State v. Bragg, ___ N.J. ___ (2025). A jury found defendant guilty of twelve charged counts, including attempted murder, kidnapping, aggravated assault, terroristic threats, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, endangering, and two lesser-included offenses of harassment. Some of those charges involved the use of deadly force. Persons may not use deadly force if the can retreat with complete safety. But under the “castle doctrine,” an exception to the general rule, a person “is not obliged to retreat from his dwelling, unless he was the initial aggressor.” N.J.S.A. 2C:3-4(b)(2)(b)(i). That doctrine derives from the common law.
The underlying events in this case occurred in an apartment to which defendant had a key. Defendant testified that he had an informal sublease on the apartment and that he had been staying there for “a few weeks.” But when he went to the apartment on the night in question, when he drove Lorenza Fletcher, her cousin Daquan Anderson, and her three-year-old son to the apartment, defendant signed in with the security guard in the building’s lobby, leading the State to contend that he was a guest, not a tenant. There was other evidence and testimony on both sides of that issue as well.
At trial, defendant, Fletcher, and Anderson all testified about a violent fight that occurred in the apartment and left all three of them in need of medical treatment. Defendant and the others offered diametrically opposed versions of what happened, who the aggressor was, and whether the apartment was or was not his dwelling. Defendant was arrested and later indicted on nineteen counts (he was ultimately found not guilty of some of those counts). The jury was not charged on the castle doctrine and defendant did not seek such a charge at trial.
On appeal of his conviction, however, defendant asserted that the failure to charge the jury about the castle doctrine was plain error that, under Rule 2:10-2, required reversal and vacation of those convictions for which a self-defense argument was available to defendant. The Appellate Division disagreed and affirmed. But in a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Rabner today, the Supreme Court agreed with defendant and vacated the convictions on those counts that involved the issue of self-defense (attempted murder, aggravated assault, and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose), leaving the remaining convictions unaffected.
The Chief Justice went through the conflicting factual versions at great length. He then addressed the two components of the castle doctrine: “whether a given location is a defendant’s ‘dwelling’ and whether a defendant was the ‘initial aggressor.’”
The Criminal Code, the Chief Justice noted, “defines ‘dwelling’ broadly as ‘any building or structure, though movable or temporary, or a portion thereof, which is for the time being the actor’s home or place of lodging.’ N.J.S.A. 2C:3-11(c) (emphases added [by the Chief Justice]). The definition encompasses an apartment. State v. Bilek, 308 N.J. Super. 1, 12 (App. Div. 1998). And it plainly extends beyond a permanent home.” There was thus a factual issue for the jury as to whether the apartment was defendant’s dwelling, from which he was not obligated to retreat and where he could use deadly force in self-defense.
The question of whether defendant was the aggressor was also, on the hotly disputed facts about what happened and who did what, for the jury. The Chief Justice said that “[b]oth disputed factual issues were for the jury to decide. [Citations]. But the jury was not asked to resolve them. Nor did the jury receive any guidance about the significance of either issue or the overall exception to the duty to retreat. Without that information, the jury was clearly capable of finding that defendant was required to retreat rather than use deadly force. Yet a proper instruction was just as capable of leading jurors to conclude defendant had no such obligation and could stand his ground and defend himself if he was attacked.”
The jury was instructed that “[i]f you find that the defendant knew he could avoid the necessity of using deadly force by retreating, provided that the defendant knew he could do so with complete safety, then the defense is not available to him.” But the jury instructed about the castle doctrine exception. That was error, and it was error of a magnitude that was “clearly capable of producing an unjust result,” the standard of Rule 2:10-2. Accordingly, the convictions on the counts in which self-defense was implicated were vacated, the other convictions left to stand (despite defendant’s claim that all the convictions should have been vacated), and the case was remanded for “any further proceedings in this matter.”