ABSTRACT
It is a basic requirement that the force used by the defendant must be justified as necessary. This means that the defendant must show that the circumstances in which he acted must be sufficiently and imminently threatening (Devlin v Armstrong (1971)). This threat must not be created by the defendant himself (Malnik v DPP (1989)) and the force used in response must be reasonable in the view of the defendant and proportionate to the threat (Clegg (1995); Martin (2000)). Proportionality may also be judged subjectively (Owino (1995)). That said, in some of the cases below, the courts have allowed the defendant to ‘strike the first blow’ so that they do not have to wait for their attacker to apply force towards them, and there is no duty to retreat from the threatening situation.
