A guess. A prosecutor is often a very political animal, for many prosecutors, the office is a springboard to political office. Hence, even more than the average competitiveness of lawyers, a prosecutor looks to a conviction rate as his ticket. Prosecuting this case has some obvious drawbacks, not least of which is pissing off the NRA. The image of the citizen shooting a criminal in self defense is dear to their very hearts, it gives them serious wood. Whereas some nut shooting some kid for nothing is a Betty White porno. Just to put these complex notions in terms you deevs can understand…
Sorta kinda. I still have the feeling there is something else going on here, a shadow, an eminence greasy. Because it doesn’t quite work, does it? He would almost have to know that this kind of blow back is possible, he would be anxious to have all the facts before he unzips himself and puts his pecker on the chopping block. But he wasn’t, was he, appears to have been anxious to put the cork in this bottle of woe and bury it, and right now!
Or it could be that his reading of the law is such that he thinks any half-assed community college lawyer could beat the rap and make him look like a stooge. Because the law is written so badly that it is entirely possible that the whole case rests on the mind set of the shooter: can a lawyer get a jury to believe that he had any reasonable expectation of bodily harm? The word “reasonable” being a term of art, meaning whatever you can make a jury believe or even doubt. Or, worse case, whatever you can make one juror believe, one who refuses to vote for conviction no matter what. (Jeebus, I’m thinking like a bad Grisham novel…I considered the law briefly while in college, but my grandmother threw herself at my feet and begged me not to besmirch the family honor of dirt farmers and horse thieves…)
So I guess the argument must first rely on one of the half dozen or so lawyers we got the boards. Or the ones who admit it, anyway. Is this law that badly written? And can you explain that without a buttload of op. cit., dispositives and stark staring decisis? Or penumbras? Jesus, anything but penumbras.