ABSTRACT

This chapter presents criminal defenses into three, rather than two, categories: justified acts tout court, excused acts tout court, and "justified wrongs." It reviews some familiar difficulties of classifying and understanding the necessity defense and explains these difficulties by reference to uncertainty in the concept of wrongdoing. The chapter considers the relationship between justified wrongs and excused behavior in the context of trying to understand and classify the defense of duress. It examines the familiar problems that flow from the rights and obligations of third parties in the face of justified and excused actions. The chapter describes the implications of the analysis for the claim that justifications refer to general characteristics of the act and excuses refer to idiosyncratic characteristics of the actor. It also presents matters together with observations on the use and abuse of structured thinking in analyzing the criminal defenses.