force is only permissible if a reasonable person would believe that he is in imminent fear of serious physical injury or death.
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