Drew -

Thanks very much for posting those polls and tabulating the results. Very interesting. I was a bit suprised how close the general public viewed those scenarios compared to martial artists - although I shouldn't be.

Starts to make me understand some of the idiotic jury results I have seen over the years.

Great job!

MC:
The guy without the knife didn't run for two reasons: he was angry, drunk, stupid, and aggressive, and he didn't see the knife until the trial had started. Maybe that's five reasons. Anyway, if I were defending my life and had a knife on me, the attacker would never see the knife either unless I left it in him. A threat is a gift to the enemy. The difference between me and the defendant is that in my case the state's witness wouldn't see the knife in court either. It would be in a river or a dumpster.

However, it could have gone another way. I've seen a jury convict a man of aggrivated assault for breaking a man's arm with a baseball bat and then running away. He broke the man's arm because it that arm was holding a machete that the state's witness was swinging at people while the state's witness' wife was throwing bottles at the defendant's friends. Of course, the defendant had an MS13 tattoo on his forehead, so that may have influenced the jury.

The definition of assault almost doesn't matter when you are facing a jury. Juries do strange things. When you face a judge, you are facing the law of your state. When you face a jury, you are dealing with what 12 people not smart enough to get out of jury duty think is a reasonable way to behave in your county. In the machete matter, one question that came up was how close the nearest baseball diamond was. One way to look good for a jury long before any SD situation occurs is to live a normal life. Just seeming like a decent person rather than a thug makes a huge difference. Also, think about what weapons you carry. Do any of them seem unnecessarily ugly or strange? If you zap someone with pepper spray, your odds will be much better than if you knock him out with chucks. If you slash someone with a Buck knife in the South, your odds will be much better than if you whip out a balisong or gravity knife, though with practice a Buck knife is faster than either of those. Juries are not rational, and my vote took that into account.

BTW, if you warn him that you have a knife, you have threatened him, which is already assault. If you even try to cut him after that, it is aggrivated assault with a deadly weapon. If you show it to him, you are brandishing, another felony. If you just whip it out and get slashy, you are defending yourself in a panic situation, if you have the right lawyer, which this guy had.

Your milage may vary.

My point since I deal with criminal complaints all the time, is based on the knowledge that even video can be misleading. You can't "know" what actually happened and what someone's intentions were in spite of their actions seen on a "video".

I still say "it depends".

I'm no fun. I know. Sorry.

So if you saw "I do not want to fight!", keep backing up, then when they pursue, nail em out of nowhere good and hard, and then leave, you are good to go most likely?
What if you say something like "if you attack me i will hurt you"?

That would most likely be taken as a challenge, or a threat. Your better off saying " I am not looking for trouble", or something along those lines.

What a screwed up justice system, sheesh, it's a warning to enable self protection. Oh well, they got issues.