Virginia Gun Owners Forum - VGOF

At trial, once a defendant has sufficiently raised the issue of self-defense and gotten it into court in the first place (a very low threshold), it becomes the prosecutor’s responsibility to disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt to the satisfaction of the trial’s finder-of-fact (usually a jury, but the judge in the case of a bench trial).

The prosecution accomplishes this by disproving, beyond a reasonable doubt, any one of the four remaining elements of the self-defense claim (innocence, imminence, proportionality, reasonableness). If the prosecution is successful, self-defense collapses. If prosecution fails to do so the jury will be instructed to acquit the defendant.

At the self-defense immunity hearing, conducted pre-trial, the legal standards are quite different. In addition, here there is only a judge acting as the finder of fact, there is no jury.

More specifically, at the self-defense immunity hearing it is the responsibility of the defense to convince the judge of each and every required element of self-defense by a preponderance of the evidence, rather than the responsibility of the State to disprove even one element beyond a reasonable doubt.