This is literally the opposite of the idea behind “stand your ground”. It’s right in the name. The idea behind stand your ground is that it is OK to stand your ground and you have no duty to retreat.
A person who has a right to be present at the location where the deadly force is used, who has not provoked the person against whom the deadly force is used, and who is not engaged in criminal activity at the time the deadly force is used is not required to retreat before using deadly force as described by this section.
And if you see someone who is doing so, you may feel threatened. If you do, you are not required to move away, instead you are allowed to kill them on the spot. (because you yourself are allowed to open carry)
This seems… like a bad idea all round.
To take it further… If I am open carrying, and I see another guy shoot someone who is also open carrying (because he felt threatened), I guess I am now allowed to kill the shooter because he’s obviously a threat to me. And so on ad infinitum.
I’m honestly surprised we haven’t yet seen a serial killer using Stand Your Ground laws as their tool of choice. I mean, as you say, it has so many huge loopholes. Even if you knew the guy was going out with the intent of finding someone to shoot, how, under this law, would you be able to prosecute them? Is there some principle in law that it’s legal to defend yourself X times, but X+1 you’re going to rot in prison?
They need to update the video and add a couple of drag queens an LGBTQ+ person or two and some Librarians…. Picture a couple of bears and their twinks kitted out in leather BDSM stuff waving rainbow Gladstone/ “come and take it” flags while brandishing AR-15s.
It would asymptotically disappear. As more of them shoot each other it becomes increasingly difficult for them to meet. And at the end there would still be one left.
And don’t forget, if the other guy doesn’t have a gun, but you do, you can be in fear for your life of the possibility that they’ll grab your gun, so you can still shoot them.
We have a hot off the presses case in Tennessee where the shooter is claiming self defense where he feared for his life because of the possibility that some shoplifters may have been armed. I guess we’ll see how this one plays out.
“The employee then pulled his semi-automatic pistol and began shooting, saying he was afraid and did not know if either of the women were armed.”
Sorta sounds like the “… in the parking lot” kinda wrecks his claim of self-defense. By the time the shoplifters were in the parking lot they were probably going away and he should have been staying in the store, not running after them.
Back inside the store, right next to the cosmetics and near the overpriced stale canned nuts, sure. But outside? That’s a claim too far.
If you read the whole thing, the story so far, and we’re pretty much getting only one side so far, is that he followed them out filming them and to get their license plate number, and then they attempted to spray him with pepper spray or similar, then the gun comes out and bang bang premature baby.
I would have to know the details of that spraying. If they got him right in the eyes and he was completely or nearly completely blinded I could see panic rising to a legitimate fear for your life pretty quickly.
But my guess is that it was nothing like that and they ineffectually put some spray in the air.
I’d like to say that we’ll find out more down the road, but no one died here so it might fall off the radar pretty quickly.
If we grant that the former would suffice — but then add that, no, it was actually the latter — could an argument be made that, once they started spraying, it can be reasonable to bootstrap that into figuring, hey, they could get me right in the eyes, with the blinding and the panic like Lance was just saying, such that he started justifiedly guarding against the “legitimate fear” possibility because, and only because, the latter possibility was, as it were, in the air?
I.e. the jury will be asked to decide if a reasonable person would have feared for his or her life in the same situation as opposed to trying to determine if this particular guy actually feared for his life like really for real.
It’s also not traditional/stereotypical racism. He apparently supported the NAACP. At least two of his ‘girlfriends’ appear to have been Black. One that he slept with appeared to be high school aged. Other girls he messaged on Kik appear to have been minors, it also seems he didn’t want nudes from minors. There’s signs of depression, explicit statements of fear, and lots of right wing memes (esp. about reverse racism), and in some communications with other soldiers, very toxic macho culture. Some of the more toxic things like what he says to this Justin Smith, he will describe in a totally different way to others like his girlfriend or Michael Holcomb.
His family pushed back when they saw his Facebook posts but I don’t think it had any effect. Credit to the Holcomb guy for repeatedly engaging with the defendant about a number of relevant topics, from BLM being mostly peaceful protests, to what is or isn’t legally justified self defense, even to the specific point that it’s not justified if you are looking for trouble and instigating violence. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough.
Gov. Abbott’s decision to ask for a pardon at this point is indefensible and unprecedented. If the defendent had been in custody for years leading up to the trial, with documented mistreatment, and the sentencing was for a short amount of time, clemency might be appropriate. Resentencing from a death penalty to life in prison is another situation where clemency could be argued for. Neither applies here. Abbott - a former Texas Supreme Court Justice mind you - has a track record of not intervening in such cases even when everyone wants him to. That makes this decision all the worse.
Firing a gun in a parking lot while blind is reckless behavior regardless of circumstances. He’s lucky he didn’t kill random people. At that point he’s no different than a maniac mass shooter who opens fire in a mall.
