Are we in North Korea where the authorities can demand that a person remained confined in his car?
How is simply being somewhere, putting out fires illegally started, and rendering medical aid a provocation?
Have you watched the videos? IMHO, they are absolutely compelling and show a textbook self defense case.
These aren’t particularly American principles of law, for what it’s worth. Self defense as a legal concept is much older than that.
What’s unique about the American version of these legal conflicts is that Americans are running around with death machines and yelling at each other at unprecedented peacetime clips.
To turn your question around on you–how else could the law work, really, in very broad strokes? If someone who is not the aggressor, as ultimately determined by a jury, is put in reasonable fear for their life by multiple people, what’s the rule of law that fairly applies to them, but which does not hypothetically “justify a mass shooting incident?” One answer is that they just aren’t allowed to have a gun, and certainly that answer ends you up in a distinctly American controversy. But that means that the concerns about self defense per se are a little bit of a red herring.
There are problems here galore. But the fundamental principle of “don’t start none, won’t be none” is pretty much the law everywhere, even as applied to sovereign nations, so I’m not sure it’s the big one.
Perhaps so - but the “witness” did not have the scope or perspective of the video. And, the case is decided on the beliefs of those involved. The “witness” felt his life was threatened by an active shooter. He was then free to act in self defense.
What is the legal granularity of acts of aggression and self defense. Zimmerman was stalking Martin. Martin had moved toward Zimmerman at the truck but then moved on. Zimmermann stalked him (with weapon) into the dark alley. Martin surprised him by stopping in a shadow. Zimmerman turned toward him displaying the weapon which Martin saw. Martin grabbed for the weapon and the struggle ensued with back and forth shifting in split seconds (according to the video Zimmerman made with the police)
But when entangled there was an imbalance. Zimmerman had a weapon which he intended to use. Martin did not. Isn’t that part of the legal equation?
It isn’t far off from that. Trained law enforcement officers shoot people (and suffer no penalty) for things like cel phones, someone’s hands, a basketball or nothing at all. “Reasonable” in this usage changes all the time and often, IMO, is unreasonable.
If a trained LEO feels such fear from the very notion that a gun might be introduced, why should a non-trained non-LEO not feel such fear from seeing an actual gun?
Infinitely so, to the extent that you can articulate those shifts.
Said witness, by the way, was a participant in the January 6 attack and urged fellow terrorists to “spill blood” and kill lawmakers. But the judge prohibited the prosecution from mentioning that to the jury.
Then there is this:
Full title: Judge Asks for ‘Round of Applause’ for Military Veterans in Kyle Rittenhouse Trial. A Defense Witness Was the Only Veteran in the Room.
How can this possibly not be grounds for declaring a mistrial and a new trial?
Well. Who’s going to declare that?
Don’t pester me with logic when I’m pissed off.
Motion denied!
Then Rittenhouse while fleeing in fear could turn and defend himself, the “witness” would then be confronted and fear for his life and could respond in self defense with a counter move or weapon which allows Rittenhouse…resulting in an intransitive series.
Zimmerman was a clear case of first degree murder. He purchased a weapon specifically for the purpose of shooting someone. He carefully prepared it and placed a ready round in the chamber before he left the house. He selected a target and pursued it doggedly against the immediate advice of legal authority. He knew his target was alerted but followed him into a dark alley. He had no knowledge of the target, no purpose for the pursuit and no authorization to engage. He confronted the target who then engaged him and indeed Zimmerman had good reason to believe that the man he engaged would defend himself by removing Zimmerman as a threat. Since Zimmerman was armed, Martins’ only option was to beat him until Zimmerman was unable to function. Zimmerman intervened by killing Martin.
I do not see how self defense is an issue in either of these cases. It’s like Babales’ lion. When you place yourself in the presence of danger you reject the concept of self defense. Standing in front of a bus and shooting the bus driver is not self defense. If you walk into the lions den and shoot the lion, it is not self defense.
Thanks for the response.
Yea, I can see now that I was definitely using “self defense” here to mean self defense with the intent to kill someone. Not just the general concept of self defense. That wasn’t clear, and not sure if that changes anything. I definitely think people have an inherent right to defend themselves.
I’d probably say you need to manage self defense. So yea, that would likely lead me to believe normal people should be moderated in their use or ability to have guns (and the type of gun) in public for the purpose of self defense.
The only way any of these rulings that went against the prosecution can likely be challenged is if Rittenhouse is convicted and then appeals. The prosecution can probably (this is all based on how it works in my state) cross-assign error to the rulings that went against them, so those rulings could be reversed if there were a retrial.
As for the prosecution being able to appeal, there may be a limited ability to take what’s called an interlocutory appeal, if the judge were to make a ruling that the prosecution thought was, e.g., fatal to their case. They may be able to put the case on hold in order to appeal such a ruling. Doing that is allowed in my state under limited circumstances. I don’t know if it is allowed in Wisconsin. In my state, it’s also quite rare for the state to do it, for various reasons.
If Rittenhouse is acquitted, there won’t be any way for the rulings that went against the prosecution to be appealed.
Defense rests.
Closing arguments Monday.
If Rittenhouse is defending himself while fleeing in fear, he isn’t the aggressor when he uses force. It’s one or the other. There is granularity to the extent that you can argue that in the course of a particular sequence, he is no longer using force to defend himself from the imminent harm that he perceived. The shopkeeper chasing the crook down the street and shooting him in the back, for example.
You’re still applying the same general rule. If someone else has placed you in reasonable fear of imminent harm, they’re the aggressor and you can defend yourself. If that specific description doesn’t apply to you at the specific time when you use the force, then you weren’t entitled to it. It’s all just a bunch of facts for the jury to sift through to decide whether that description applies or not. People can reasonably differ about what the outcome should be in a particular case, but that doesn’t make the rule obviously deficient. If by placing yourself in a situation, you were the one who was causing a reasonable fear of danger to others, then you were the aggressor. If not, not. Still the same rule.
I don’t really want to address the specifics of the Zimmerman case for that reason. I don’t have any desire to defend that outcome; a jury could have just said “nah this wasn’t reasonable” and you get a different outcome. If you were a juror, you would have said guilty, it sounds like. If I was a juror, I don’t know what I’d say, but certainly on the day of the verdict as a non-juror I thought guilty.
It changes a lot from a general analytical point of view, I think. But it doesn’t change a lot if you are forced to operate under the understanding that this is America, and the rest of the laws and cultural norms that obtain in America also obtain in this situation.
In, say, France, you are still allowed to use reasonable force to defend yourself from harm. But in France, you just aren’t going to be carrying a fucking assault rifle around when you find yourself in that situation, and so whatever reasonable force you use, even if it has some chance of killing somebody, isn’t just going to be instant guaranteed carnage. For a trial conducted in Wisconsin, USA, it’s just a different world.
OK - then the point at which a person introduces a means of deadly force he becomes and remains the aggressor. When Rittenhouse introduced an armed semi-automatic weapon, he became and remained the aggressor.
There is a means of deadly force present in most of human intercourse.
Rittenhouse shouldn’t have been there. It wasn’t his community. It wasn’t even his state. He bought an AR-15, illegally I might add, with the express intent of using it on someone. And he’s claiming he was there to protect a business and render medical aid, but he has no medical training whatsoever. And I don’t buy his crocodile tears.