Alphecca

My wristwatch is worth more than the life of your average mutant. Jack.

A few points: criminal sympathiser Adam Liptak deliberately leaves out the last conditional clause of Florida's "Castle Doctrine" law:

"...if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony"

and similar clauses in the relevant sections.

So, it isn't just a "shoot first and ask questions later" situation as he lies to his readers that it is.

John Locke, English Philosopher, wrote in his Second Treatise On Government, in 1690, over 400 years ago:

"[It is] lawful for a man to kill a thief who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than by the use of force, so to get him in his power as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him; because using force, where he has no right to get me into his power ... I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty would not, when he had me in his power, take away everything else."

And:

"If the innocent honest man must quietly quit all he has for peace sake, to him who will lay violent hands upon it, I desire it may be considered what kind of peace there will be in the world, which consists only in violence and rapine; and which is to be maintained only for the benefit of robbers and oppressors."

Locke knew what he was talking about.

I can't match nimrod45's comment above, but can I share an anecdote?

Speaking to an Angolan guy who I'm working with, we got talking about an apparent upsurge in muggings in Luanda since a hoard of street criminals were released from jail (to relieve overcrowding and because some were in jail without due process being followed).

My take was that the cops would likely shoot any who they considered a threat. My contact related a story, take it as you will, considering its provenance as a mate of a mate story;

A Friend of his had been overpowered by three youths in the stairway of a tower block. they had taken his valuables, but promised to throw his keys out down the street.

The guy collected his keys and followed the group at a safe distance in his car.

When he found a cop (they are on every road junction and usually well armed, uzis and AKs) he reported the crime. the cops gave chase and shot two of the muggers dead.

They had asked the guy to go to the station to make a statement. While he was there the corpse of the third mugger was carried in.

I'm not going to put a value judgement on it, I don't even know if it is true (but then it is probably as valid a story as our local rags tell). If the events had happened to me, I think i would be pretty shaken, by the mugging and by the shootings, but then, I'm not in the same position as the locals and the cops who have to face these scum bags.

Fucking moron. I hope he's carjacked and beaten within an inch of his life so he can write a first-hand account of how sorry he feels for his attackers, and blames George Bush for their "need" to commit crimes.

HEAR, HEAR!!! Will Done Jeff=)...........

Let's see, can I do the math:

To take a life, to defend property:

What do I spend to buy my property? My money.

What do I spend to buy my money? My labor and skill.

What do I spend, using my labor and skill to buy money? The precious minutes of life that are all any man truly has.

I think I'm paraphrasing Heinlein, badly, in this. Let's go to a concrete example.

Joe Average makes $24,000 a year, or $2,000 a month. Let's assume he has a 40 hour a week job, 50 weeks a year, 2,000 hour work year. Neglecting taxes, which drive the equation upward quickly, here's the scenario.

I decide to carjack Joe Average's car; it's new, worth $12,000. I have just stolen six months of his labor, a thousand hours of his life. That is, I have stolen every breath he breathed at work for six months; if you "merely" go by hours of life, I have stolen over fourty days of his life.

This utterly neglects "psychological harm." And sure, he's insured, but how much of his life goes into paying for mutant insurance?

Bottom line; defense of property is defense of life.

At the risk of making light of this, consider the Pit of Despair in The Princess Bride: "There, I've just stolen a year of your life. How do you feel? And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest."

Morally and functionally, they are identical.

In Missouri, and probably in many other states, the duty to retreat is entirely a fabrication of the judges. There is NO statute that requires retreat from an attack, never has been in MO. But if you are charged with shooting someone and your defense is that you were attacked first, every judge MUST instruct the jury that before they can consider your defense they must find that you first retreated as far as you could. (In some states, but not MO, this has even been interpreted to include a duty to retreat from your home before resisting an attack.)

This duty to retreat is part of the instructions that the MO Supreme Court has promulgated for every trial judge to use. Prosecutors have a right to insist that that instruction be given, and they file their cases knowing that they can get this kind of instruction to the jury.

So in any states with similar legal histories, the legislatures that adopt a "Castle Doctrine" law are merely exercising their constitutional power to PASS the laws which the courts are there to APPLY. In doing so, the legislatures are just "repealing" laws adopted by judges without any vote by any elected representative of the people. In fact, this is the ONLY way to change laws which judges adopt on their own initiative, as the judges themselves are not elected (at least in MO.)

A jury is not bound by a judge's instrucitions. The court belongs to the jury. They and they alone are the finders of truth. Most people do not know this, but the jury owns the courtroom.

It is technically true that juries own the deliberation process ('cause nobody else is allowed in the jury room) but the courtroom itself is controlled by the judge. The judge will tell the jury what the "law" is in no uncertain terms, after the prosecutor has already emphasized the "duty to retreat" idea in his closing argument.

I'm not sure how permissible it is for a defense lawyer to say to the jury in his closing argument "now the judge is going to tell you that the law imposes a duty to retreat, but you should just ignore that and find my client not guilty even though he didn't retreat." That might get the defense lawyer cited for contempt, and certainly will bring forth a storm of instruction from the judge to the jury in the strongest terms of what THE LAW IS and what the jury's duties are. It would take a VERY strong couple of jury members to withstand that sort of power play from the judge and ignore his instructions. And it's certainly not something that any citizen should have to pin his freedom on.

Nice post, Jeff. If only these byproducts of our fine universities understood what common sense means - and how to use it.

Re the duty to retreat: Doesn't it take TIME to retreat from a threat situation? Time that the mutant could use to make good on his threat? I've never been faced with a crisis like that, but it's easy to imagine a confrontational situation where the time window available to retreat "if possible" is zero.

BTW, Ben, I have an MFA from a fine university, UCLA, but I was just a music major, not a law student or nuthin, so I guess I just don't understand the logical necessity of sacrificing my life over NY Times debating points. ;-)

I must apologize to your readers, in that I unintentionally mislead them with my initial posting. I used only an excerpt from the Florida law, which I had saved for another purpose; it isn't the right section.

Liptak was actually correct: Section 776.013, Florida Statutes, subsection (1) *does* ensrhine the presumption of "reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm" in the law, based soley on the fact that someone was "in the process of unlawfully and forcefully entering, or had unlawfully and forcibly entered, a dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle". This gives the defender the legal right to use deadly force against them, *without* any actual necessity to "reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony"

I regret making this mistake, and any misunderstandings it may have caused.

wrangler5, you are absolutely correct. However, as Americans it is our responsibility to enforce the rules. Ours, not the cops, not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the defense attorney. The jury is our representation at the scales of justice.

Defense attorneys will not contradict a judge, no matter how erroneous his instructions or representations of the law. If we don't grow some balls and quit going along to get along, we won't need any damn juries, will we? If we accept everybody else's interpretation of what we are to do or what we may consider we would be a fraud.

Look into our system and you will find the petit jury is also charged with trying the law. Despite what the legal elite would like you to believe, our founding documents make it quite clear that the law is always on trial. Once the agreement is reached on that then the case is decided. Every graduate of law school will tell you that is not true. They either lie, or they are ignorant and did not avail themselves of the reading material they should have when studying the law.

I could go on, but to be honest most people find this truth about our responsibility to be so scary that by the time I get here, they have decided I'm crazy and therefore aren't about to listen to this scary shit.