Watkins v. State

MOYLAN, Judge. The appellant, Bruce Dwight Watkins, was convicted by a Montgomery County jury of second-degree murder. He raises the single contention that the trial judge erroneously failed to instruct the jury that even an initial aggressor at the nondeadly level may yet claim self-defense if the other party escalated the fight to the deadly level. Without rehearsing the at-times confused and sometimes inconsistent testimony of numerous witnesses, it is enough to point out that on September 16, 1987, the appellant and the homicide victim, Kenneth Gardner, engaged in a fight at the home of a third person.

In the course of that fight, the appellant stabbed the victim several times, causing the victim’s death. According to many witnesses, the appellant was the initial aggressor, albeit at the nondeadly level. According to ¹³⁸ the appellant, on the other hand, he was not the initial aggressor even at that level. In any event, the fight commenced at the nondeadly level, whoever the initial aggressor may have been, and the jury was correctly instructed as to the availability of the defense of self-defense under those circumstances.

They were instructed that if the appellant had been initially attacked, he would ordinarily be entitled to respond, with appropriate force, in self-defense. They were also told that if the appellant were the aggressor, however, he would not be entitled to claim self-defense. So far, all was well. The purely subsidiary issue, within the self-defense context, of whether a person is reasonable in his belief that he is in deadly peril or is reasonable in determining the degree of force necessary to fend off that peril, is not material to our decision here.

Where, within the self-defense context, the person defending himself perceives reasonably and responds reasonably, it is a case of perfect self-defense and the verdict is not guilty. Where, on the other hand, the defender unreasonably (though honestly) perceives the danger or unreasonably (though honestly) responds with more than necessary force, it is a case of imperfect self-defense, which mitigates the level of blameworthiness down to the manslaughter level even though it does not totally exculpate. The difference between exculpation and mitigation is not what matters in this case, however. We are concerned rather with the objective entitlement to claim self-defense in the first instance, a common denominator consideration which applies to perfect self-defense and imperfect self-defense alike.

Although the appellant