As I understand it, the Stand Your Ground laws empower you to shoot an actual or potential attacker if you’ve got reason to fear that you may be killed or suffer severe bodily harm.
Does rape constitute severe bodily harm? I’d put it in that category. Don’t know whether the laws get that specific.
But if rape was severe bodily harm, ISTM that any woman being followed by a stranger - or by someone they know who they have reason to believe has hostile intent towards them - should be able to gun down their stalker because of their reasonable fear of being raped.
Agree? Disagree? And if true, is this a good or a bad thing from your POV? Discuss.
What does stand your ground laws have to do with it. SYG laws just mean the prosecution can’t say “A-ha! You could have escaped by doing X so we’re going to charge you with murder/manslaughter/whatever.” They don’t actually change the conditions under which deadly force is permissible under the law. So, your understanding of SYG laws is flawed.
Texas permits the use of deadly force to prevent sexual assault and aggravated sexual assault.
How does that disallowed 'aha!" not change the conditions under which deadly force is permissible?
Tru dat. But the question is, if there is no sexual assault in progress, just a reasonable fear that someone who’s been paying a bit too much attention might initiate a sexual assault shortly, can the woman shoot her stalker under SYG?
As I understand SYG, no. Some level of actual threat needs to be present, not just someone’s perceived threat. Otherwise, someone could just gun down the creepy guy hanging around outside the 7-11 because they thought he looked threatening, even if all he was doing was smoking a cigarette, sipping on a Big-Gulp, and waiting on his friend to come pick him up since his car broke down.
Now if said stalker in your scenario had a restraining order against him, and he stilled showed up at (lets say for the sake of argument) his ex-girlfriend’s house and accosted her in her driveway, then possibly she could be justified under SYG.
Note that not all SYG laws (where they even exist) are worded the same. IANAL and all that, so I’m not up on the differences between the states, so there very well could be (probably are) differing bars of threat-threshold that must be passed for any action to be justifiable.
A common theme in those laws seems to be “believes” or “reasonably believes” felonious violence is imminent. Police, prosecutors, or juries may disagree after the fact. Each case is going to have to be judged on a case-by-case basis. As Odesio notes, Castle Doctrine/SYG laws are meant to reduce are eliminate the “Duty to Retreat,” but don’t liberalize that actual use of deadly force.
So, the woman who guns down the guy walking his dog at 10:00 PM because in the dark she thought he was her crazy ex-husband has some serious 'splaining to do. And had best not make any long-term plans.
The woman who actually shoots her crazy ex-husband when he shows up at her house and attempts to reconcile their marriage with an axe is most probably legally on solid ground under SYG, where it exists. But she doesn’t have to run into her house, and hide in a closet or under the bed, and wait for him to break down the front door, and then the bedroom door, before shooting him.
Maybe the cops show up in time to stop him. Maybe they don’t. Under SYG, she doesn’t have to roll those dice.
This is, IMO, a good thing. Because IME, cops are great for writing speeding tickets, and filling out reports after a crime has been committed. Actually stopping a crime? Not so much.
It would be a bad thing. Perceived threat and actual threat are not the same thing. Laws that make violence in response to perceived threat would make it open season on groups like young black males and the mentally ill (two groups who can be perceived as threatening w/o actually engaging in or making threats).
Stand your ground laws have been used, successfully, as a defense for people who have chased down and killed petty criminals who offered no threat at all to the killer, or at least wouldn’t have had they not chased them down.
You’re right, but I don’t think it’s always so cut and dry in the real world. If some drunk guy is banging down my front door at 4 AM is is a real threat or do I only perceive him to be a threat? Forget perceive, would a reasonable person feel threatened in this situation?
How about the woman who notices that the same guy has been walking a half-block behind her for 14 blocks, involving a couple of turns from one street to another? So she decides to stand her ground, pull out her gun, warn the guy to back off, but he keeps on coming. How close does he have to be for her to have a reasonable fear? Seems to me that if she’s warned him to back off and he keeps on coming, her fear is reasonable, even if he’s still a couple hundred feet away.
What say you? Can she drill him as soon as he disregards the warning, or does she have to wait until he’s, say, 20 feet away? Or does she have to wait until he actually tries to grab her?
To be clear, what you’re saying is that if I’m walking down the street and there’s somebody up ahead of me and I haven’t even made any sign that I’ve seen them there, if I take the same path they take for a mile or so and they turn and point a gun at me and tell me to fuck off, and I still get within 200 feet of them, it is reasonable for them to actually kill me?
I do not think that is what the law means when it says reasonable. The only difference between stand your ground and other jurisdictions in that case are that in a non stand your ground jurisdiction, we ask whether they could have retreated. Stand your ground applies only once you’re under threat of force. It doesn’t change the essence of the right to self defense in the sense that a bad use of force becomes an OK use of force. And plugging somebody 200 feet away who hasn’t indicated any specific threat is a bad use of force.
Well, is a woman being stalked by a man under threat of force, or not? If she’s made a couple of turns to make sure he’s following her, rather than just walking on autopilot down the same route, and if she finally pulls out her gun and tells him to back off, yet he keeps on coming, should she not feel threatened?
