Can the elements of the charges be proved “beyond reasonable doubt?’. In the case of Burglary, a close examination of the “indictable offence” is undertaken. If there is a defence to the indictable offence the charge of burglary has deficits the defence can leverage.

Speaking generally, a defendant is not criminally responsible for the consequences of an act or omission if they did not intend those consequences, or reasonably foresee them, and an ordinary person in their position would not have reasonably foreseen the consequences as a possible consequence of the act or omission either. This is an ‘excuse’ rather than a defence and is further complicated with a number of other tests and legal principles from the case law, a lawyer should be retained to assist identifying if this excuse is open to you.

This not a "defence" as the law applies see it, but an approach the defence might take in preventing the prosecution from proving the 1st element above to the standard of beyond reasonable doubt.

Can the Prosecution prove it was you? In some cases, the identity of the person who did the assault causing the bodily harm might not be readily identified. An example would be if there the assault occurred in a dark part of town, the complainant was near sighted and drunk and only a poor description of the defendant was given.

Section 28 of the Criminal Code provides a defence. As the charge requires an “intent”, intoxication may offer a defence to the charge if there is insufficient evidence the intention was formed as considered. The defence is not a straightforward as it may seem at requires the facts and evidence to be closely examined to determine if it applies.

The QLD District and Supreme Courts Criminal Law Bench Books summarize the defence as:

Extraordinary Emergency, s 25 A person is not criminally responsible for an act or omission done or made under such circumstances of sudden or extraordinary emergency that an ordinary person possessing ordinary powers of self-control could not reasonably be expected to act otherwise.

Your lawyer will need to review the facts, law and your instructions to determine if the defence is open to you and form a strategy to wield the defence in a way that best works in your unique case. Defences are and can be tricky to navigate and may rase issues of evidence.

In certain circumstances the law offers a defence if we are compelled to act to resist the violence of others. The Queensland Criminal Code calls this ‘compulsion’ and says, for present purposes, that a person is not criminally responsible for an act if that person does the act because it is reasonably necessary to resist a threat of actual and unlawful violence to themselves or property.

The Criminal Code defence may apply to this as a person is not criminally responsible, for an offence relating to property, if what he did with respect to the property was done in the exercise of an honest claim of right and without intention to defraud.