Recently, the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People's Court released such a case.
The general facts of the case are as follows: at a certain construction site, because Liu and others were tearing up the construction site safety officer Cao, the defendant Luo stepped forward to persuade him, and then had an argument with Liu. After Liu beat Luo with a wooden stick, Luo punched Liu's nose several times, causing Liu's nose to be injured and bleeding. After evaluation, Liu constituted a second-degree minor injury.
So is Luo intentionally hurting or justified defense?
In judicial practice, the basic form of intentional injury cases is that one party beats the other party and the other party fights back, forming a situation in which two people fight each other, which is often defined as "mutual assault", resulting in "as long as you fight back, it is a mutual assault".
However, the 2002 Guiding Opinions on the Application of the Justifiable Defense System in Accordance with Law pointed out that it is necessary to accurately distinguish between defensive acts and mutual fighting. The perpetrator's subjective intent is to be judged by comprehensively considering objective circumstances such as the cause of the crime, whether there was fault for the escalation of the conflict, whether the murder weapon was used, and whether others were gathered to participate in the fight.
In the above case, Liu and Luo did not make an appointment in advance, and from the point of view of the cause, Liu was at fault, Luo stepped forward to persuade him, and it was Liu who made the first move, and Luo's punch counterattack should be a defense, and the beaten person could not be required to "fight back", and Liu beat Luo with a wooden stick, and Luo only fought back with his fists, and did not use obviously disproportionate violence, and did not exceed the necessary limit. Therefore, the court held that Luo constituted legitimate defense.