Posted on 01/11/2023 10:17:36 AM PST by absalom01
I remember a video of a cop shooting some bad guy during a traffic stop. The cop came around the car and emptied his magazine, maybe 9/10/11 shots.
That cop didn’t face charges. Matter of fact, I believe the sheriff said something like “Guys like this can never be dead enough” or some such.
Happened not long ago..
It’s also not unusual that he has an accomplice right outside the door a nanosecond from charging in. It’s a large leap of faith people make when they assume the action is over when bad guy 1 was on the floor. And he could have had a hand starting to move for another gun.
This guy did good. But it scares effete Easterners and prigs.
Well, from where I sit, and based only on the video, IMHO,
shots 1-3 totally fine. No grand jury, even in Harris county.
shot 4, probably still fine, but I’d rather not have to defend it.
Shots 5-8, in Waller county, no grand jury, in Harris, for sure a grand jury for some degree of manslaughter
Shot 9: you’re going to get a grand jury in just about any Texas jurisdiction.
My 2 cents. The author of the piece is perhaps the nation’s preeminent authority on the legal use of self defense deadly force, and does a much better job explaining everything than I ever could.
I see it in simpler terms.
If the thug hadn’t gone into a business, waving a weapon (regardless of what it turned out to be) and forcibly stealing people’s private property, there wouldn’t be any issue.
“Shots 7-9: The threat has already ended, shots not justified.”
By that time the perp was already dead. The shooter was just making sure.
You can’t execute a dead man.
Agreed, but this piece doesn’t address the moral or societal issues, but is directed at the purely pragmatic issues, which the defender is currently dealing with.
Branca does a great job just breaking down the legal issues from a criminal perspective, and it’s relevant for anyone who might find him or herself in that situation. It might be a matter of greater urgency for those of us in a jurisdiction with a Soros DA, as we have in Harris county, but it’s a valuable perspective for anyone.
No one wants to win the gunfight, and then spend years in a cage because, as you note, some knucklehead decided that it was a good day to wave a gun in one’s face and demand your wallet.
It’s a legal shooting, but the fact the guy left the scene is suspect, and probably illegal.
The robber crazily waves around a gun threatening the lives of everyone in the store.
Now the person, who risk his life in pulling out a gun and successfully making sure that the robber did not threaten anyone any more, is being questioned and denigrated by people who have probably never been in a similar imminent life-threatening situation as a civilian.
The gunfire occurred over nine seconds, and given how close the shooter was to the robber, there may have been motions by the robber that the shooter saw that were not picked up by the camera, even after he retrieved the robber’s gun. Also, the gunman did not medically examine the robber to see if he was still alive, or was unconscious, or pretending to be. Furthermore, the gunman did not frisk the robber to see if he had other weapons on him that he might be trying to use. And we should realize that the gunman probably had high adrenaline level during this time and would be highly sensitive to any perceived threatening movement by the robber, even as he was laying on the floor, and even if it was just a death throe, or reaction from being previously hit.
Based on these observations, in this situation, every round fired could be reasonably justified as self-defense, except by anti-Second Amendment fanatics.
Some of the pro-vigilante comments puzzle me. It seems to be a misunderstanding of what is and what should be. I don’t claim to know the self defense laws in Texas, but I am reasonably familiar with them in my state. We are not given executioner status when we are under threat of death or great bodily harm. We are allowed to use deadly force until the threat (not the person) no longer exists. Going only off what is seen in the video, it’s hard to find any legality for the last shot. Maybe additional evidence will justify it, but the optics of aggressively moving toward the robber while firing, even after he is down and appears to be motionless, doesn’t help his case. Not to mention leaving the scene before police arrived.
Nice answer, but not one that will fly in court.
If I were on the jury, I would never convict this guy, but when an overly zealous prosecutor tries a police officer for murder just because he had the words "You're F*cked" on the dust cover of his AR-15 that he used to shoot a suspect, you know damn well this guy will end up in court.
The defender’s counsel will almost certainly make that argument. Branca addresses the problems with that line of defense.
Would be much better to not have to mount that defense, IMHO.
This is posted more as a learning tool for those of us who choose to carry a defensive firearm. A LOT to learn from this one.
I was trained to make sure the adversary is 100% incapacitated. If that means emptying a magazine into them, so be it.
pettifoggery
What a perfectly cromulent old-timey word!
Back in the 1980s, NYC subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz was acquitted of attempted murder under very similar circumstances. The jury accepted the case presented by the defense — that a crime victim’s state of mind is not conductive to sound, rational decision-making in a highly charged situation where self-defense action is taken under threat of death or serious injury.
Was it fear, action, and adrenaline that made the Hero walk up to the Perp lying motionless on the ground, reach down and pick up the Perp's gun, then fire a 9th round into the Perp from a foot away?
There is a line between self defense and execution, and our Hero may have crossed it.
Not illegal. It's not like a traffic collision, there's no legal duty to stick around after a legal defensive use of force, at least in Texas. And the fact that he left, while it might be used against him to "impeach" his testimony is the least of his problems, and might even be good tactics. Frankly I'm giving serious consideration to that very thing in my own ROE's.
The problem that the defender is going to have is justifying the "reasonableness" of his use of deadly force for the shots following, at minimum, the 4th.
Nobody trained you to walk up to someone face down on the ground who is motionless, and put a bullet into his head after retrieving his dropped gun.
It was no longer deadly force when the person was already dead.
So, a lawyer who is an expert in the law of self-defense wrote a long column examining the legality of three sets of shots, knowing from the video the effects of each set. The shooter had 2 sec, 0:14 to 0:16 on the video, to do the analysis.
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