Encouraging Good Samaritans

A drunken quarrel flared in the shabby Newark apartment when Aaron R. Rudesel suddenly began berating his girl friend, Dollie Fair. After Aaron warmed up, he hit Dollie in the mouth. She brandished a knife; he cut her with another. A third member of the party, named John B. Lynn, jumped up blearily and cried, "Man, you shouldn't cut your woman like that." As the men grappled, Dollie fled. In the melee, Rudesel was stabbed, and then Lynn took it on the lam.

Dollie Fair and John Lynn both wound up on trial for killing Rudesel. And in his charge to the jury, the judge cast the case in terms of one question: To what extent were the accused entitled to defend themselves against Rudesel? So charged, the jury found Dollie guilty of manslaughter and Lynn of second-degree murder.

What the trial judge overlooked, said the New Jersey Supreme Court in the course of reversing both convictions, was the more important issue of Lynn's right to intervene in defense of Dollie. Striking a blow for good Samaritans, the court held that "one who intervenes in a struggle under a reasonable but mistaken belief that he is protecting another who he assumes is being unlawfully assaulted is thereby exonerated from criminal liability."

"Not only is it just that one should not be convicted of a crime if he selflessly attempts to protect the victim of an apparently unjustified assault," said the court, "but how else can we encourage bystanders to go to the aid of another who is being subjected to an assault?"

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