I’m happy as long as everyone gets what is coming to them. And to quote William Muny out of Missouri, “We all have it coming, kid.”
Not guilty.
I take a hard line on cases like this. Ten times she calls the cops and there is no arrest. The reason murder is a crime is that there is an implicit pact between the citizens and the state. You protect me and I give up the right to protect myself. You fail to protect me (and, on the facts, the failure was aggravated) and I have to take my defense on myself. And you are not entitled to prosecute you for that. It is the cops who failed to act who are guilty of this murder.
I guess I would never be allowed on the jury.
My explanation for why there’s no arrests is that she never pressed charges. But I guess that wasn’t established one way or the other.
Nobody is saying that she cannot defend herself. What we are saying is that she cannot appoint herself as judge, jury, and executioner for someone who might be guilty of a misdemeanor crime.
It’s not her job to press charges, it’s the state’s. Which it repeatedly failed to do.
Firstly, trying to strangle someone isn’t a misdemeanor, it’s attempted murder. And secondly, by referring to her as “judge, jury and executioner” in this case, you are, in fact, saying she can’t defend herself, as that’s what she did.
Oh right, because the state was right there when all the abuse was happening.
You’re being a troll.
Hardly. You clearly don’t understand how the law works. How, exactly, would you expect an individual to “press charges”?
If you read the thread, the police repeatedly attended their residence in the aftermath of previous violence, and ignored it, when they should have investigated and charged him.
She may absolutely defend herself. But defense stops when the imminent threat is over. Lying on the floor choking on his own blood=threat is over. When she continued past that point, she appointed herself as his executioner, without giving him the benefit of a trial, and for a crime that was not death penalty eligible.
I’m not at all unsympathetic to victims of domestic violence, but that sympathy shouldn’t extend a license to murder.
That’s not true, legally or morally. Far from knowing the threat was over, she thought he was laughing at her. But, even if that were not the case, one is not expected to fire a single shot, then pause and consider the circumstances. Guns don’t just stop people instantly, and in many cases even several shots don’t kill.
Perhaps a calm, rational person would realise in this particular case that no further shots were necessary (or even that there could have been a better option than shooting in the first place), but the law doesn’t require calm, rational thought in the face of the threat of violence.
So, if you want to claim that the last shot was illegal, you’ll need to prove that either she’s lying about not knowing he was incapacitated, or prove that no reasonable person could possibly mistake the dying breaths of her abuser for laughter, after having just been nearly killed by him.
Which you can’t. Not guilty, self defence. Should never even have gone to trial.
Let’s assume her story is true and that after shooting him in the temple and dropping to the floor, he was lying there laughing at her.
Laughing does not create a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily harm. Especially when the laughor is lying on the floor after having been shot in the head.
The followup shot is an execution under any version of events and is first degree murder.
She was already in that state of fear, and it’s up to him to act in such a way that stops that. Laughing at her would not do that. If she was justified in shooting him at all, she was justified in shooting until he was dead.
Not even slightly guilty, no execution, but self defence, and self defence by a terrified, brutalised woman.
Fuck you and your victim-blaming bullshit.
You’re new, so I’ll tell you that calling others trolls here outside of the forum named “The BBQ Pit” is against the rules…so don’t do it again.
Idle Thoughts
Mod of IMHO
“Hello, mods? I’d like to report an armed man… he seems very agitated, and is behaving irrationally. He’s putting me in fear for my life.”
The phrase you were looking for is “cogent legal analysis”. If you want to vote on nullification grounds, you can do so - but you can’t very well castigate others for voting to follow the law.
Maybe I’m not using the right terminology, even though I looked it up. What I mean is make a complaint to the police. Typically, the police will then investigate etc etc. Now one of two things happened here: on previous occasions, the police came to the door but the women told them it was all a misunderstanding and there was no problem, or the women told the police that the guy mistreated her but the police decided that there was no merit to the complaint before reaching the stage where arrests are made.
My interpretation is that the former is the case (perhaps partially because of the language barrier), yours obviously the latter, presumably because the police didn’t do their job properly. However, the story doesn’t say one way or the other, and I think you’ll agree this is important information.
I’m not usually a fan of murder, but in this case I have no qualms about it. Not Guilty.
The police can, and should, investigate crimes even if the victim doesn’t cooperate. Because, ultimately, a crime is committed against the state, not just an individual.
I don’t entirely disagree. But if the woman in question didn’t cooperate with the police that doesn’t mean she gets to take the law in her own hands later.
Well, I can’t see anything less than at least manslaughter: even if she didn’t think so, she did have options other than shooting him. On the other hand, I can’t see making this first degree; she was responding to a threat on her life, not planning a murder for financial gain or something.
So I’d probably be looking for some more detail to choose between manslaughter and second degree. Probably lower, just to make sure the judge didn’t give a sentence at the high end of second degree.