You are totally misstating the law. Just because I come onto your property uninvited doesn't give you the right to threaten me with deadly force. You certainly have the right to ask me to leave. You don't forfeit your right to self defense just because you are on someone else's property. I don't pretend to know what was going on here. My experience however was that there must have been a long history of these kinds of noise issues. He knew he wasn't going to get any cooperation and probably would get some crap from his drunk neighbors and their pals. I'm not defending his actions, only saying that the neighbors and their guests are also to blame for the incident. They were in the wrong, having a loud drunken party in a residential area late at night. Instead of apologizing and cooperating, they started making threats. It doesn't take much to start a conflagration ina tinderbox. From what I saw, i wouldn't have voted for murder. Manslaughter maybe.
What makes you think this is a CCW case? He wasn't carrying concealed apparently. The idea of some psychological questions for CCw issuance is naive at best. First, we would have to trust that the government wouldn't misuse them to deny permits. The whole philosophy of CCW must issue laws is that the police don't get that kind of discretion because experience has shown they misuse it. So we have objective standards. You pass a test, you don't have any convictions, you haven't been under the care of a psychiatrist, you get a permit. by and large, this approach has worked very well. Second, a couple of obvious questions aren't going to identify problem cases. People will lie. Nor are pop psych questions about someone's childhood likely to be good predictors of adult behavior.
AAA you're the only one who thinks the killing was justified, including the jury. It might be your logic that is wrong in this case.
It does if you show up in my driveway with a gun, talking shit. If anyone had rights under the Stand Your Ground it would be the owners of the home.
So in your view asking a bunch of drunks to tone down a loud party is "talking shit?" Why can't you guys just make your case on the facts without creating straw men? And why the need to ridicule the guy because his voice cracked under stress? You don't know how many times this same scene had played out, how many times he and his family were kept up by a bunch of drunken yahoos next door, how many times he had courteously asked them to keep it down and been told to go fuck himself, how many times he had called the police and they did nothing. He didn't handle it right, but it's naive to believe this was a one-time incident and that the neighbors and their guest don't share some of the blame.
I didn't say it was justified, only that I saw a murder conviction as a stretch. I don't mind being odd man out either. I don't have a lot of time for neighbors who keep you up with drunken parties.
It is when you show up with a gun. I don't care how many times he had dealt with this issue. You show up with a gun, and whatever comes next is all on you. The reason it's murder and not manslaughter is the fact that he went with a camera and a weapon. That means he had put some thought in to what might happen. That's where manslaughter ends and murder begins.
Wrong again. It certainly is not the law that "you show up with a gun and whatever happens next is on you." That's ridiculous. It implies that having a weapon makes you some sort of a criminal, to whom normal rules don't apply. Anyone can take a free shot at you and it's your fault. Your mistake, and I would add the jury's, was to assume that a guy who was kept awake by a loud party thrown by inconsiderate neighbors was thinking clearly and making a clear plan when he went to the house. If he was planning on gunning someone down, why would he want it on video? Your logic is faulty. The fact that your neighbors are drunken thugs doesn't mean you have to cower in your house all night either. Murder was a serious miscarriage of justice, but it shows what can happen when you are armed. You can be at the mercy of ambitious prosecutors and naive jurors.