A legal proposal

[Bone]

Castle doctrine not only states you have no duty to retreat in your home, it also creates the presumption that anyone forcibly entering your home that has no right to be there puts you in grave danger at risk of serious bodily injury or death. Your proposal eliminates the presumption of imminent danger/death in one’s home (castle doctrine) and forces the lone homeowner to bear the burden of showing how they were in fact in danger.

This rule allows (to its supporters) the swift administration of natural justice. But to those of us who are not prepared merely to take a shooter’s say-so, it creates an evidentiary lacuna. The question is: Does the benefit of relieving people from having to retreat from places they have a right to be (in the still very uncommon circumstance of being threatened with deadly force*) outweigh the tendency of this situation to present, after the fact, with these evidentiary gaps.

• This is a difference in worldview. SYG supporters seem to perceive the world as fundamentally hostile and our ability to punish lawbreakers as hopelessly inadequate. Thus SYG is needed to parry a menacing world. Suffice it to say, I think this is overblown (and more the consequence of internal psychodramas) than a reflection of just how often people are genuinely imperiled with death.

The purpose of SYG is not to mete out swift justice nor do its supporters believe our ability to punish lawbreakers is inadequate. The purpose is not to shift the role of the justice system to the individual. The was well articulated by Una Person in the other SYG thread:

@Una_Persson

SYG was intended to remove the “deadly hesitation” factor for self-defense. In short, to allow someone whose life was threatened to have the confidence to act to protect themselves and other innocents, rather than wait out of fear of being a criminal themselves if an activist prosecutor or inept jury somehow decided they could have somehow escaped by impossible means.

And myself, from later in that thread:

The problem [without SYG] that you are not recognizing is one where there is legitimate self defense, and a hostile DA (with full prosecutorial immunity) can ruin your life after you successfully defend yourself. A jury that was not present will second guess your actions and it’s a roll of the dice if they do the right thing. And on top of all of that, you are now financially crippled by way of a trial. Either that or you take a lesser plea because you can’t afford a solid defense even though you are innocent.

SYG mitigates that problem. If there is no SYG, how would you address that problem?

In FL at least, the person asserting the SYG defense must do so based on a preponderance of the evidence. But even in simple self defense cases, where there is a plausible claim the burden to show that the killing was not in fact self defense should rest on the prosecution, and the standard should be beyond a reasonable doubt.