Two recent high-profile Texas homicides—the stabbing death of a 17-year-old high school student on April 2, 2025, at a track meet in Frisco and the May 17, 2025, shooting death of a former Afghanistan war hero in a Houston parking lot—involve claims of self-defense. Both homicides escalated from verbal to physical confrontations between the individuals involved and resulted in tragic outcomes.
Not every homicide—the causing the death of another person—is a crime in Texas. The state’s legislature has carved out three widely recognized exceptions when a homicide is not a criminal offense:
- Self-defense: homicide justified when the person taking the life believes they are at imminent risk of death or serious bodily injury;
- Defense of Others: homicide is justified when the person taking the life believes they are protecting another person from the imminent risk of death or serious bodily injury; and
- Defense of Property: Homicide is justified, in much more limited circumstances, when the person taking the life does so to prevent serious crimes (like robbery or burglary) involving property.
With respect to self-defense, Texas is a “stand your ground” state, a much debated defense (especially in murder cases) that there is no duty to retreat before using either lethal or non-lethal force in self-defense. The jury is specifically instructed that it cannot consider even the possibility of retreat when determining the reasonableness of a claim of self-defense.
Over the past several decades, Texas has continued to bolster its self-defense laws. For example, the legislature has extended civil liability immunity to those who are acquitted of using lethal force in self-defense and just recently passed a bill that extends civil liability immunity to those who threaten to use force in self-defense.
Despite its pro-Second Amendment stance and support for “stand your ground” defenses, the Texas Legislature has established seven strict elements necessary to establish self-defense. They are:
- There must be reasonable belief of threat: An individual claiming self-defense must show that their use of force was immediately necessary to protect themselves from another person’s use or attempted use of force.
- The use of force must proportional to threat: An individual’s right to use force in the face of a threat does not extend to the actual use of excessive or disproportionate force. In short, deadly force is justified only when an individual believes that it is immediately necessary to protect themselves or others from death or serious bodily injury and/or to prevent certain specified violent crimes.
- The threat must be immediate: The threat must be imminent, immediately necessary at the moment—not used in a preemptive or retaliatory manner.
- There must be no provocation: A person claiming self-defense must not have provoked, initiated, or escalated the confrontation.
- Not engaged in criminal activity: A claim of self-defense does not extend to those engaged in criminal activity at the time of the incident.
- The Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine: These two concepts are closely intertwined. Stand your ground gives an individual the right not to retreat from a threat, provided they did not provoke the threat and were not engaged in criminal activity at the time of the threat. The Castle Doctrine allows a person to use lethal or non-lethal force against someone forcefully and unlawfully entering (or attempting to enter) their habitation, vehicle, or workplace.
- In defense of third parties: This element allows a person to use lethal or non-lethal force to protect others from unlawful force or specified violent crimes when they reasonably believe intervention is immediately necessary.
Texas laws protecting the right to self-defense, however, are not a license to kill outside of these seven elements. In other words, mere gestures or words do not justify the use of force.
Further, a person charged with murder or causing serious bodily injury bears the initial burden of proof of presenting some evidence—at least enough that a reasonable jury could find self-defense given the facts presented—which then shifts the burden to the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person’s actions were not justified.
As recently as 2022, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) held (Rodgers v. State) that a defendant’s testimony alone, claiming self-defense, is sufficient to warrant a jury charge on self-defense. The CCA held that under Section 9.32 of the Texas Penal Code, a defendant is entitled to a self-defense jury instruction if there is “any evidence” supporting the claim, irrespective of the trial judge’s or prosecution’s belief in the credibility of the claim.
Defending one’s self, family or home should be enshrined in our legal system, but self defense should not be used to justify unprovoked or unreasonable violence against others.
Self-defense claims may be relatively simple to raise, but in many cases, they remain difficult defenses for those accused of a violent crime. This is why criminal trials and a vigorous defense are essential: they separate the wheat from the chafe.
