Not. Can you give me a cite?
Edited to clarify: Please supply cites of lots of cases of two people getting in an argument, one escalating to shoving, the other one shooting the first to death, and the shooter not being charged.
Edited again: Where there is video, so it’s (somewhat) clear what happened.
Media doesn’t cover it so it will be difficult to find, believe what you want, but there are 10’s of thousands of deaths by guns every year so go figure it out.
So you are unable to substantiate your assertion? No Youtube videos? No articles? Nothing, just your bare assertion that I am supposed to believe? How many deaths are we talking about every year, here?
…approximately 15,000 by gun in 2017, and almost all are the final resolution of some type of altercation.
You’ve flipped the burden of proof. Prosecutor has to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) Drejka shot and killed McGlockton. Drejka will then raise the affirmative defense that he was in fear of his life, so SYG applies. Proof for the affirmative defense is on Drejka. The prosecutor doesn’t have a burden of proof for the affirmative defense. The prosecutor tries to defend the charge against the affirmative defense.
^ Not exactly, @twoinanddone. As I understand it, if SYG is invoked a preliminary hearing is taken to determine whether it is applicable. If it is, the prosecutor will bear the burden, as outlined by @ucbalumnus.
If it is not invoked, and it might not be here, then self defense can be raised as an affirmative defense, and the defendant will bear the burden - not beyond the shadow of a doubt, but typically on a more relaxed preponderance of the evidence standard - of proving that he was in reasonable fear for his life or great bodily harm. A real Florida criminal lawyer could chime in here, but again I think that is basically right.
"Throwing in the fearfulness expressed by Florida posters about how “everyone” has a concealed gun there (basically implying that you should either submit to being bullied or carry a gun yourself) "
Has nothing to do with submitting and everything to do with choosing not to engage. Has anyone actually had a positive experience with a yelling stranger where you somehow convey your position and that person stops yelling and agrees you are right? There is no “winning” with random strangers who are willing to act like this, there are only ways to exacerbate the situation or ways to avoid it in the first place. Ignore, ignore, ignore. Very effective in avoiding these issues.
All these people were bullies, all were engaging. If one or more had just ignored or refused to engage, this likely would have ended differently.
SatchelSF accurately describes the practical implementation of SYG in Florida. 2nd district court of Florida in May of this year (Timothy Ray Martin case) shifted burden of proof to prosecutor. If the prosecutor fails to meet this burden the case will not proceed to trial.
Actually there were about 13,000 gun deaths by intent in the US last year, excluding suicides (which are the large majority of gun deaths).
But the vast majority of these were classified either as illegal homicide of some sort or other, or as legitimate killing by law enforcement. There were not 13,000 cases where some hothead went around starting arguments, got someone to assault him, shot the person, and then got away with it.
Gun homicides are bad. Good thing their incidence has dropped precipitously in recent decades.
Some of us believe that killings by people who go around picking and escalating fights are also bad, and that is what we are discussing here. I assume that most people in this discussion would not classify a guy getting drunk and shooting his girlfriend, or two drug gangs in a shootout, as “these type of incidents.”
Two reasons.
(1) She was never in fear of Drejka imo; people can make their own inferences as to how reasonable getting out of a car with a “crazy man” close to you would be.
(2) From her vantage point, with Drejka positioned a few feet off the driver’s side fender, about half way between front bumper and driver’s door, she was able to see McGlockton exiting the store past Drejka’s left shoulder. At that very moment she decided to exit the car, leaving her infant child and toddler, for some reason. Hmmmm. Drejka never even saw him coming. McGlockton gave Drejka no chance to back away.
Watch the video again.
“Watch the video again.”
I have watched it, multiple times. And I’ve lived in Florida for many years, and am familiar with the area of the shooting. My comment was addressed at how I’d teach my sons to refuse to engage or what I would do, but then again we’re law abiding types and I wouldn’t join my partner to administer a beat down in a parking lot. Which is exactly what I would guess was in process here. Right down to the way McGlockton ambushed Drejka by shoving him off his feet. Not a surprise he has a DV conviction because that’s something many of the DV offenders learn - hurt and disable the person in ways that are less likely to leave an obvious mark. That way when the police question you, you say you didn’t touch them, the other person just “fell” and you have no idea what happened.
