If I could find a good way to post a Captain Obvious picture here, I’d be right on it!
Thanks!
Yeah, I’m opposed to the “Stand Your Ground” premise and think that (as far as we now know) the stabber’s actions were entirely unjustifiable and inexcusable.
If I (NAL) were the stabber’s defense attorney, however, I would definitely be pitching the subtext of my defense strategy towards implying “Well, are you saying that Stand Your Ground is only for white people?!”
“YES!”
Yeah, that would have to be one non-white jury pool to get away with that one.
Agreed.
However, I was argiung against the literal definition of trapped which is the suggestion that LSLGuy made, not the figurative definition.
As a reminder, this is what I was pushing back against:
I hope it’s not necessary to point out how stupid the “I was trapped by all the people trying to make me leave” argument is.
As for feeling figuratively trapped by the situation, and feeling like you can’t back down or look like a coward, and backing yourself into a rhetorical corner, I am in 100% agreement and I’m sure that absolutely played a part.
I’m always reminded of Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.” If you feel as though your in danger of being harmed, you’re probably not calculating the odds of exactly how much harm you might be subjected to. In Texas, deadly force is typically authorized when a reasonable person would feel as though they were at risk of losing their life or suffering grievous harm. What’s a reasonable person to feel in this situation? That’s why we have trials. I haven’t seen the totality of the evidence, but I’m willing to reserve final judgment until all the evidence has been weighed.
When you are in a crowd and they are all around you, and you know they’re all on the other team, but you don’t know which of them are passive observers / cheerleaders and which are itching to get physical, there is no direction you can retreat to. And turning your back on the main protagonist threat is a great way in the real world to end up with your neck or head stove in with a 2x4 or chair or beer bottle or whatever that you didn’t see coming. Because you’re trying to retreat.
That’s trapped. It’s a stupid situation to find yourself in, but it is not a stupid argument that at that point you are trapped.
Far smarter for the kid to have retreated at the very first sign he was unwelcome there. Whether unwelcome rightly or wrongly, that was the time to depart.
Security will respond in some minutes. After somebody bothers to call them. And as long as their side is winning, decent bet nobody will bother. This kid had zero allies in that crowd.
Meanwhile, as we have just seen in this very case, the time from first violence to fatal injury can be just a few seconds.
Choosing to take a beating from what may be a dozen young men and hoping to be rescued by Security in time is a very poor percentage play in the real world. Especially when you consider the likelihood at least some of those other kids have knives too. Maybe even guns. And unlike TV, even 4 unarmed guys can do serious damage to one guy just using whatever implements come to hand: folding chairs, cowboy boots, etc.
Yes, but it was the alleged murdered who had the knife, not the victim… it’s a bit odd for the more armed person to be the one that is feeling threatened.
Again, I understand that this is the law, and if Karmelo can convince a jury that he was threatened to the point where reasonable force was authorized then he will be acquitted.
Because he was in the other team’s tent…
I think the race of the accused and the victim, as well as the fact that this was TX, has colored these arguments to an almost unrecognizable point. In either way, and regardless of the law, I still believe that the correct decision is to flee as soon as the threat of violence becomes palpable.
The correct decision of the guy who was stabbed was to get security and not start a fight.
I think you missed the salient point here. When you feel endangered, you’re not necessarily in the right state of mind to assess the situation with a clear mind. It doesn’t matter if the perceived danger is a firearm, a hostile crowd, or if it’s literally an uplifted knife. It’s very easy for you and I to sit back and calculate the odds in the safety and comfort of our own homes. It’s quite a different thing entirely to calculate those odds within a few seconds while under an immense amount of stress.
Me too. On all accounts. GTFO.
Yeah, especially because he’s, ahem, not white.
I think it’s equally inadvisable for children of any race to bring knives to school.
If you’re suffering from extreme paranoia, sure. Nobody with reason would think that way. You are bending yourself into a pretzel with this laughably ridiculous argument.
He went into the opposing team’s tent. He was asked to leave repeatedly and chose not to, until it escalated into a physical confrontation. We don’t have a lot of details but those are details we do have. Your crazy story about being paralyzed with fear until he resorted to pulling out a knife is some crazy fiction and frankly I have no idea where it came from because I know you’re not that stupid.
ETA: I do have sympathy for the kid. He obviously didn’t realize the gravity of what he did. He doesn’t seem like some cold-blooded killer. He was asking about the guy he fought and asked if he was okay. He admitted to what he did and it sounds to me like he thought he was justified in defending himself.
So I hope that those factors and his youth are mitigating circumstances, though I don’t know his background either, like if he has a history of violence or this was just one bad day that led to tragedy. And I’m wondering what other factors around this incident will go public before and during the trial (if there is one and the kid doesn’t take a plea deal).
He had at least one of the knives present at the scene. We don’t know whether anyone else had a weapon available.
Armed student from one school decides to sit in a tented area that is set up for (and is marked) as seating for the opposing school. A place where team spirit is a common denominator among the kids who set up the tent.
The murderer has a million dollar bail set. It’s possible that there is more to the story.
This board is even more pathologically against self defense than I remembered… I’d have thought the victim being black would change that but no, people are still referring to him as a murderer, not a victim of an attack. Pathetic.
I’d think you’d appreciate the lack of hypocrisy
“Victim of an attack” makes it sound like he was suddenly attacked out of nowhere rather than this being a series of escalations that led to a physical confrontation. I’ll note that he threatened to stab the eventual dead kid beforehand, so he made his intent clear before anything got physical.
On the other hand, “murder” implies a motive that doesn’t seem to be present here or at least we don’t know of one. And there is literally only one person in this thread who called the kid a murderer, and that person is an idiot who I usually keep on ignore.
You came back to the board just to spout this inaccurate tripe?!