Posted on 12/13/2007 8:32:57 AM PST by BradtotheBone
In Joe Horn's now-infamous 911 call reporting the burglary of his neighbor's home last month, there's a particularly disturbing refrain that made many of us cringe.
"I'm not going to let them get away with this," the Pasadena homeowner tells the dispatcher several times in various ways in the moments before he shot to death the two burglars, Miguel Antonio DeJesus, 28, and Diego Ortiz, 30.
To many of us, Horn's preoccupation with stopping the crime and recovering the stolen property — "a bag of loot," as Horn described it — seemed irrational and vengeful rather than heroic. We agreed with the dispatcher, who repeatedly pleaded with the 61-year-old computer consultant to keep himself and his shotgun safe inside his own house while police headed to the scene.
"Ain't no property worth shooting somebody over," the dispatcher told Horn.
Property versus human life Human life is worth more than property. It seems like a universal truth. But apparently not in Texas, or other states with similar laws.
Over the past week, I've researched the Texas Penal Code and discovered some provisions that were surprising even to this fifth-generation Texan.
The law of our land seems to place more value on the property being stolen — even if it belongs to a neighbor — than on the life of the burglar stealing it.
A review of our state's protection-of-property statutes suggests that Horn's repeated declarations about not letting the burglars "get away with it" may be the words that ultimately set him free.
If Horn doesn't get indicted, don't blame the grand jury. And don't blame Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal. Blame the section of Chapter 9 of the Penal Code that deals with protection of property.
Justifiable homicide Under the section, which has been in place at least since 1973, a person is justified in using deadly force to protect a neighbor's property from burglary if the person "reasonably believes" deadly force is immediately necessary to stop the burglars from escaping with the stolen property. It's also justified if the shooter "reasonably believes" that "the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means."
Now, one might argue that, since the dispatcher told Horn that police were on their way, Horn should have reasonably believed authorities would nab the bad guys.
But the escalating anxiety in Horn's voice as he sees the burglars emerge from his neighbor's window with the goods, and his reiteration that "they're getting away" moments before he fires his 12-gauge may indicate to a grand jury that Horn didn't believe police would arrive in time.
Rosenthal wouldn't discuss the particulars of the Horn case, which he is still waiting to receive from Pasadena police. And police haven't revealed all the facts. A police spokesman disclosed last week that, according to a plain-clothes detective who witnessed the Nov. 14 shootings, Horn shot the two men in the back after they'd ventured into his front yard.
The fact that they were on his yard may provide Horn with even more protection.
Rosenthal said he's gotten about 50 letters and e-mails, including out-of-state inquiries from California to Minnesota, split about even in favor and against Horn being indicted. Rosenthal said he won't let the controversy surrounding the case — including a death threat against Horn called into the DA's public integrity division on Sunday —influence his office's handling of it.
He said he's not assigning any particular prosecutor, saying "whoever's working intake (when Pasadena files it) gets to be the person in the bucket."
And the prosecutor won't make a recommendation to the grand jury, which Rosenthal said is standard for such cases.
"We'll take it to a grand jury; we'll present it straight up, and whatever the grand jury does, we'll follow it. And if they decide they want to indict the guy, we'll handle it and we'll suffer the slings and arrows, but that's part of the territory," Rosenthal said.
Texas isn't unique in allowing the use of deadly force in the protection of property during felony crimes such as burglary, but the experts I talked with weren't aware how many states allow deadly force in the protection of a neighbor's property.
And for those of us tempted to dismiss such laws as backward or antiquated notions in a trigger-happy state, experts suggest states are moving closer to Texas' model than away.
"My sense is that the reason, not just Texas, but other states have been enacting statutes more and more like this is because politicians are afraid to vote against them," said Steven Goode, a law professor at the University of Texas.
"They don't want the next attack ad to be one where they are criticized for voting against someone's ability to protect themselves in their home."
"In a calmer and less politicized environment we might have different laws," Goode said. "But campaign ads don't allow for particularly nuanced discussions of issue."
Even if they don't indict him, it doesn't mean Horn's actions were morally right. He chose to kill; he didn't have to. His own life and property were not in danger until he confronted the burglars.