^ Sorry @milee30, my “watch the video again” was really a general exhortation. I’ve noticed that not a single poster who is saying that Drejka was so threatening (based only on media reports of supposed past actions, many of which will likely turn out to be exaggerations or outright lies) has volunteered any explanation of why the girlfriend would exit her vehicle. I think i just figured it out based on that vantage point analysis.
One of the big issues on CC is that most posters are undoubtedly members of the cognitive elite, and have a very large intellectual toolkit with which to fix life’s little problems and annoyances. These three don’t have that toolkit. Different rules in these situations, and rule 1 is don’t put your hands on someone else because you don’t know what you might get in return.
If a tape comes out showing Drejka banging on the car, rapping on the window, reaching in, etc., I’ll be the first person to change my tune. McGlockton was only entitled to use force to prevent imminent physical harm to himself or his girlfriend. Obviously, she was never in any danger.
I’ll shut up now:)
The Martin case is under appeal to the Florida Supreme court, and other courts have found it unconstitutional. Not settled yet. It is very unusual for the prosecution to have to argue the defendant’s position. The standards in preliminary hearings is usually much lower than in a trial, usually a preponderance of evidence.
I don’t know if this matter is in the 2nd Judicial district or another. Miami-Dade seems to go in another direction.
^Was settled in May. See my above post. Easily found Sun Sentinal.
Purely a theoretical but in an ideal world the races of those involved would have been distorted to avoid ipeople’s conclusions being racially biased. I suspect people would be shocked at how much it effects their perceptions even if the are not conscious of their ingrained bias.
Yes, ucbalumnus, when you quoted me in your post 114, my example was NOT to demonstrate legality of a shooting. My example was to point out state of mind of a guy under attack. After the fact, we may feel the intruder had only property on his mind, and no “personal injury”. If the intruder survives, he will claim he had no intentions other than theft. But at the second the resident confronts the intruder, how could he know the intruder’s intent?
“Castle” situations are commonly treated differently in ways much more favorable for the resident in terms of leeway to use deadly force against an intruder who has illegally entered the home presumably because:
Note also that some states do not have “stand your ground” generally, but do have “castle doctrine”, meaning “stand your ground” in your home.
You can compare Florida statutes 776.013 (“castle” situation) and 776.012 (other situation) on when the use of deadly force is justified. Note the presumption contained in 776.013(2).
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?mode=View%20Statutes&SubMenu=1&App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=776.013&URL=0700-0799/0776/Sections/0776.013.html
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?mode=View%20Statutes&SubMenu=1&App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=776.012&URL=0700-0799/0776/Sections/0776.012.html
Yes, I could compare statutes if I was dealing with the legality of the shooting. However, I am not.
I am touching on the state of mind of the shooter in the video, likely the same of a resident encountering an intruder. Neither one would know, at that moment, what the intentions were of an aggressor. Although if there is video, we can watch again and again, slo-mo or stop as necessary to reach a conclusion. We have that advantage. The victim however had only 1 try and just for a split second to determine if he might still be in physical danger.
Unlikely to be the same state of mind. Drejka was out in public apparently being an irritant and trying to pick a fight, as compared to a resident in a home minding his/her own business and not expecting to have to deal with an intruder.
Even in the case where someone is out in public and not doing anything that could be construed as being an irritant or picking a fight, many people have a different mindset about the risk of crime at home versus out in public, such that encountering a criminal inside of one’s home could produce a different mindset than encountering one out in public. That is presumably at least part of why laws commonly treat “castle” situations differently from other situations.
I couldn’t agree more, on both counts.
Since the early 1990s, gun homicide rates have fallen roughly by half, while the estimated number of guns in the US has doubled to almost 400 million, more than one gun for every adult, teenager, child and infant (I was surprised myself by that figure).
Over that same period, the number of people incarcerated has roughly doubled.
I’ll leave it to the statisticians to work out the correlations.
Number of guns has increased, but gun ownership has declined (during both the rise and fall of the crime wave), according to http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gun%20Ownership_US_1972-2014.pdf . Meaning that fewer households have guns, but those that do have guns have more guns per household than in the past. It is not obvious how that necessarily affects crime rates, since a household or individual with lots of guns can only use so many at one time, whether defending against crime or committing crime.
Incarceration rates may be more of a result of crime than anything else. Of the five US states with the highest incarceration rates (LA, OK, MS, AZ, AR), all have higher property crime rates than the US overall, and all except MS have higher violent crime rates than the US overall. Of the five US states with the lowest incarceration rates (ME, MA, MN, RI, VT), all have lower violent and property crime rates than the US overall.