The past

It was freezing - several degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Snow was blowing into big drifts. It was dark. The farmer's wife was alone in the house.
Suddenly she heard a scratching at the door. She was terrified. She seized an old pistol and made her way round the side of the house, to find a man engaged in breaking in.
Nervously she shouted a warning to him to leave. He responded: "I aint going nowhere lady."
In desperation the farmer's wife fired the pistol. She tried to aim high, but as soon as she fired the man fled screaming. She did not know if he screamed in pain or fear.

The present
The farmer was alone in his house. He had been burgled a few months earlier. His outbuildings had been raided many times. He heard voices. He grabbed his gun. As he approached the sound of the voices, a light shone in his face. He pointed his gun downwards and fired. One of the intruders screamed. Both scuttled out of the farmer's house. One of them died from his injuries.
The case of Tony Martin has seldom been out of the news since that burglar was shot. His trial and conviction for murder have caused a huge outcry among rural people.
The incident with the farmer's wife attracted no media attention. It happened a hundred years ago in the American west, in the (then) fledgling state of Nebraska. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Nebraska was still largely unsettled, and the US government granted homesteading rights to anyone who could stand to live on the land for a whole year. If they succeeded, without dying of cold or starvation, or going mad, they became the owners.
Not many people know about Nebraska. It is the middle most state in the USA. Even in America people ask "what state is that in?" It is the size of England but has a population of little more than one and a half million people. Much of the state is as flat as the Fens, where Tony Martin lived. Like the Fens, Nebraska is intensely agricultural. Both stretches of land were once covered in sea. Nebraska has been pushed several thousand feet above sea level. The Fens remain at or below sea level.
The Fens border on three counties: Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. They are an acquired taste. To many, the Fens are flat, dreary and smell of cabbages. You can find beauty in the Fens if you look for it - in the abundance of wild flowers that grow in the drainage ditches (called dykes) that line almost every road, in the exultation of larks which soar and sing above the cornfields on lazy summer days, in the menacing mists which come down and shroud the arrow-straight roads, turning every car into a ghost and - above all - in the magnificent sunsets which fill the whole sky with golds and oranges and reds.
To this natural beauty is added other colour: the gangs which descend on the area several times a year to pick fruit, gather daffodils or weed in between regimented rows of vegetables. For years these people - termed these days "travellers" - lived in reasonable harmony with the locals. They used to set up camp opposite our house every year, and the only real upset they caused was with their spectacular domestic disputes which the police often had to break up.
Throughout this time most villages had their own policeman. Ours became closely involved in the community, and always seeming to be in several places at once. Under his regime, crime was low. When he retired, he was not replaced. Now in my parents' village, and the neighbouring village Emneth, (the home of Tony Martin), police are seldom seen - until after a crime has been committed.
Almost nobody has been spared. My parents (both over 80) recently had all their gardening equipment taken. Like many others they live in fear of burglars. There was a village meeting a few months ago to discuss the crime wave. Three homes were broken into while their owners were at the meeting.
By the time Tony Martin shot his burglars, feelings were already running high. Country people felt that they had been abandoned by the forces of law and order. Criminals seemed to be cocking a snook at them and the police. By his actions Martin became a local hero. He was probably not the best choice. He was eccentric, reclusive, and had already expressed extreme views about dispatching those who stole from his property, and he turned into action what many had thought about.
But was he a murderer? His conviction last week astonished the whole community. The legal niceties imposed on those who defend themselves were laid down by those who had plenty of time to think, and to rationalise about what to do in given circumstances. The Tony Martins of this world have to make split second decisions. Are the burglars armed? Will they kill me if I do not strike first? Can I get help quickly? How can I use “reasonable force” to defend myself? Actually they would not ask the last question - unless they were lawyers.
It is easy, in the comfort of our offices, to hypothesise that violence begets violence, and that anyone who deliberately takes a shot at an intruder is a murderer if he is not being attacked. But such conclusions imply an effective policing system, where most burglars are caught, and help can be on hand quickly. In the real world, crime is rising in country areas, and policing is inadequate or non-existent. Towns now have their CCTV systems which dramatically reduce urban crime but may well push it out into the countryside.
Of one thing we can be sure. If Tony Martin had shot his burglars in Nebraska, either now or a hundred years ago when my grandmother shot at her intruder on her homestead farm, he would not even have been tried for murder, still less convicted. Even these days an American's home is still his castle.

This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal in April 2000