100 feet? 50 feet? 20 feet? At what point does she reasonably feel threatened for her physical well-being? Does the law speak to this?
The deal is that ‘stand your ground’ does change the dynamic. If she has to try to retreat, then she has to try to retreat - presumably* until she has no good alternative*. Her state of reasonable fear only enters into it when she’s run out of viable retreating options - when she’s backed into a corner, or he’s on the verge of catching up with her, despite her efforts to retreat.
But if she has the right to stand her ground, then the question of her ability to retreat doesn’t enter into it; SYG has killed that, and her reasonable fear is the only issue.
IMO, she has absolutely no right whatsoever to use force against any person who has done nothing more than walk on the same public streets and in the same direction as her, regardless of her taking turns. There has to be something more to constitute a reasonable threat. I he touches her after being warned not to, she can shoot. If he starts making verbal threats or demands, she may be justified under a SYG law.
But failing some additional overt threat, IMO if she shoots she is committing a crime.
The law says that she must have a reasonable, well-grounded belief that such force is necessary to protect herself against death, serious bodily injury, kidnapping or sexual intercourse compelled by force or threat. In your scenario, you haven’t given anything to suggest such a belief is reasonable, except that you have characterized him ex cathedra as a stalker. You already know he’s a rapist because you made him up. In the real world, where there’s no omniscient narrator to tell us he’s a bad guy, you just have a dude walking down the street and a lady killing him. What was he doing? What did she believe? Why would a reasonable person believe that? It’s impossible to say what the law says about your scenario in general because things don’t happen in general.
Again, I think you’re just putting a different gloss on the same thing that I said. The relevant part of the dynamic is that she can never defend herself with a gun if she doesn’t have a reasonable fear that she’s in for it. Stand your ground doesn’t change that. In your scenario, the distinction would never come into play. She doesn’t have a right to “stand her ground” and start shooting at a dude just because the duty to retreat has been removed from the picture.
It might help to distinguish “feeling threatened” from the legal standard of a reasonable belief that force is necessary etc. She can feel threatened, certainly. But we don’t shoot people every time we feel threatened.
Stand Your Ground laws are exactly what they purport to be. If you are being attacked you have no duty to retreat. Once the threat is over the right to use deadly force is gone.
There is no provision for pursuit or pre-emptive action (the Martin case notwithstanding). If the woman in your case shoots the guy she’d better lawyer up and have one hell of a good case or she’s going to jail for a long time.
The law does not eliminate the requirement that you use good judgment. Shooting a guy because you’re afraid he might do something does not show good judgment.
In Texas and in Florida both the SYG laws have been interpreted by the justice system to allow people to pursue and kill thieves. In Wisconsin a few weeks ago a man killed an unarmed kid hiding in a corner of his porch and was not charged because of our local SYG law.
It may well be that incidents like these were not the intent of the law, and I’m not a good enough lawyer to tell whether the problem is badly written laws, or bad lawyers interpreting them. What I do know is that one or the other, or a combination of both, have been ending in lots of really fucked up outcomes, and something needs to change.
Since when does Texas have a stand your ground law?
Under 9.32 of the Texas Penal Code it reads that deadly force is authorized “if a reasonable person in the actor’s situation would not have retreated.”
Under 9.42 of the Texas Penal Code it says that deadly force can be used to protect land and tangible property “to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property.” In continues that the actor must reasonably believe “the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means” or the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury."
I don’t see how the SYG law in Wisconsin (if it does, in fact, have such a law) made the shooting of the boy in that state legal. It was probably legal in the state before such law. Also, can you point me to the part of the Texas Penal Code that includes a stand your ground style law? I know Texas gets a lot of flak here but I think they happen to have a pretty set of laws when it comes to deadly force.
Maybe something will. Maybe the non-violent crime rates will drop. Maybe the murder rate will increase (better kill them instead of letting them get to their weapon). Quite the tempest.
In Texas, it’s technically called the Castle doctrine, but it seems to have a rather wide interpretation, including running out and killing burglars who are robbing your neighbor. You can listen to the 911 call from Joe Horn – who ignores repeated instructions from the 911 operator, leaves his own home and shoots and kills two burglars leaving his neighbor’s house, shooting them in the back. A Texas Grand jury refused to charge him. This story in the Houston Chronicle says, “Texas’ Castle Doctrine grants people the same protection as the “stand your ground” law that has come under fire in Florida in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting.”
This is the other Florida case I was referring to, the case of Greyston Garcia in Miami. He saw a man steal his car radio, then chased him down and stabbed him to death. Not only that – he never called the police (he just left the body on the street) and he sold some of the other stuff the thief stole. But a judge released him because he was “well within his rights” under that statute, according to the judge.
You might say the Wisconsin shooter had more justification than the others, and a lot of people would agree. I’m more ambiguous about it myself, but the Stand Your Ground laws make it ok to kill people rather than back away from them if it is practical. I don’t see these laws as necessary. Self-defense was already a legitimate defense before them.