There's a difference between what we can do and what we should do. Without careful judgment and discretion, the law can be a dangerous thing.
The same law that may protect Horn from indictment could also protect someone who, in the dark of night, discovers a group of teenage girls wrapping his front yard trees with toilet paper.
To a rational person, this is a harmless prank. Under Texas law, in a world without discretion, the girls are engaging in criminal mischief and the homeowner would be justified in mowing them down with a shotgun.
She's getting pummeled in the posts to her article at the source.
Texas has some terrific laws. Horn should walk.
“Human life is worth more than property. It seems like a universal truth.”
Does it, now?
It seems like a universal truth to me that when you set out to commit a crime, you assume the risk that someone may shoot you for it.
BTW, Lisa, sweetie, does that apply to the unauthorized use of your genitals? They are, after all, your property. Should we indict you if you shoot a man rather than let him use your body?
ROFL !
"They don't want the next attack ad to be one where they are criticized for voting against someone's ability to protect themselves in their home."
"In a calmer and less politicized environment we might have different laws," Goode said.
If those DAMNED citizens would just keep their noses out of this, we could protect the illegals stealing us blind!
The burglers are breaking and entering on private property, you idiot. They have no right to be there. If something bad happens to them, oh well. Granted, I probably would have called the police and left it at that. But I don't have a problem with the neighbor taking action.
Property versus human life Human life is worth more than property. It seems like a universal truth. But apparently not in Texas, or other states with similar laws.
What a steaming pile of crap. My property isn't worth my life in the sense that I wouldn't risk going back into a burning house to retrieve it .. but I'll damn sure arm myself an do what is required to keep a criminal form walking off with it.
The person who decided that their life wasn't as valuable as my property is the thief, not me.
Personally I’m glad two more thieving illegals are dead. If the guy winds up having to set up a defense fund I’ll be contributing.
The benefit of the doubt should accrue to the innocent homeowner looking to be safe and secure in his home and neighborhood.
Hmmm but so many time the authorities don't nab the bad guys...Maybe Horn was just sick of seeing the crooks win again. I like the guy & hope he walks & stays safe.
It doesn't logically follow, that's true. But we're not playing the vague implication game today -- his actions were indeed morally right.
A distinction without a difference. Stealing property is the same as stealing the portion of my life I spent working to get the money to obtain it.
If Horn doesn't get indicted, don't blame the grand jury. And don't blame Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal.
Why on earth would I "blame" anyone for a good thing? ("Damn you; it's your fault I won the lottery!" "You idiot, it's your fault the police radar malfunctioned when I was going 15 MPH over the speed limit!")
The fact that they were on his yard may provide Horn with even more protection.
As well it should.
He chose to kill; he didn't have to.
They chose to burgle; they didn't have to. It's on their heads.
The same law that may protect Horn from indictment could also protect someone who, in the dark of night, discovers a group of teenage girls wrapping his front yard trees with toilet paper.
Your straw man offends my sinuses.
Obviously the thieves thought the property was worth more than their lives.
People that crazy enough break into your home will kill you too.
I support Horn.
America has a belly full of crime and illegal aliens.
The only way Horn is convicted by a jury, is if Johnny Sutton takes the case, changes the venue to Colombia, and stacks the jury with drug smugglers and other criminals.
Snort.
My email to Lisa:Lisa:Great fair and balanced reporting
except the last four lines.
There you are editorializing.
Your elitist, collectivist, statist views are very clear.
When seconds count, the police are only minutes away!
Lisa's reply:Thanks for writing. I'm a metro columnist, which means I mix news reporting with commentary.Lisa Falkenberg
Metro Columnist
Houston Chronicle
Office: 713-362-6479
Fax: 713-362-6806
Please note new cell phone: 832-367-7123
I wonder if this dimwit ever heard the phrase "Crime doesn't Pay" ? Of course more value is placed on someone else's property over a criminal's life.
You wanna' know how I know? See all those prisons, filled with all those convicts, there's a bunch of them in for robbing and stealing. Believe it or not, stealing is a crime. And to hammer that point home, if you rob someone and get caught, your freedom will be taken from you and you will be locked away in a cell.
oh, except if you're an undocumented citizen/guest that wouldn't leave, they get do overs and Mulligans
She just doesn’t get it.
