The Statutory Felony Disqualification for Self-Defense

I am working on a new edition of the self-defense book I wrote in 1996. As in the story of Rip Van Winkle, a lot has changed in twenty years. Most notably, the General Assembly adopted new statutes in 2011 on self-defense and related defenses. This blog post addresses one of those provisions, in G.S. 14-51.4, which disqualifies a person from relying on self-defense while committing, attempting to commit, or escaping from the commission of a felony. North Carolina appellate courts have not yet considered the meaning of this provision. Cf. State v. Rawlings, ___ N.C. App. ___, 762 S.E.2d 909 (2014) (felony disqualification did not apply to case in which defendant’s offense predated enactment of provision, and court expressed no opinion on proper construction of provision). What felonies are disqualifiers? Interpreted literally, the language in G.S. 14-51.4 covers all felonies, regardless of the nature of the offense or its relationship to the incident in which the need for defensive force arose. To take an extreme example, a woman in possession of a little more than one and a half ounces of marijuana, a felony in North Carolina, could not rely on self-defense to justify the use of defensive force if her abusive boyfriend, for reasons unrelated to her marijuana possession, began to beat and threaten to kill her. Such a result would represent a drastic change to self-defense law in North Carolina and elsewhere, which provides for forfeiture of a person’s right to act in self-defense only when the person [...]