These three videos from the Greg McCollum Complete Legal Defense Team address key questions about self-defense and deadly force under South Carolina law, including whether shooting an unarmed attacker can be justified, what “reasonable fear” means in a self-defense shooting, and when deadly force is legally justifiable overall.
Together, they walk through the legal standards for imminent threat, present ability to cause harm, and the protections available under South Carolina’s stand your ground law, castle doctrine, and vehicle self-defense presumption.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can You Shoot Someone If They Don’t Have a Weapon in South Carolina?
It depends. If a physically fit 235 pound man is being jumped on and punched by a 70 pound 14 year old who has no weapon and it doesn’t even hurt, is he justified in using deadly force against that person? No, obviously not, because he’s really not in danger. If that 14 year old has a weapon, that changes it completely and anybody can see that.
But there are circumstances where you would be justified. Say a single person, male or female, is in a parking lot when the store is closing and everything is deserted. They turn around and there’s a group of people coming at them who don’t have a car, they’re walking toward them, and the way they’re dressed, ball caps or hoodies, looks like they’re trying to hide their identity because they’re going to commit a robbery.
They’re coming toward them in a threatening way, and then they start running at them for no good reason, and there isn’t time to get in the car because they’re on top of them, but the person is armed.
Are they justified in shooting? They’re going to scrutinize that a lot, and anytime you shoot somebody who’s unarmed, the deck starts off stacked against you. But in that kind of scenario, yes, you probably are justified in using deadly force, because if you have a loaded gun and it turns out the group did not have weapons, the only thing that’s going to happen is they’re going to overpower you.
The presumption is they’re going to rob you, and if you had a gun, they’re going to take your gun and may kill you with it because you’re a witness. To answer the question, you have to look at the specifics of each situation in order to answer it accurately. When these things happen in real life, everybody is second guessing everything that you did.
Facts come out later, like these people have a criminal history for robbery, or this guy was on probation for robbery, or this guy just got out of prison, facts that you would have no way of knowing except maybe you sensed some of that. The later analysis of it, which is really unfair, but that’s what happens, they’re going to go back and look at it and say these people obviously were going to cause him harm, so this was justifiable.
Anytime you shoot somebody, you become the target of the investigation, and nobody’s happy when you’ve shot somebody, I don’t care the circumstances, but there’s a lot of pressure on people to prosecute you. So the best answer is yes, there are circumstances where you could legally shoot somebody or use deadly force when they’re unarmed.
What Counts as “Reasonable Fear” in a Self-Defense Shooting in South Carolina?
What did you actually fear, and was that realistic in terms of would a rational person put in that same circumstance feel the same way? It’s not necessarily that objective standard, it’s your subjective standard, what did you think, because that goes to your criminal intent.
If you believe you’re about to be killed, you believe you’re about to lose your life, and you have a realistic reason to think that, the facts are there to show that’s about to happen and that somebody looking at that from the outside would think anybody in that situation would think the same thing.
How does that come about? Many times it could come about through the actions of the other person, or through the threats they’re making. If somebody’s running at you with a knife, screaming I’m going to kill you, what would anybody else think?
The factors there are they’re screaming I’m going to kill you, so that shows their intent, their state of mind. They’re armed with a knife, holding it in a threatening and aggressive manner, it’s not folded up in a backpack, they’ve got it in their hand, they’re brandishing the knife, they’re screaming at you, they’re running at you.
Now the clock is ticking, because within another half a second or so they’re going to arrive at the place where they can harm you and do harm to you. So now you have just a split second sometimes to make a decision of what to do. Under the stand your ground law, you’re not required to turn and flee.
And even under the old self-defense law, you wouldn’t be expected to retreat if the retreat would put you in more danger. If you couldn’t safely retreat, you couldn’t retreat.That’s really not the law anymore, but you can’t get it out of people’s head, because when something is a law for so long, decades, a century or more, people always go back to it. So that’s the description of the fear: it’s that it’s imminent, and the person has the present ability to harm you.
Think about it like this: in an assault case, self-defense is defending yourself from an imminent assault. If you’re in jail, literally behind bars, and someone standing a few feet from you doesn’t have a weapon or a key and can’t get out, and they tell you I’m going to kill you, clenching their fists and their teeth, showing every aspect that they intend to do it if they could, it’s not really an assault, because they can’t do it, because they’re in jail. It’s just talking.
Now, they passed laws about that, because if you’re a public official or a certain person, it’s illegal to threaten somebody even using the phone, because if you’re not physically capable of doing it, it’s an impossibility.
So in that situation, if someone is behind bars growling and screaming I’m going to kill you, and you’re armed and you pull out the gun and shoot them, that is not self-defense, because physically it was impossible for them to create harm right then, and that’s what imminent means. You have a present ability to do it, and the fear of harm is imminent, which means it’s happening right now. In that scenario, it’s not happening right now.
You may be worried about something in the future, and if you ran into them in an alley in the future, that’s a completely different situation. The person has to have the ability to carry it out, and that makes it reasonable for you to act in self-defense in that scenario.
When Can You Legally Shoot Someone in Self-Defense in South Carolina?
The easiest way to remember this is to think that you could fight force with force. So how much danger are you in? There are a couple of things that play into this, and anytime you talk about the law it gets a little more complicated, even a lawyer answering a question has a couple of exceptions knocking around in their head. But to make it simple and understandable, you’re legally justified in shooting somebody and using deadly force because that’s what you’re feeling threatened by.
In other words, you feel an immediate and realistic threat, this person is going to kill me, if I don’t do anything I’m dead. An assault is when you’re being assaulted, and assault and battery are two different things. The assault is that you’re in fear. You can assault someone and never hit them, that could be an assault where you think you’re about to kill someone but never hit them, never shoot them, because you weren’t able to, because the other person intervened, did something.
So an assault under South Carolina law is you have this imminent fear of harm and the person you’re afraid of is physically capable under those circumstances of doing that harm. It has to be immediate, it has to be imminent. So if you’re not in fear of losing your life, you’re not justified in using deadly force, and shooting somebody or shooting at somebody is using deadly force.
Now, there are legal exceptions to that. Under the stand your ground law, also called the castle doctrine, if you’re in your house, the law presumes that the person trying to come into your house is armed with deadly force, so the presumption is you could always shoot them. Sometimes the law in reality and the way things are handled by police and prosecutors don’t exactly match up like a perfect puzzle.
The other thing is that if you’re in your car in a public place, the law in South Carolina now treats your car the same as it treats your house. They’ve treated your house this way for centuries, but now if somebody’s trying to get into your car, trying to assault you in your car under the law, the presumption is that person is armed with deadly force.
Whether it’s true or not, you have the right to use deadly force to defend yourself. In the real world, if somebody is trying to get into your car and you shoot them, whether they die or not, you’re going to get arrested, you’re going to be questioned if you shoot somebody, regardless of the law.
Then the investigators and people that are going to prosecute you start picking this thing apart, asking was it reasonable for you to think the person was trying to intrude into your car to harm you, what about that was reasonable or unreasonable. But basically, you have the right to shoot somebody if you’re in reasonable imminent fear that you’re about to lose your life, and that’s what they’re doing, they’re trying to harm you.
With nearly 30 years of experience and a background as a former prosecutor, Greg McCollum brings a rare depth of understanding to self-defense and deadly force cases in South Carolina. Having seen these cases from both sides of the courtroom, he can help clients understand how the law applies to their specific situation.
If you have questions about self-defense laws in South Carolina, call the Greg McCollum Complete Legal Defense Team at (843) 626-5480. Consultations are confidential.
