No you wouldn’t. The prosecution had the burden of proving that your belief was not reasonable.
But here’s the thing. If you throw the “duty to retreat” doctrine back in, some non-zero percentage of people will go to jail. Let’s be conservative and say 10 people. Maybe 3 of those didn’t really have a duty but the jury found they did. 3 innocent people in jail. So that means that seven people go to jail for what? For not retreating when they could have in the face of a violent felony.
I don’t support that. Those seven shouldn’t go to jail. They have a right to stand where they legally are. And there might be mistakes there. Why should people be questioned about where they have a legal right to stand?
Oh, the defendant could have run! Yes, but the dead guy could have not committed a violent felony against the defendant. The second is worse than the first. The seven are in jail because of a state imposed duty that the dead guy could have taken with ease.
This is where things get stupid. You have a right to defend yourself of you reasonably fear being killed. That’s all. This “right to stand where you legally are” is just bullshit when what you’re talking about is killing another human being.
And THAT is what Bricker et al are complaining about.
Not when that other human being is putting you in reasonable fear of death of serious bodily injury. Why should the law protect that person versus another person being where he has a legal right to be? Think of the duties impose on each person: 1) The good guy must show he could have retreated. He must show that in court after hiring an expensive lawyer in front of jurors in air conditioned comfort analyzing his actions months before under intense emotional circumstances. 2) The bad guy needs to simply stop committing violent felonies against individuals and putting them in fear of death or serious bodily harm.
If his life is so valuable, all he has to do is not commit violent felonies. That’s it. Then his life is preserved.
You might want to go back and read the whole thread, because no.
Bricker: “in the vast majority of cases, proof that you could, or could not, retreat should be relatively easy. And again, you only have to prove it by the barest margin – preponderance of the evidence means that the evidence needs to slightly favor you. If it’s 50.1% that you could not retreat and 49.9% that you could, you still win.”
He’s not talking about Florida.
No he’s not. But he wants Florida to be like that.
Where did you get that idea?
By the way, I think there was a question in this thread, or maybe in another one, about which states require that the self-defense, if used as an affirmative defense, has to be disproven by the prosecution beyond reasonable doubt, and which only require preponderance of evidence. This article by a guy who wrote the book on this, so is probably pretty knowledgeable, says that 49 states are the “beyond reasonable doubt” ones and only one (Ohio) is the “preponderance of evidence” one.
Huh. I’d forgotten about that thread.
From The Nation: “The Monsterization of Trayvon Martin.”
- I read about that once – a psychological study done in the 1960s: A group of (white) test subjects were shown – for just a moment on the screen – a photo of a white man and a black man fighting, the white man wielding a straight razor. Asked to describe the scene afterwards, most of them said the razor was in the black man’s hand.
BTW, the Dream Defenders are still camping out in Fla. Gov. Rick Scott’s office.
Sure. Why not bring up 1920s? Or 1860s?
Oh, and I am sure that referring to Zimmerman as a “cracker” and “rapist” was not “monsterizing” him. It was just the way kids talk…
Because there are still a lot of people around who were around in the 1960s, or children of those who were, and that matters a lot here. As you know.