Opinion ID: 2080649
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: facts

Text: Defendant and the victim were next-door neighbors in the same apartment building in the Bronx for nearly 40 years, virtually their entire lives. Their families were close until 1994 or 1995, when a dispute  with ultimately tragic consequences  arose over cable and telephone wiring. The victim and his family believed that defendant was siphoning off their services, even after the service providers found that the suspicion was without basis. In 1997, following a heated verbal exchange, the victim stabbed defendant in the back, hospitalizing him for two days. Although the families remained next-door neighbors, separated only by a common wall, from 1997 to 1999 the victim repeatedly threatened to shoot, stab or otherwise injure defendant. He made these threats to defendant's face, to his father and to neighbors  at one point even brandishing a boxcutter. On December 21, 1999, defendant and the victim argued through the shared bedroom wall between their apartments. Using a metal pipe, defendant knocked an indentation into his side of the wall. The victim then left his apartment to go downstairs and open the building's front door for the police, who responded to the 911 call his mother had made about defendant. Defendant, inside his apartment, walked to his front door several times, opening it and looking into the public hall until he saw the victim there with a friend. Still holding the metal pipe he had earlier used to hit the wall, defendant (while remaining in his doorway) then engaged in an angry argument with the victim. [1] According to defendant's trial testimony, he continued standing in the doorway, never going into the hall, when the victim reached into his pocket, came up to defendant's face nose to nose, and said he was going to kill him. Believing he was about to be stabbed again, defendant struck the victim on his head with the metal pipe, killing him. As defendant requested, the trial court instructed the jury as to the Penal Law § 35.15 defense of justification, including that a person may nevertheless not use defensive deadly physical force if he knows he can with complete safety to himself avoid such use of deadly physical force by retreating. Immediately after this instruction, defendant asked the court to charge the jury that if a defendant is in his home and close proximity of a threshold of his home there is no duty to retreat. The trial court denied the request, ruling [defendant] said he was at the doorway and I don't consider that being inside his home . . . . The jury acquitted defendant of murder but convicted him of manslaughter in the first degree, and he was sentenced to a determinate term of 16 years. The Appellate Division affirmed, as do we.