Compare and contrast
Via Radley comes a case where a black man shot a white man in self-defense but he’s spending life in jail. The article is about ‘stand your ground’ laws failing, which I doubt is the case if the shooting occurred before GA passed such a law.
Police didn’t charge the man initially. But, a year later, the DA decided to prosecute.
If the account of the incident is correct, then this pretty egregious. A man shooting another man who is charging him with a knife is, in any way I can think of, lawful self defense.
April 13th, 2012 at 10:02 am
The Salon article left a bunch of stuff out. No knife was pulled. Shooter stated he was “gonna whoop some ass” before dead guy showed up.
April 13th, 2012 at 10:06 am
Any cite on that? Just curious the rest of the story.
April 13th, 2012 at 10:23 am
There was a thread at georgiapacking that discussed it. That’s where I read about it. We were all worked up about it until one of the attorneys that posts pulled the case up and posted about it.
http://www.georgiapacking.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=71647&p=995299&hilit=epp#p995299
April 13th, 2012 at 10:34 am
P.S. – that link goes to page 2 so you’ll have to go to page 1 for the GA SupCt quote.
April 13th, 2012 at 11:24 am
I don’t believe Epp’s story, from Radley. “He pulled a knife on me.” That’s an old Irish joke. BTW, those weren’t my pant’s, either. They were someguy’s.
As for Zimmerman, Martin had the exact same right to stand his ground, armed or not, on a public sidewalk. The stand your ground law does not apply, who was aaggressing and who was defending does.
April 13th, 2012 at 11:48 am
On another note… I’ve heard about 20 accounts of the Zimmerman/Martin incident and every mention of “Stand Your Ground” explains that a person in FL can use lethal force if they feel their life is in danger.
Always left out is the extremely important part about “reasonable belief” which actually means something that is entirely different in a legal sense than mere “belief.”
April 13th, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Yup. Honest belief may mitigate, reasonable belief exonerates.
April 13th, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Two principles at work here, gentlemen: “Prosecutorial Discretion” and “Doesn’t Matter”.
Prosecutorial discretion means that the DA can ruin your life long after the incident, based on whim, political calculation, a search for “justice”, or any other reason that climbs in his/her head.
Doesn’t matter is just that: doesn’t matter if it was a classic case of self-defense; doesn’t matter if you were in the right; doesn’t matter if the DA has it in for you because you used to flush his head down the toilet on a daily basis in middle school. None of it matters because as soon as you’re charged, you will be ruined: you will go bankrupt defending yourself, your reputation will suffer, and you may even lose your job as a result. That’s why Zimmerman is toast, regardless of what the results of his trial turn out to be: the aim now is to ruin him, reduce his life to rubble, as a sacrifice to the political gods.
April 13th, 2012 at 5:37 pm
I am fairly sure “Dec. 6, 2005” was after FL nut before GA version of SYG. And the info Sparky points to looks quite different.
Still, before SYG even if the deceased in Sparky’s case actually had a knife in hand it was usual practice to make a charge in such cases because using a firearm against a knife is escalating past “reasonable” force, which is the idea that the shooter should have pulled a knife rather than a gun, and “responsibility to retreat” which required a 91-year-old with one leg to at least try to outrun a 20-year-old track star. There is currently a case in Canada in which a store owner told a person who had previously been convicted for robberies in the neighborhood to leave the area, was then attacked, and used what he had at hand – some spices – in an attempt to break away: he was charged because he “escalated” from a fist-fight to using a “weapon.”
April 13th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
John, that is not the case in GA. Florida may have had the first SYG on the official code, but there has been no duty to retreat in GA for over 100 years.
April 13th, 2012 at 11:29 pm
In my jurisdiction at least, it is not unusual for charging not to occur for months or even years after the crime, depending on the crime. Some crimes take months to investigate, for instance…. and once the investigation is complete, it could be a month before it gets assigned to an attorney, and another few months before it makes it to the top of his priority list for charging. Unless there is an imminent community threat it’s more likely I see charges between 6 months to a year from when the investigation was finished. It’s frankly just a matter of workload, at least where I live.
April 14th, 2012 at 12:48 am
Apparently there was never really a need for a “stand your ground” law in Georgia:
“Conklin v. State, 254 Ga. 558 (1985)(emphasizes that Georgia has long recognized since 1898 that in the face of a felonious assault, a man who is free from blame has no duty to retreat).”
1898 was pretty long ago. DA must have had something to go on in this case to challenge it.