Taizhou Daily (reporter Yun Zhao) - Recently, Liu was prosecuted by the Wenling People's Procuratorate for suspected intentional injury. One early morning, someone entered his family's small store, and he stabbed the intruder with a knife, resulting in the person's death.
Liu is from Wenqiao Town in Wenling City, and he is 51 years old. He runs a small store at home. Previously, the store had been burglarized several times. To ensure the safety of his store, Liu moved to sleep in a room behind the store and kept a knife in a box by his bed for self-defense.
At around 3:00 AM on March 31st last year, Liu woke up to some noise outside. Thinking there might be a thief, he got dressed, took the knife out of the box, and opened the door. "As soon as I opened the door, a drink box was thrown at me and hit my face," Liu said. He saw a person standing in the room, so he raised the knife and lunged at him. The person then ran away, and Liu chased him until he escaped over a wall.
After returning to the room and turning on the light, Liu noticed blood on the knife and immediately called the police. Afterwards, Liu went outside to call for help in catching the thief. Many neighbors woke up and helped him search for the person. Not long after, someone shouted that they found the person near the market. Liu quickly went over and saw a person lying on the ground, still moving. Soon after, the police arrived.
The victim died due to a stab wound on the right thigh, which caused an open wound, a ruptured femoral vein, and hemorrhagic shock.
Investigations confirmed that the deceased was Wu, who had entered Liu's store. "I just wanted to stab him and catch him, then send him to the police station. I stabbed him in the lower body because I feared something serious would happen if I stabbed him in the upper body. At the time, I didn't think I would kill him," Liu later told the police. On the same day, Liu was released on bail by the Wenling Public Security Bureau.
Upon investigation, it was determined that Wu was stabbed in the right thigh by Liu during his escape and later died despite medical efforts. The prosecution believes that Liu intentionally injured another person's body, resulting in one death, and should be held criminally responsible for intentional injury.
Why wasn't Liu's action considered self-defense? The prosecutor handling the case explained that implementing self-defense must meet the following two conditions: first, the purpose of self-defense must be to stop unlawful aggression; second, self-defense cannot obviously exceed the necessary limit. In the first condition, there are two sub-conditions: first, there must be an occurrence of unlawful aggression; second, such unlawful aggression must be ongoing. Since Wu was fleeing at the time, the unlawful aggression had already ended, thus making Liu's actions not meet the conditions for self-defense.