My life is worth more to me than my property.
My property is worth more to me than the life of a thief.
Mr. Horn was morally correct in teaching this truth to the burglars, even if they did not live to profit by the lesson.
Human life is worth more than property, yes.
But, burglary, robbery, theft, is also about more than just property. It’s a question of will you stand up for your rights to be secure in your life and property. Letting them get away with it when you can shoot them is an abdication of both your rights to your life and property, and your moral obligation to defend them, both for yourself and others.
Count on liberals to ignore the moral dimensions of any argument.
They apparently thought it was worth the risk of losing their lives to steal from others. If they value their lives so little, why should anyone else value them more?
Lets suppose he let the burglars escape. A few weeks later
they are burglarizing someone else’s house and are surprised
by the unarmed homeowner and they kill him! I think Mr. Horn
just saved that homeowner’s life without knowing it. Think about it.
I don’t value the thieves lives very highly at all. What I have a problem with is that Mr. Horn had no intention of stopping them - he had every intention of killing them. He even told the dispatcher “I’m gonna kill ‘em.” Then he walked outside and gave a “warning” but didn’t give the perps sufficient time to comply with his warning before opening fire on them. On another thread a week or two ago, everyone was supporting Mr. Horn because some witness said that the robbers charged him and that’s why he fired. Now the truth comes out - they were both shot in the back. Unless they were running backwards at full speed towards Mr. Horn, I’d say we have a case of a neighbor lying to protect Mr. Horn.
The reason for that is simple - property is life, because someone had to expend a part of their life energy to obain it. It is exactly the same as the criminals taking a meat cleaver and trying to whack the property owner's arm off. And had that scenario occurred the author would not be faulting Joe Horn for shooting the criminals.
Liberals have trouble with this concept because many of them don't earn much money nor own much property, and when they do someone else like spouses and parents are usually the ones who paid for it, so they don't get the connection. They think property is something the government creates out of thin air and ought to distribute fairly to everyone. If that were actually true there would in fact be no reason to shoot at thieves.
I have a strong inkling that her sudden concern for human life fades quickly if the topic were unborn children or the sick and elderly........
Bets?
I have no doubt he saved some Americans life. Those two could have pawned all that stuff gotten loaded and killed an American by driving drunk as well.
The guy is a hero plain and simple.
Come to Colorado and test out our "Make My Day" law.Steal here, die here.
; )
real name(TigersEye)
I believe that was in response to the dispatcher telling Horn that he was going to get killed.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
If he had wounded them , they would have turn around and sued him.
Rofllllllllll
Damn sight easier to say when it's somebody else's property.
If I were to find the guy who stole my truck a few years back, I wouldn't have hesitated to shoot him down, and Texas law would back me up.
Remarks like this serve only to show how out of touch Lisa Falkenburg is.
See, democracy DOES work!
Falkenburg is just FULL of crap!
Doesn't she realize that property IS human life?
MY life?
I go to work, giving up a part of my life, to earn money to buy stuff.
My stuff therefore has an equivalency to my life; if I have to work a year to pay for a car, that's what it represents - a year of my life.
Someone stealing it is stealing a year of my life, and I'd take pleasure in offing the culprit.
Best line and best reasoning on the entire thread!!
Operator: Don’t go outside the house.
Horn: I’m doing it.
Operator: Mr. Horn, do not go out of the house.
Horn: I’m sorry. This ain’t right, buddy.
Operator: You’re gonna get yourself shot if you go outside that house with that gun. I don’t care what you think. Stay in the house.
Horn: You wanna make a bet? I’m gonna kill ‘em.
Operator: Ok. Stay in the house.
I’m not sure what relevance it has that his proclamation that he was “gonna kill ‘em” was in response to the operator telling him he would be shot if he went out with the gun, but that’s the sequence of the comments. It is still clear from that comment and Mr. Horn’s subsequent actions that his intent was to kill the men before he ever left his house.
