If you shoot someone in self-defense are you better off (from a legal standpoint) to kill the person rather than wound them?

Great Debates
81

Great post ParallelLines. It crystallized the feeling I’d had, reading and contributing to this thread, that was similar to the memorable Jeff Goldblum line from Jurassic Park, “[Y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Should, God forbid, anyone here ever be involved in a shooting, everything thing you do is going to be scrutinized. And while, in theory, ensuring your assailant is dead ensures their statement will not be part of the evidence used against you in the proceedings to determine whether to charge you with a crime or not, you are going to have to explain how that happened. If you shoot your assailant again, while s/he is just laying there—in other words, the deadly threat to you has stopped—you are going to have to explain that individual gunshot.

If you can’t articulate an imminent threat to your life, or a third party’s, you might be going to prison.

PL is absolutely right that anyone contemplating using a firearm to defend themselves (or, in Texas, potentially property as well) needs to ask themselves these questions, educate themselves on their state’s relevant laws, and think very carefully about the potential issues.

82

If I recall right, there have been people who’ve shot intruders in the back or shot them after they were clearly injured and debilitated who have been convicted or murder and/or attempted murder.

83

The case of Laquan McDonald has both of those elements, asahi. Officer-involved shooting, and you can read the linked wiki for the gory details.

The points to take away from that shooting, and why I brought it up, are that McDonald was laying on the ground at some point during all of the shots that Chicago police officer Van Dyke fired, it looked like you could see the individual bullets hitting McDonald as he was laying on the ground, and most importantly: it looked absolutely awful on video to the jury. On video, it looked like Van Dyke shot a helpless man (a threat that had already been stopped) again and again. The jury ended up convicting on Murder 2, with some concurrent battery charges as well.

You will have to explain every shot. And if you lie, or deliberately attempt to tamper with the evidence, a previously justifiable self-defense shooting now turns into another crime that can put you in jail.

As PL stated upthread, these things are astoundingly rare for people not in law enforcement. Fairly rare for those guys too. (@ParallelLines is the 100 or so instances over the country as a whole, for justified self-defense shootings by a non LEO?)

84

And if you’re going to play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band.

85

I personally know about a dozen people who have shot someone (not ncluding those that did so in military action). All but 1 of them cops.

2 of them did shoot someone in the back and the force was ruled as reasonable:

One of them was in a fast food restaurant off duty when an armed robbery took place. He felt it wasn’t safe for himself or anyone else in the establishment to engage so he remained seated and kept his mouth shut. But the suspect got pissed that the staff behind the counter wasn’t moving fast enough and began shooting across the counter into the kitchen where there were several employees. This turned it into an active shooter scene. My acquaintance immediately drew his off duty weapon and fired at the only target he had, the suspects back, killing him instantly. That use of force was judged as reasonable and that he saved several lives by his action.

The second one was on a traffic stop. The driver jumped out and pointed a handgun at him. The officer drew and fired. At the very instant he did the suspect had turned to run and the bullet struck him in the side of his back. There was dashcam video from another squad present. After a scrutinizing investigation it was ruled that in the split second between pulling the trigger and the suspect turning there was no way his brain could have processed the movement in time to not fire. I saw the video at an in-service training session. It all happened in the blink of an eye. There’s no way that could have been avoided. It looks like there is flash from the barrel at the same instant the suspect started turning.

Every one of the people I know who were involved in shootings never got their gun back. While justified it still was a homicide or attempted homicide and the weapon stays in evidence. This is no big deal when it’s a department issued sidearm, they just give you another one. But some agencies, like the one I work for, allow officers to carry their own pistol as long as they qualify with it and carry the departments ammo. The legal expense of trying to get your weapon released is far more than what it would cost to just buy a new one and many just give up trying.

86

I was responding to this line in a prior post, which as lobotomyboy63 pointed out, I did not do my own research time, as I was trying to acknowledge that yes, these situations happen, they are not ‘frequent’ in the great scheme of things, but they are not rare either. I should still have been more clear and nuanced in the post though, for which I accept responsibility.

Okay, back to thread: I’ve been trying to find any actual evidence of the original point in the thread, whether there is/is not an advantage legally speaking of a dead vs injured assailant. Surprise surprise, there are a not insignificant number of news articles about injured criminals suing the homeowner/property owner (because it’s sensational) but very very few speak to the results.

