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Ark. Code Ann. § 5-2-208

Duress

Applied in 4 court decisions — leading case Pugh v. State (2002)

Most recently applied in Commonwealth v. Vasquez (July 2012)

Acts 1975, No. 280, § 208; A.S.A. 1947, § 41-208.

How often courts cite this section

199620002010201210
citing decisions per year

Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.

(1) It is an affirmative defense to a prosecution that the actor engaged in the conduct charged to constitute an offense because the actor reasonably believed he or she was compelled to engage in the conduct by the threat or use of unlawful force against the actor's person or the person of another that a person of ordinary firmness in the actor's situation would not have resisted.

(2) The affirmative defense provided by this section is unavailable if the actor recklessly placed himself or herself in a situation in which it was reasonably foreseeable that the actor would be subjected to the force or threatened force described in subsection (a) of this section.

Current official text: Arkansas General Assembly. Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Arkansas statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.