Before I go any futher, I should say that while I am a lawyer, I am not a California lawyer, and I'm not your lawyer. This is purely for informative purposes and should not be considered legal advice. For legal advice consult a lawyer licensed in you jurisdiction.
Okay. California law requires that an act of self defense must be both (1) honest, and (2) reasonable. This means that you must subjectively believe that you are under a threat of imminent harm, and that belief must be subjectively reasonable. An honest but unreasonable belief is called "imperfect self-defense;" it will mitigate murder down to manslaughter, but won't exonerate you altogether.
The section of California Law dealing with justifiable homicide is as follows:
Quote:
CALIFORNIA PENAL CODE
TITLE 8. OF CRIMES AGAINST THE PERSON
CHAPTER 1. HOMICIDE
197. Homicide is also justifiable when committed by any person in any of the following cases:
1. When resisting any attempt to murder any person, or to commit a felony, or to do some great bodily injury upon any person; or,
2. When committed in defense of habitation, property, or person, against one who manifestly intends or endeavors, by violence or surprise, to commit a felony, or against one who manifestly intends and endeavors, in a violent, riotous or tumultuous manner, to enter the habitation of another for the purpose of offering violence to any person therein; or,
3. When committed in the lawful defense of such person, or of a wife or husband, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant of such person, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony or to do some great bodily injury, and imminent danger of such design being accomplished; but such person, or the person in whose behalf the defense was made, if he was the assailant or engaged in mutual combat, must really and in good faith have endeavored to decline any further struggle before the homicide was committed; or,
4. When necessarily committed in attempting, by lawful ways and means, to apprehend any person for any felony committed, or in lawfully suppressing any riot, or in lawfully keeping and preserving the peace.
198. A bare fear of the commission of any of the offenses mentioned in subdivisions 2 and 3 of Section 197, to prevent which homicide may be lawfully committed, is not sufficient to justify it. But the circumstances must be sufficient to excite the fears of a reasonable person, and the party killing must have acted under the influence ofsuch fears alone.
198.5. Any person using force intended or likely to cause death or great bodily injury within his or her residence shall be presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily injury to self, family, or a member of the household when that force is used against another person, not a member of the family orhousehold, who unlawfully and forcibly enters or has unlawfully and forcibly entered the residence and the person using the force knew or had reason to believe that an unlawful and forcible entry occurred.
As used in this section, great bodily injury means a significant or substantial physical injury.
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The kicker, though, is that the amount of force used can only be that which is necessary and must not be excessive, and your idea of what is necessary and the court's idea may not be the same. In a case called People v. Bates, the victim and the defendant were involved in a "tussle" (the court's words) in the kitchen of the defendant's restaurant, and the victim grabbed a knife and stabbed the defendant in the hip. The defendant got the knife away from the victim, but he then proceeded to stab the victim repeatedly in the chest, killing him. The court ruled that "self-defense may be resorted to to repel force, but may not be used to inflict vengence" and found that the defendant used excessive force and was not entitled to a claim of justifiable homicide.
Protecting yourself from imminent assault by your use of a deadly weapon is only justified if you have a subjectively honest and objectively reasonable belief that the force used is reasonably necessary to protect yourself or a third party from either death or "great bodily injury." If you commit homicide with a deadly weapon in self defense, you'll have to show that you honestly and reasonably believed that your use of the deadly weapon was necessary to repel the imminent threat to your life. It's very difficult to say how these will play out in individual circumstances; if you use a deadly weapon to repel an imminent beating with the fists, you might have only a claim of imperfect self defense (honest, but not reasonable if you believed your life was in danger when it wasn't), or might have no claim of self defense at all. If you use a knife to repel an assailant with a knife or gun, obviously your chances of a self defense claim are much better.
There's much, much more to it, of course - people write whole books about this stuff. This is a general overview, but it should give you a very basic idea of the state of the law. I'll add more later if I can think of anything.