Has on # 5 one of the ones that I found in my research but actually mentions the results. If you don’t want to read the whole thing (it did get my blood up) .

Cutrufelli soon filed a lawsuit against Leone. He claimed that Leone had negligently shot him during the confrontation, and he said that Leone had caused him great bodily injury and financial damage.[7] Cutrufelli’s lawsuit was thrown out.

As far as I can tell, in many of these suits, the person shot sues in civil courts, and then the subject of the initial assault/B&E counter sues, and they agree to both drop, or the case gets thrown out.

I bring this up, because we are all in danger of drifting off the thread (and I’m guilty of this as well). So, I summarize my findings so far as this.

In General (because there is a metric ton of local laws, precedents, biased juries, and on and on and on) if you end up injuring someone in a justifiable shooting, you are unlikely to be subject to a criminal trial, but much more likely to be subject to a civil trial, which is more than likely to be dropped or dismissed.

In the event of a lethal, if justified shooting, you are at risk of a criminal trial, as well as possibly a civil lawsuit on behalf of the deceased party’s family. Which depending upon the jurisdiction above, is still likely to be dismissed given the assumption that the shooting is justified based on the facts of the case.

Regardless you are going through the wringer. Given the choices above, I would tend to think that for the purposes of the OP, you are not better off from a legal standpoint in a shooting to kill, all else being equal and the shooting is justified in the first case. You are potentially avoiding (and yes, there are tons of exceptions but…) a serious criminal charge and additional costs. I suspect that the basis of the advice the OP saw on Reddit is that there is a possible trend in such shootings that the justification is questionable, and if so, well, they feel dead men tell no tales.

87

In a significant minority of states, a finding that the use of deadly force was justifiable bars any subsequent civil suit arising out of the use of deadly force. (Texas’s conflicting laws on the subject are briefly discussed in this blog post)

Which in theory that doesn’t make sense, as the standards of proof are different between criminal prosecution—prove the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt—and a civil case—prove by a preponderance of the evidence (>50%). Still, that’s what the legislature did.

88

Question, if the “Ken and Karen” couple shot a protester that got within arms reach of them, would they have been charged with murder? I assume, since they were lawyers, that the probably believed they would not be, otherwise, why carry guns OUTSIDE your house?

FWIW, I think they probably should have been standing on that balcony that their security was on when the protesters pass by a second time. If the protesters threw rocks or some other heavy object at them while they were on their balcony, and they shot the protesters, would they have been charged with murder?

89

In my CCW class we were told:

  1. Don’t draw unless your (or someone else’s) life is threatened.
  2. Shoot to kill.
  3. Call the police. If you say anything, only say that you thought that your life was in jeopardy.
  4. Call a lawyer. You are going to be sued.
90

WTF kind of training are some of you going to? These instructors should be aware that there is a possibility that they may have to testify at a court trial regarding the instruction you received. Words matter, even if it’s just semantics in real life. Getting on the stand and saying they intentionally train their students to shoot to kill rather than to stop a threat may not sit well with some juries.

91

Agreed. When I was trained, the instructors always made a point of telling everyone we were being trained to shoot to disable. And we were trained to shoot at the center of the target, which if it’s a human being is very likely to kill the person you’re shooting at.

But afterwards, we could go to court and testify that we had never been trained to kill people.

92

I went to training in rural Oklahoma where juries are far less likely to feel sympathy for home invasions. Also, it’s been long enough ago that the instructor could reasonably say “I never said that. Mr. Glinley must be misremembering.” And it’s entirely possible that I am. I don’t think I am, but it’s possible.

93

Can Ken or Karen credibly claim that they reasonably believed either of them were in imminent jeopardy of severe bodily harm or death? That’s the main question to answer. There are other questions: was there a duty to retreat, did they instigate the confrontation, were they in a place they had a legally recognized right to be, etc…

You can see how different people may perceive differently what a reasonable person in Ken’s or Karen’s shoes would have reasonably believed. Which can make successfully proving this justification difficult.

94

Right. Shoot to stop the threat, aim to where more likely to hit. Period. “A reasonable person” will know that if he’s shooting he has already made a decision to imperil life.

