(Duress may or may not be allowed as an affirmative defense for some particular charge – in particular, it is generally forbidden for murder, and many jurisdictions also forbid it for sexual assault.
In some rare cases, a successful argument of duress – even when not an affirmative defense – might result in the jury nullifying the charge by refusing to convict.
The basis of the defense is that the duress actually overwhelmed the defendant's will and would also have overwhelmed the will of a person of ordinary courage (a hybrid test requiring both subjective evidence of the accused's state of mind, and an objective confirmation that the failure to resist the threats was reasonable), thus rendering the entire behavior involuntary.
A mutant of duress involves hostage taking, where a person is forced to commit a criminal act under the threat, say, that their family member or close associate will be immediately killed should they refuse (commonly known as a Tiger kidnapping).
[5] A counterpart may be found in an English law, where in R v Dudley and Stephens involved a case of one man being killed to save two lives - no duress defense was available and they were convicted.
2004) Duress in contract law falls into two broad categories:[6] Professor Ronald Griffin, Florida Agricultural & Mechanical College of Law, Orlando, FL, puts physical duress simply: "Your money or your life."
[9] Common law took a narrow view of the concept of duress in that it was concerned with actual or threatened violence to the person or unlawful imprisonment.
Equity, however, adopted a broader "fusion" view of what sort of pressure could constitute coercion for purposes of relief and has since prevailed.
For example, in Hawker Pacific Pty Ltd v Helicopter Charter Pty Ltd (1991) 22 NSWLR 298, the contract was set aside after Hawker Pacific's threats to withhold the helicopter from the plaintiff unless further payments were made for repairing a botched paint job.