Votes: 17 Results | Other Polls
I'm too lazy to look, but I wonder if any cops have been shot by someone "standing their ground." --------------- Technician - "We can't even get decent physical health care. Mental health is like witchcraft here."
"To this day that was the most bullshit caesar salad I have every experienced..." - triggerfinger
But that depends on how you define "Stand your ground". If you take the simplest aspect of it, there being no duty to retreat so that lethal force is always an option even if there are other options available, I think the number is over 30.
And something like it exists for for federal case law as well:
Rationally the failure to retreat is a circumstance to be considered with all the others in order to determine whether the defendant went farther than he was justified in doing; not a categorical proof of guilt. The law has grown, and even if historical mistakes have contributed to its growth it has tended in the direction of rules consistent with human nature. Many respectable writers agree that if a man reasonably believes that he is in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm from his assailant he may stand his ground and that if he kills him he has not succeeded the bounds of lawful self defence. That has been the decision of this Court. Beard v. United States, 158 U.S. 550, 559, 15 Sup. Ct. 962, 39 L. Ed. 1086. Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife. [Brown v. United States]
[Brown v. United States]
Wumpus
On the third hand (I'm an octopus), if Zimmerman walked up to Martin and started talking to him, that hardly gave Martin the right to take a swing at him. If that's what happened, it's hard to say what Zimmerman is guilty of even in a moral sense. Do we really want to make it so that you can't defend yourself just because you verbally confronted them?
On the fourth hand (squid), the real story here is that the media managed to get a totally BS story in front of the public in March 2012. There was a manufactured, media-driven element to this case that's impossible to ignore and that was the factor that changed it from a merely local story into a national scandal with the continuing involvement of DOJ and the President, a threatened civil-rights suit, etc. Zimmerman is kind of a loser, but he's clearly not the racist lunatic that we heard about last year -- he volunteers for the NAACP! Not to mention his mom is Afro-Peruvian, he's a registered Democrat, his "gated community" turns out to be lower middle-class, etc.
After the Zimmerman case, the Jena 6, the Duke lacrosse fiasco, etc., I'm done with any story that has a "narrative". The narrative is almost always wrong.
(Or maybe not. The thing about bad laws is that they are often arbitrarily enforced.)--- [ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman
I can bait you into a fight and if I start losing I can can legally kill you, provided I "believe" myself to be subject to "great bodily harm." It is then the state's job to prove--beyond a reasonable doubt--that I either did not actually fear for my life, or my fear was unreasonable. In the case of George Zimmerman, even if the state proved that he baited an encounter (and I am not sure they did) they still must prove that he had no reasonable justification to fear for his life.