95

Something we haven’t discussed yet in the thread I wanted to bring up - establishing your prior intent.

If you want to be “better off (from a legal standpoint) to kill ther person rather than wound them” you might also want to make sure you aren’t self incriminating on Facebook/Twitter/Social media. Yes, we all have read the news about shooters posting their intent or manifestos on social media to promulgate their views. But from the POV of this thread, you should consider if the posts you make or share are indicating your intent to use excessive violence as a premeditated response. I avoid social media like the plague, but there are quite a few people out there that have posted sufficiently incendiary opinions that while they could be denied, might help sink them when in front of a jury.

96

The carry conceal instructors I went too, as well as other weapons trainers, emphasized the legal aspects, decision making and so forth, as well as the real world ramifications…but they all pretty much said IF you have to pull a weapon to defend your life or the life of someone else, you shoot to kill. Not to disable. Not sure what sort of training you have gone to, or perhaps it’s a generations thing as my own training was nearly 2 decades ago, so maybe the new thing is shoot to disable or something like that. So, YMMV today verse when I had training.

97

I think I can square the circle between ‘if you must shoot, shoot to kill’ and ‘deadly force is only justifiable to stop a threat of imminent death or serious bodily harm.’

Most people don’t want to kill someone else. Even if that someone else is trying to hurt them. The victim just wants the bad guy to go away or to stop trying to hurt them. You read about this, in interviews with people who were trying to defend themselves with a firearm: “I was just trying to scare him off. I wanted him to stop hurting me, so I shot him in the leg” And so on.

Training people that, when they use a firearm in self-defense, they are using it to kill the assailant, helps condition people to only using it when the attack or grievance against the assailant is so severe that it requires the death of the assailant. And conversely, to not shoot your assailant after they slapped you, or wouldn’t leave your front lawn, any assault up to the point of, 'I could lose my life or be permanently maimed if this doesn’t stop…

That ‘shoot to kill’ training instruction conditions people to be restrained in using deadly force, as the half-measures of warning shots, shooting them in the arm or leg, isn’t legally available. It’s meant to replace any idea of shoot to wound in the trainee’s head.

It doesn’t mean, ‘shoot until the guy is unequivocally dead.’ Because using deadly force against someone when they no longer present an imminent, credible threat of death/sbi, is illegal.

98

What would be the legal basis for this? The point of self-defense is that you are stopping the crime that is directed against you from occurring. And you do that equally well by disabling or killing the criminal. So what justification is there for killing the criminal when it was only necessary to disable them?

So most training is going to be based on teaching people that their intent should be to disable not to kill.

Of course, as a practical matter, shooting a person with the intent to disable them is generally identical to shooting a person with the intent to kill them.

99

I honestly don’t understand the question. If you think your life is in danger, then the ‘point’ would be to save your life. If you think someone else might be in danger, then the ‘point’ would be to save their life. If you don’t think your life is in danger, then the ‘point’ would be not to draw or even show your gun. Water is wet. Sky is blue. So, not sure what you are asking me here.

Basically, you don’t use a gun to disable someone…except in Hollywood. Anyone teaching you this is a fool or worse that a fool. If you can, run away…if you can do it safely. Or hand over your money, car or whatever they are wanting, if you think this will satisfy them. If you can’t, and if it’s a last resort, then you use the gun, and you use it to kill…because at that point, it’s you (and/or someone else you are trying to protect…SOMEONE, not something) or them. If you happen to shoot them and this disables them, that’s great. But you don’t try for some sort of ridiculous Hollywood shot to the shoulder or leg in the thought that this will disable them and all will be well.

Or, maybe today they teach this sort of Hollywood horseshit. Like I said, I wouldn’t know…my own training was back in the dark ages, seemingly.

100

Exactly. Should have just read your reply and left it there as you said it better. If you have to, you shoot center of mass…which is considered a kill shot. You don’t then walk up calmly and put two in the persons head, a la John Wick, to make sure they are dead. If they live, that’s great, but IF you have to pull a gun and use it the last thing you are going to be fretting about is that the other guy survives. If you are worried about that, you should never have pulled the gun in the first place, as you weren’t really in a existential danger…which is the only time you should ever, under any circumstances, pull out a gun at all, let alone use it.