"Good fences make good neighbors," wrote poet Robert Frost in "The Mending Wall." For one Broken Arrow family, this may ring particularly true.
Police responding to a call of an assault and stabbing determined that a 13-year-old boy who stabbed a neighbor was acting in self-defense after the man attacked his family.
Reports say 31-year-old Noah Blacketer approached a mother and her two sons, aged 13 and 19, as they were unloading groceries yesterday afternoon. The elder brother told reporters that Blacketer was making strange accusations and began assaulting them before his younger brother intervened on behalf of their mother.
The family says their neighbor had never been a problem in the past, but a couple of weeks ago, he changed. They said he would come to their house in the middle of the night, yelling at them about "banging on his house windows and walls and doors." The older son said that the family never knew what he was talking about, but the neighbor would become so aggressive that the family had to call police.
Yesterday, he came again, and this time, he was violent. According to the older brother, he, his younger brother, and his mother tried to reason with Blacketer, but to no avail. The man started a physical altercation with the family members: "My mom got one, my brother got haymakered in the face; got his wrist broken by him and everything." He says his younger brother was knocked down but got up quickly as Blacketer attacked his mother, stabbing him in the back with a pocket knife.
Blacketer left the scene and drove himself to the hospital a non-life-threatening injury. He told hospital workers that he fell off a ladder and was impaled on a piece of metal. Police tracked him down at the hospital and arrested him on a municipal complaint of assault and battery.
Investigator's call the boy's actions self-defense, and no members of his family are charged in the incident.
Oklahoma's self-defense laws uphold both the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground laws. The Castle Doctrine holds that a person has a right to be safe and secure in his or her own home, and he or she has the right to use lethal force if necessary against an intruder. Stand Your Ground Laws, which came under fire after the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, hold that a person has no duty to retreat if threatened in a place where he or she has a lawful right to be.
In this case, the boy did not use lethal force against his neighbor, who suffered only a minor injury in the stabbing. However, a stabbing could very easily be lethal force. If the neighbor had died as a result of the stabbing, the act would likely have been considered justifiable homicide in the eyes of the law. Oklahoma law defines justifiable homicide as follows:
A. Homicide is also justifiable when committed by any person in any of the following cases:
1. When resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to commit any felony upon him, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is;
2. When committed in the lawful defense of such person or of another, when the person using force reasonably believes such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to terminate or prevent the commission of a forcible felony; or
3. When necessarily committed in attempting, by lawful ways and means, to apprehend any person for any felony committed; or in lawfully suppressing any riot; or in lawfully keeping and preserving the peace.
B. As used in this section, "forcible felony" means any felony which involves the use or threat of physical force or violence against any person. 21 O.S. � 733
Use of lethal force in self-defense must be commensurate to the threat. A person is allowed to defend himself or herself and to defend the lives and safety of others, but lethal force in defense of property or killing a person to prevent a misdemeanor or non-violent felony is not justified under the law.
