Odger's English Common Law

COMPULSION AND COERCION. 127
own life. 1 No one is entitled to kill an innocent and un-
offending person in order to save his own life. But in other
less serious cases even moral compulsion may afford a defence
if the person accused can show that his act " was done only
in order to avoid consequences which could not otherwise be
avoided, and which, if they had followed, would have inflicted
upon him or upon others, whom he was bound to protect,
inevitable and irreparable evil ; that no more was done than
was reasonably necessary for that purpose, and that the
evil inflicted by it was not disproportionate to the evil
avoided." 2
The dread of future penalties cannot be expected
to prevail against the certainty of present suffering.
Compulsion is admitted as an excuse for some of the minor forms of
treason. If a man who has joined with traitors and taken part in a
rebellion can satisfy the jury that he did so only under compulsion, that
the compulsion continued during the whole time that he was with the
rebels, that he did no more than he was compelled to do, and that he
desisted as soon as the compulsion was removed, he is entitled to be
acquitted of the treason. 8 " If a man be desperately assaulted and in
peril of death, and cannot otherwise escape unless, to satisfy his
assailant's fury, he will kill an innocent person then present, the fear
and actual force will not acquit him of the crime and punishment of
murder, if he commit the fact, for he ought rather to die himself than
kill an innocent ; but if he cannot otherwise save his own life, the law
permits him in his own defence to kill the assailant, for by the violence
of the assault, and the offence committed upon him by the assailant
himself, the law of nature and necessity hath made him his own
protector." 4
This passage was cited with approval by the Court in the judgment in
a well-known case, in which some shipwrecked sailors, who were adrift in
a boat and in peril of immediate death from starvation, killed a boy who
was among their number and fed on his body. They were all held guilty
of murder.
*
In some cases the law assumes, with singular blindness to
the actual facts of life, that a married woman is incapable of
freely exercising her will and judgment in the presence of her
husband. Hence, if she commit a crime in the presence of
her husband, or even in his company, the law presumes that
i U. v. Tyler (1838), 8 C. & P. 616.
2 Stephen, Dig. Criminal Law, 6th ed., 24 ; and see B. v. Tyler, suprd.
3 B. v. M'Grcnvther (1746), 18 St. Tr. 394.
4 1 Hale, P. C. 51.
6 B. v. Dudley and Stephens (1884), 14 Q. B. D. 273, 283.