Making it OK to murder
Salon, by Lisa Riordan Seville
July 19, 2010

The right to self-defense is rarely invoked in a murder trial. But that may be changing

Ziad Tayeh was acquitted after claiming self-defense in a 2006 stabbing in New York.

Even now, Ziad Tayeh has a hard time explaining how a late-night stop for a bite to eat ended in a fight for his life.

Early one October morning in 2006, Tayeh, then a 23-year-old community college student in Brooklyn, New York, hopped in his Lexus SUV and drove into midtown Manhattan to grab a plate of chicken and rice at a popular food cart on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.

He had just finished ordering when, according to Tayeh, three youths, including Tyrone Noel Gibbons, a 19-year-old from New Jersey, tried to cut in line. Angry words were exchanged. The dispute moved from the cart to their cars. The men spilled back onto the street two blocks away where, Tayeh says, Gibbon’s Toyota Yaris boxed him in. The men demanded he get out. He did. "I pulled a knife out and I told them to back up," Tayeh told The Crime Report. "They called my bluff."

One of the three men came at Tayeh with a knife and held it to his neck. Tayeh swung his arm, the knife still in his hand. In the ensuing melee, Tayeh struck Tyrone in the torso. Then Tayeh jumped in his car and drove away. An officer picked him up 30 blocks away.

Grilled by investigators, then the district attorney, Tayeh said he had fought back in self-defense. He learned only after hours at the precinct that Gibbons had died. Tayeh was charged with second-degree murder. "No one understood how scared I was," he recalls. Three years later, a jury accepted his self-defense argument and found him not guilty of manslaughter.

Tayeh was fortunate. While all 50 states have laws that protect the right of self-defense, this right appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. And the difficulty of applying the laws to specific places, circumstances and weapons has made such a defense a risky, and therefore rarely used, tactic in courts. Even more rare is a case in which a claim of self-defense leads to a not-guilty verdict.

Source: Salon