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Duress is a complete defence to all criminal charges. Duress is a complicated area of the law and difficult defence to raise. If you intend to rely on the defence of duress our criminal lawyers can advise you on the intricacies of the defence to give you the best chance of raising it successfully.
You will have acted under duress and therefore involuntarily, if your actions were performed because of threats (express or implied) of death or really serious injury. The threats to you need to be of such a nature that a person of ordinary firmness and strength of will would have yielded to them if placed in the same position as you. The ordinary person is a person of the same maturity and sex as you.
To legal test to raise defence is:
The police must establish that your acts were done voluntarily and must eliminate any reasonable possibility that you acted under duress.