You are right about that. Most people who are outraged by this are liberal whiners who think they should be able to abort at will and euthanize Grandma. I am not against the concept that you have a right to protect your property. My problem is that I think Mr. Horn was entirely too eager to kill someone. His stated intent was to kill the men, and that’s exactly what he did. He gave a farce of a warning with no time to react, then shot the men in the back.
I’ll ask anyone on this thread who blindly supports Mr. Horn: What if , despite your best efforts to train them to respect other people’s property, your 15 year old had a few beers too many one night and got involved in something like this with a couple of friends? Would you feel that Mr. Horn was justified, or would you think maybe he had gone a little too far?
I suspect that a great deal of the support for Mr. Horn on this board has as much to do with the ethnicity of the perps as it does with whether Mr. Horn’s actions were right or wrong.
The only people here who are doing anything “blindly” are those trying to find fault with Horn.
He intended to kill them? Good.
Nothing was at risk but property, and he killed them anyway? Good.
They were running away, and he killed them anyway? Good.
I don’t care if they were down on their knees crying and begging for their lives. They forfeited their right to breathe when they entered that house. Horn just made them pay the check.
The only way we’re ever going to take our country back is with a lot, ***LOT*** more of this kind of thing.
If you think a lot more of this kind of thing is going to “take our country back” then you clearly misunderstand the way this plays to most Americans.
I’m not talking about Freepers. I know that Mr. Horn is very popular here. I’m talking about the vast majority of the rest of America, the ones that voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Dummies last election. We don’t win over anyone by shooting people in the back without sufficient warning. Mr. Horn’s case will be used by the left as a prime example of the need for stricter gun control, beyond handguns and “assault rifles” and now extending to shotguns and all other types of weapons.
On this board - clearly there is the opposite reaction, but sentiment on this board rarely reflects political reality as much as it does political idealism. If you don’t believe that, just look at how different the results of the last couple of elections have been than posters on this board claimed to be confident that they would be.
I’m not calling for a pragmatic approach to win votes, but this case just bothers me as a clear example of a man who, much like Officer Gardner of the Utah Highway Patrol, was much too eager to pull the trigger.
Actually, the Founders were killing people over property. They took the "property" stuff our of the Declaration and Constitution in part because it was commonly understood at the time that property was paramount.
I imagine the Founders would be gobsmacked at today's notion that "it's just stuff".
That's how the government ended up owning most of our "stuff", including our paychecks, real estate and automobiles.
Question: Was the 15 year old drunk boy with the 4 girls toilet-papering?
Another question: What if the 15 year old boys actions inadvertantly caused another person to die?
Straw men can run wild.
And do you really believe “sentiment on this board rarely reflects political reality”? What is up with that?
And you appear to clearly misunderstand that most folks on here just don't give a rat's derriere HOW this "plays" to most Americans.
The issue being discussed is whether Joe Horn did the right thing, and the overwhelming concensus is "YES!"
"Most Americans" wouldn't know the "right thing" if it jumped up and bit them on the nose.
“The law of our land seems to place more value on the property being stolen — even if it belongs to a neighbor — than on the life of the burglar stealing it.”
Since the life of a sneak thief is essentially worth nothing and any kind of property has some sort of value by definition, I think this is right.
As with most liberal pro-criminal screeds, this one is based on a strawman. It is not property in and of itself that is worth a human life, it is the right not to have our possessions taken by force that is worth defending with lethal force. They are not the same thing at all.
The silly [w]itch is blaming Texans for those two poor disadvantaged illegal aliens robbing a Texans home, just doing the jobs that real Texans refuse to do and they get themselves shot and killed in the process. She, like the two thieving sorry-ass thugs just don't understand Texas homeowners anger and rage at being taken for a expensive ride and then advantage of by bleeding heart social engineering liberals and their handymen thugs.
Even if they don't indict him, it doesn't mean Horn's actions were morally right. He chose to kill; he didn't have to. ......
The two low-life professional thugs also knew that this was a risk they were willing to take when they chose to break into a mans home and steal his hard earned property [in Texas]. I'm afraid even more of them will get blown away yet still as they just don't want to live with the rest of us in a peaceful and law abiding manner. Too bad. Personally, I too am locked, loaded and ready for em'.
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