Assuming your rather lurid characterization were correct, it still begs the question of whether he had a “long-standing intent to murder.” It’s pretty easy to murder someone if you have a gun. Why did it take him so long? Maybe because he didn’t, in fact, have a longstanding free-floating intent to “murder” someone, anyone, under any circumstances. Maybe (to accept your hypothetical for the moment) he was very interested in shooting anyone who’d dare break into his house and threaten his tat. But the minute you add this additional qualifier to the hypothetical, it becomes very unclear whether he had an “intent to murder,” because killing a housebreaker is far from obviously “murder.” Now, you may think that on the circumstances as they developed, the self-defense route doesn’t apply to Mr. Martin, but unless you know with some certainty that I can’t imagine your having that Mr. Martin was bound and determined to kill a housebreaker specifically under circumstances in which there could be no sustainable claim of self-defense, than the most your hypothetical can prove is that he had a longstanding dream of killing a housebreaker. It need hardly be stressed further that the difference between killing a housebreaker in a way that the law chooses to recognize as self-defense, and killing him under circumstances that can’t possibly support self-defense, is the very issue we’re debating, and is the reason you can’t plausibly characterize Martin’s determination to kill any burglar as an intent to “murder.”
I won’t even disagree with your basic characterization of the circumstances that might make him an attractive target to thieves (though how the clutter littering the floor of his house, as opposed to his isolation, would tempt thieves isn’t clear to me). Tony Martin was by all accounts a disagreeable weird old geezer whose own choices had something to do, at least indirectly, with his victimization by burglars. Stipulated.
What you’re missing is that we as a society have generally decided that it is not comme il faut to dwell at any length on the poor choices of a crime victim when discussing either his victimization, the culpability of the criminal, or the reasonableness of the victim’s conduct. In some cases we’ve even erected evidentiary barriers so that relevant-but-inflammatory evidence about the victim can’t be mentioned at all, but I’m not limiting my discussion to court by any means. Do you think you would see the following news articles in a parallel case? “Mr. Martin attacked the men who defrauded him of his life savings. Mr. Martin, a Mormon, had been easy prey for the fraudsters, who knew that anyone credulous enough to believe in golden plates handed down from heaven would be sure to accept their story of sequestered Nigerian oil funds.” “Miss Martin’s attack on her previous assailants was motivated by their sexual assault on her. Miss Martin, a supple-bodied co-ed whose friends and neighbors described her as ‘quite the flirt’ and a devotee of provocative outfits, often liked to chat up strange men in pubs for a laugh, before beginning her three mile walk back through the dark woods to the deserted nursing college where she made her home.”
You won’t be seeing those stories, even though their factual characterizations about the victims are not much different in their degree of “voyeurism” (as acsenray put it) or denigration of victim character, or indirect suggestion of victim responsibility for his own victimization. And it’s not because there’s not some truth to the imputations (as with Martin). Don’t own a ramshackle old house in the middle of nowhere, don’t collect valuable bric a brac, and maybe you won’t get robbed. Okay, fine. But if we don’t advise, “Wear a burqa and enter the convent, and you’re statistically less likely to get raped than if you’re hanging out in bars in a miniskirt” (and we don’t), then why even introduce the subject of Martin’s possibly ill-advised choice of lifestyle, unless he’s doing something that’s just plain stupid and begging for trouble (a la the W. Va. lottery winner who keeps getting rolled for the tens of thousands of dollars in cash he carries with him while out drinking)? Having an isolated house full of crap is no more egregiously stupid or risk-laden than wearing a miniskirt and flirting with bar patrons, and I don’t see why either should even be mentioned in the context of discussing how the victim got to be a victim, given our general hesitancy to even discuss crime victim behavior because of the inevitable suggestion that it somehow mitigates the victimizer’s behavior.
