I was wondering what this forum thinks of the circumstance. Can you chase after a car thief, confront them, have them assault (stab) you and then shoot in self defense in PA? Just wondering what you all may have done.
In the current climate, this past decade at least, it doesn't really look good to go chasing down a criminal suspect only to end up having had used lethal force against that criminal. No matter what the statutes say.
But the reality is, in most states where I've looked, the basic statutes are like this: so long as you don't unlawfully provoke another to violence, so long as you aren't the criminal in the situation, you are lawfully justified to protect your very life with force, up to and including deadly force.
But the reality also is, that if you find yourself having chased down a criminal (ostensibly to retrieve your property personally), it's going to get difficult to distinguish between that ostensible cause, being seen as taking steps that "provoked" the situation (for lack of a better term), and actually desiring to harm the criminal. Tough distinction, made all the harder with a dead or dying perpetrator lying in the gutter or on a slab.
In such a situation, personally I can easily discern the difference between the original crime (the robbery or theft) and the subsequent crime (aggravated assault / attempted murder). But the law doesn't always do so, particularly when humans who weren't there get to determine the reasonableness of one's actions.
Take a simple variant of the scenario: confronting someone burgling your car, demanding he stop, then being confronted with a deadly weapon and threat of death. Seems simpler, since it doesn't also involve chasing down the criminal in order to stop the theft of the vehicle. And therein lies the problem, I think, with how many will subsequently view our actions when asked to consider reasonableness. Fact is, though, the criminal created caused the problem, committed the crime and and upstanding citizen stood up to stop it all from happening, despite escalation from burgling/robbery to aggravated assault and attempted murder.
I'm all for this concept: that upstanding citizens every right to attempt to stop a crime against us; that we also have every right to additionally defend against unjustifiable and unlawful escalation by a criminal against us, even if that defense requires deadly force; and we need not be presumed guilty merely because the original perpetrator happened to end up getting the short end of the stick. But not all the statutes are written that way, and frankly some of the states have horrible potholes we can all fall into, if we dare believe we're "scot free" when seen chasing down a criminal and find ourselves succeeding.