Opinion
Case No. 2D04-1714.
Opinion filed March 11, 2005.
Appeal from the Circuit Court for Hillsborough County, Richard A. Nielsen, Judge.
James Marion Moorman, Public Defender, and Allyn M. Giambalvo, Assistant Public Defender, Bartow, for Appellant.
Charles J. Crist, Jr., Attorney General, Tallahassee, and Cerese Crawford Taylor, Assistant Attorney General, Tampa, for Appellee.
S.J.C. challenges an order withholding adjudication after the trial court found him guilty of committing a battery on his mother. He argues he was entitled to assert self-defense to his mother's corporal punishment and that the State failed to overcome this defense beyond a reasonable doubt. We reverse.
Fifteen-year-old S.J.C. provoked his mother's ire, according to her testimony, when she arrived home to discover he had skipped school to go fishing and had written profanity on his sister's makeup case. She approached S.J.C., who was sitting in a recliner, intending to "pop" him with a board she had grabbed from the corner of the room. The undisputed testimony about this board was that it had little nails sticking out of it. S.J.C. saw the nails sticking out of the board as it was coming toward him, and his mother admitted she, too, saw the nails but only in mid-swing. S.J.C. deflected the strike by pushing the board back against his mother, causing her to stumble on a footstool. S.J.C. was charged with battery, and the trial court found him guilty but withheld adjudication.
S.J.C. argues he was entitled to a judgment of dismissal because the undisputed facts established he was acting in self-defense. We agree. "The [S]tate has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, which includes proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense."Hernandez Ramos v. State, 496 So. 2d 837, 838 (Fla. 2d DCA 1986). Normally, self-defense is a defense to battery. Notwithstanding this defense, the State argues S.J.C. was not entitled to use self-defense against his mother because she was using corporal punishment against him. The State derives its argument from the language of the self-defense statute:
A person is justified in the use of force, except deadly force, against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against such other's imminent use ofunlawful force. § 776.012, Fla. Stat. (2003) (emphasis added). The State reads this statute in conjunction with case law acknowledging that corporal punishment by parents is lawful unless it crosses the line to abuse. Raford v. State, 828 So. 2d 1012 (Fla. 2002). It combines these two propositions to conclude that because a person may protect himself against only unlawful force, and corporal punishment is not unlawful, S.J.C. was not permitted to defend himself against his mother's corporal punishment.
The State's argument turns on the fact that S.J.C.'s mother's raising a board with nails in it to strike her child did not result in any harm. Paradoxically, what prevented the harm from happening was S.J.C.'s use of self-defense. Under the State's theory, S.J.C.'s mother's use of corporal punishment was lawful because it was not abuse, and it was not abuse because S.J.C. was not harmed; therefore, S.J.C. cannot assert self-defense because the force his mother used against him was lawful. See § 39.01(2), Fla. Stat. (2003) ("Corporal discipline of a child by a parent or legal custodian for disciplinary purposes does not in itself constitute abuse when it does not result in harm to the child."). The result in accepting the State's position is a catch-22: S.J.C. could not assert self-defense because he was not harmed; but if he had allowed his mother to strike him in the face with the board with nails in it, then he would have been harmed and he could have defended himself.
The fatal flaw in the State's position is the assumption that S.J.C.'s mother's act was not abuse. It is true that the trial court, in admonishing the mother about using care in her future disciplinary methods, did not state that the mother was abusing S.J.C. when it noted, "[A]s to you, you are not before me for any violations of law. I'm not saying that any laws have been violated with respect to any of your conduct." We do not consider this comment to be an indication that the trial court decided one way or the other whether the mother's act was abuse for the same reason the trial court stated: because the mother was not on trial. We are likewise unpersuaded that the lack of resulting harm to S.J.C. necessarily equals a lack of abuse. Although section 39.01(2) specifically states that corporal punishment that does not result in harm is excluded from the definition of abuse, it should be noted that this exclusion is within the context of dependency and termination of parental rights. In contrast, the definition of child abuse for criminal purposes is found in section 827.03, Florida Statutes (2003), and it includes "[a]n intentional act that could reasonably be expected to result in physical or mental injury to a child." § 827.03(1)(b). Under this definition of child abuse, "corporal punishment" that could reasonably be expected to injure a child is criminally punishable abuse, even if the act is not completed to bring about the expected injury.
Our discussion of this definition of abuse is intended not to suggest that S.J.C.'s mother ought to be criminally prosecuted but rather to show how a parent, intending to use "corporal punishment," nevertheless may cause a child to reasonably expect to be injured sufficient to invoke that child's right to use self-defense. Whatever the intent of S.J.C.'s mother, the question is whether S.J.C. defended himself to the extent he reasonably believed was necessary to protect himself from his mother's imminent, unlawful force. If her act of raising a board with nails in it to strike him could reasonably be expected to result in injury — and we conclude it could — it was an unlawful act and S.J.C. was entitled to use reasonable self-defense to protect himself from such imminent force.
S.J.C. testified without rebuttal that he was afraid when he saw the board with nails sticking out coming at his face. It is undisputed that his mother intended to "pop" him with this board. It is likewise undisputed that the board had nails in it and that S.J.C. saw the nails in the board. S.J.C. therefore reasonably feared that this unlawful force was imminent, and he used nondeadly force to defend himself. Accordingly, we conclude the State failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that S.J.C. did not act in self-defense, and the trial court should have granted S.J.C.'s motion for judgment of dismissal. We therefore reverse with directions that S.J.C.'s withhold of adjudication be vacated.
Reversed.
NORTHCUTT and KELLY, JJ., Concur.
NOT FINAL UNTIL TIME EXPIRES TO FILE REHEARING MOTION AND, IF FILED, DETERMINED.