What do you do if your space shrimp fishing village is attacked by bandits? That is the question that the residents of a village on the planet of Sorgan find themselves in during the events of Episode 4 of Disney+’s The Mandalorian. Now, if you haven’t seen the show you should check it out because it’s quite good. If you want to watch the show before reading this article I won’t blame you, and you probably should, but if you want to plow ahead then I’ll try to make this as spoiler free as possible. That said, here’s the spoiler summary from the show so far: The Mandalorian (or Mando), a bounty hunter, was hired to return a bounty. The bounty turned out to be internet sensation Baby Yoda. Mando decided he didn’t want the Baby experimented on, so he steals him from the remnants of the Empire and goes on the run. Thus, he finds himself on Sorgan confronted by two space shrimp farmers. This brings us back to the original question, what do you do if you find your village attacked by Klatoonian raiders? Well, you really only have a few options: option 1 you run away and find somewhere else to live, option 2 you do nothing and keep giving them what they want from your village and hope they don’t kill you (hint: probably not your best option), option 3 you rally the villagers and fight back, option 4 you hire a professional bounty hunter who’s a bit down on his luck and protecting the internet’s new cutest thing ever. Guess which option these guys picked. If you guessed option 4, you are correct (incidentally, if you guessed option 3 you’re kind of right but it wasn’t what we were going for so half points).
Now, let’s make a slight tweak to the show here and make Mando a law abiding citizen who doesn’t really want to go out and straight murder these raiders for money. Does Mando have some legal justification that will let him keep his newfound law abiding attitude and still take the payment the villagers offered him? It might surprise some to learn that the law does make some accommodations for the use of deadly force that might let Mando take this job without looking at the next rest of his life in a New Republic prison. They are called justification defenses and in broad terms they all look like this: the Defendant (Mando in our case) says, “yes I killed all those raiders but I was legally justified in killing them because of …” whatever specific defense applies. Let’s look at three justification defenses and see if they’ll help our friend Mando out of the dilemma he finds himself in. All three of these defenses are fairly standardized across the jurisdictions (at least at the basic level we’re going to cover here) so I’m going to use Oregon’s laws as examples. If you want the law where you live, check your local law library. Also, at this point it seems worth a reminder that in real life by the time you’ve gotten to the point of considering what defenses might apply to an action you are already in deep trouble so take a few steps back and avoid trouble where at all possible. Now, back to the Mando.
The first defense we should consider is perhaps the most famous, Self-Defense. In its purest form a case of self-defense looks like this. You’re minding your own business sitting in a bar, maybe getting hired to run some passengers off world, when all of a sudden a Rodian drops in across from you and points a blaster at your head. Were that Rodian to say something about your dead body being the idea of the situation you would be fully justified to shoot him first. Let’s break this down into the elements of the defense. Looking at Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) 161.209 we see that a person is entitled to use self-defense when they reasonably believe that they are in imminent danger of having unlawful physical force used against them and that they may respond with whatever degree of force they believe is reasonably necessary. Subject to some limitations, but we’ll get back to that later. Applying the self-defense rule to our bar example above: our hero reasonably believes that the Rodian is imminently going shoot him, because the Rodian has just told him that’s the idea. There’s nothing lawful about shooting someone in a bar because they have a bounty on their head placed there by a crime lord (look, if it’s not obvious at this point that we’re talking about Han and Greedo in the cantina during A New Hope you might want to go watch the original Star Wars movies). So, Han reasonably believes he is going to be killed unlawfully by Greedo and he gets to shoot him in self-defense, but what about Mando and the raiders? Well, we run into one problem right away. Unlike the cantina example the Raiders aren’t threating Mando himself so self-defense is out. Luckily, there is another. No, not another Skywalker (well yes apparently one of those too) but another defense.
Closely related to self-defense is the defense of others. It has the same elements, reasonable belief, imminent treat, and reasonable response but you are acting in defense of someone else instead of in defense of yourself. This looks more like what Mando might rely on to attack the raiders. The villagers are certainly in danger and it is reasonable for Mando to believe that they are. The trouble is, there is very little to indicate that the danger is imminent. Put another way, it is not an imminent threat for me to type in this article that I’m going to shoot you. I don’t own a gun and I don’t know who you are or where to find you. You have no right to self-defense against me because of that line in an article you read online (keep that in mind please). Similarly, even a vague threat from the raiders that they’ll be back isn’t enough for a threat to be imminent. When we make justification defenses available in the law they are meant to be available as last resorts.
The final justification defense we might look at is defense of property. ORS 161.229: A person is justified in using physical force, other than deadly physical force, upon another person when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes it to be necessary to prevent or terminate the commission or attempted commission by the other person of theft or criminal mischief (damaging or destroying someone else’s property) of property. At first blush, this looks promising for Mando. The raiders are certainly committing theft and criminal mischief against the villagers. The trouble Mando will run into in asserting defense of property is that it limits the use of deadly force which is, if we’re being honest, Mando’s go to. See ORS 161.229. The limit on deadly force is something of a reflection on our values as a society. You aren’t privileged to kill someone over property because we value life more than stuff, at least that’s the theory. Mando would be privileged to use deadly force if, and only if, he were defending the premises and not the stuff there, which he is by the end of the episode. He is privileged to defend the premises by deadly force if necessary because by this point he is trying to prevent the raiders (who are trespassing) from committing a felony by force or violence (wholesale murder of the village). There’s a problem though, Mando and Cara Dune baited the raiders into attacking. This would make sense if you’re a mercenary hired to protect a village, but it would also negate any self-defense claim. Recall that you are only privileged to use self-defense if you are in danger, but you are lose that privilege if you provoke that danger with the aim of then being able to defend yourself. For example, if you attack a raider camp with the aim of provoking them into attacking you so that you can defend yourself, you do not get to claim self-defense when you then kill all the raiders and destroy their AT-ST. The reason for this is of course because we don’t want to make it legal for someone to provoke someone into a fight just so they could beat or kill them and then claim self-defense. Self-defense is designed to be a rare event reserved for those situations when you are truly under threat and don’t have a choice other than to defend yourself.
The real problem we run into in this analysis is that when legislatures create these types of justification defenses they are created for individuals not communities. For the protection of communities we typically create police forces or militaries depending on if we’re looking to protect from internal or external threats respectively. These laws simply weren’t made for the situation the Sorgan farmers found themselves in and unfortunately we don’t get enough background on the planet to know what form of government it might have and if that government has any protection to offer the farmers. It seems clear though that rather than looking at justification defenses for the assaults, murders, and various other crimes Mando commits (or allegedly commits) it makes more sense to look at this as a quasi-governmental action to protect the village. If you look at in that light, a sovereign entity like the village is perfectly at liberty to protect its sovereignty from outside threats like other governments or raiders. Sovereignties can do things like preemptive strikes or hiring mercenary forces that individuals can’t and under those parameters Mando and Cara’s actions were entirely justified.
