New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, ruled on Tuesday, October 27, that a person charged with endangering the welfare of a child can be entitled to have the jury consider self-defense — the legal defence known as justification — when the prosecution's case is built on the defendant's alleged use of force. In a unanimous decision in People v. Mears, the court reversed Stephen Mears's child-endangerment conviction and ordered a new trial, rejecting a categorical rule that had kept the self-defense instruction out of some child-endangerment cases.
Source: Justia — New York Court of Appeals opinion summary, People v Mears
The ruling, written by Judge Caitlin Halligan, holds that Article 35 of the Penal Law makes justification available 'in any prosecution for an offense' and contains no exception for endangering the welfare of a child. When prosecutors choose a use-of-force theory and the trial record reasonably supports self-defense, the court said, jurors must be given the instruction for the endangerment charge as well — not only for other charges arising from the same alleged force.
The 2022 incident behind the case
The case arose from a physical confrontation in September 2022 between Mears and his girlfriend's 15-year-old son. The teenager — who is not named in this report, in line with protections for minors — was left on the floor and appeared unconscious after the altercation, according to the court record. Prosecutors in Kings County (Brooklyn) charged Mears with endangering the welfare of a child and with strangulation in the second degree, relying on the same alleged use of force as evidence for both counts.
At trial, the teenager, his mother and Mears himself gave sharply different accounts of what happened. A forensic nurse testified about abrasions on the teenager's neck, and a scientist testified that a swab taken from the neck likely contained Mears's DNA, according to the opinion summary. Mears asked the trial judge to instruct the jury on justification under Penal Law section 35.15 for both charges. The judge gave the self-defense instruction for the strangulation count but refused it for the child-endangerment count.
A split verdict — and the appeal that followed
The jury acquitted Mears of strangulation — the charge for which it had been allowed to consider self-defense — but convicted him of endangering the welfare of a child, the charge for which the instruction had been refused. The Appellate Division, Second Department, upheld the conviction, relying on earlier appellate cases that generally held justification is not applicable to child endangerment, and it also concluded that no reasonable view of the trial evidence supported a self-defense instruction on that count. A judge of the Court of Appeals granted Mears leave to appeal, setting up Tuesday's ruling.
The Court of Appeals reversed. It held that a justification instruction under section 35.15 is available for endangering the welfare of a child when the prosecution's theory is based on the defendant's use of force, provided a reasonable view of the evidence supports the defence. The court also found that the evidence in Mears's trial did reasonably support the defence, and that the failure to instruct the jury was not harmless error — the legal standard that decides whether a mistake requires a conviction to be thrown out.
The decision does not declare Mears innocent and does not bar prosecutors from retrying him. It holds that at any new trial, if the evidence reasonably supports it, the jury must be allowed to consider self-defense on the endangerment charge too.
Why the ruling matters beyond one case
Child endangerment is one of the most commonly charged offences in New York family and domestic cases, and prosecutors sometimes base it on the same physical act charged separately as assault or strangulation. Before Tuesday, defendants in much of the state faced a patchwork: a jury could weigh self-defense for the assault-type charge but was forbidden from weighing it for endangerment, even when both charges rested on identical alleged force — the very split that produced Mears's mixed verdict. The Court of Appeals has now set a single statewide rule: the availability of the instruction follows the prosecution's theory and the evidence, not the label of the charge.
For families in the Punjabi diaspora and other immigrant communities in New York, the practical point is narrow but real: in a household confrontation that leads to criminal charges, what a defendant says happened — and whether a jury is permitted to judge the force as defensive — can now be considered across all force-based counts, rather than being cut off for the endangerment count alone. The ruling changes jury instructions, not the underlying law of what counts as endangering a child.
What happens next
Mears's endangerment conviction is reversed and the case returns to Kings County for a new trial, at which prosecutors must decide whether to retry the charge under the corrected instruction. No retrial date has been announced. The decision is binding precedent for trial courts across New York State from Tuesday onward.