It’s absolutely relevant to explain that he was an attractive target to thieves. Because it was that, and the resulting repeated attacks on his property, that led him to lie in wait with a gun. The difference to your strawmen is that we’re not discussing the victim, but the perpetrator - Martin being a victim of robbery is not the point we’re arguing, but whether Barras was the victim of manslaughter.
And in any case, you shouldn’t be arguing that it wasn’t murder, but that it wasn’t manslaughter, given that that was the later judgement.
So, Huerta, are the circumstances of the shooting and proof of Martin’s personality and inclinations relevant to a finding of manslaughter/murder or not? Should the court have nothing to consider except that the dead person had tried to break into Martin’s house? Is that the only relevant fact? I think not. I think the fact that Martin might expressed a prior intent to kill anyone who broke into his house very relevant. It’s self defence to react with deadly force to a situation that threatens bodily harm. It’s another thing to decide in advance that you will use deadly force whenever anyone breaks into your house, no matter the other circumstances, including if the burglar is running away.
They don’t.
However the booby trap, the rottweilers and the fact he slept fully clothed with a gun by his bed was.
You just pick out a phrase and pretend that’s the point of my quote.
I can add this:
Rosamund Horwood-Smart QC, prosecuting, said Martin had been burgled in May last year and items were stolen. “When he reported the burglary he told the police operator, Mrs Wood, that the burglars had left some furniture outside and that they may come back and if they did he would blow their heads away, …
He said if he caught the bastards he would shoot them…
He told the officers that he had at no time warned the intruders or given them the chance to surrender.”
glee: I don’t understand where you (Huerta88) get these irrelevant notions from.
Huerta88: Right, that would be hard to understand, if I knew what “irrelevant notions” you were describing.
Here is an example:
Huerta88: I bet his antiques included Hummel figurines and other hopelessly naff curios. Well, then, no sympathy for his right to be left alone in his reclusive ways, right?
And where is your evidence that people think that way?
Huerta88:
My only point has been that being a weird old recluse, having a naff, sloppy house, or even believing that gypsies may rob you (and then being robbed by a gypsy) are not highly relevant to the reasonableness of a person’s response to a home intruder, but the Guardian nonetheless saw fit to parade such evidence of Martin’s not-terribly-likable-or-enviable way of life before readers, with the “othering” effect I’ve suggested (and no, I don’t doubt there was “othering” all around in the community, but he’s the only member of the community who was on trial and facing prison).
[/quote]
Of course none of this article would have been seen by the jury in the court case.
The Guardian article gave the background because there was a movement at one time to release Martin without charge (and he was described as a hero as well by people who didn’t know the facts).
Of course I assumed you didn’t care for Bush. You come over as far to the right of him. 
And Martin was indeed convicted on the facts, not on his ‘housekeeping style’. That’s one reason why we have defence lawyers.
But since his case is regularly quoted - here as an example of why an Englishman’s home is not a castle - it’s useful to give references to the court case.
Sam Stone quoted this earlier:
“As for the effectiveness of stringent gun control, since handguns were banned in 1998, handgun crime has more than doubled.”
(Cato Institute)
Sam, this is not up to your normal standards of quality.
Since handguns have not been legal for home defence here well before 1998, this is complete bllsht.
The handgun ban only affected members of gun clubs, including people training for the pistol events at the Olympic Games.
Or is the Cato Institute saying that Olympic competitors are responsible for a massive increase in gun crime? :rolleyes:
Interesting. I would assume you have no objection to a news article like this:
Since it is important to know why a crime victim might be a target.
Regards,
Shodan
Closed captioned for the sarcasm-impaired - the previous is a parody, not a real article.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, I’d avoid news sources that sensationalise in that way (the comment about her child being a superfluous and denigratory aside, and the meaningless quoting of a single statistic poor journalism), but yes, a woman’s dress and behaviour do affect the likelihood of her being raped. This is not the same as taking a ‘she was asking for it’ attitude. To ignore the circumstances surrounding a crime does not help understand why the crime took place.
Of course, rape is a poor example to use, because so many jurisdictions protect the victim’s identity.