Florida stand your ground is the gift that keeps on shooting

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Re: Florida stand your ground is the gift that keeps on shoo

Postby Absentia » Tue Aug 14, 2018 3:21 pm

The system works! All it takes is national media scrutiny and near-constant protests.
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Re: Florida stand your ground is the gift that keeps on shoo

Postby ghijkmnop » Tue Aug 14, 2018 4:28 pm

Redacted
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Last edited by ghijkmnop on Thu Mar 14, 2019 3:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Florida stand your ground is the gift that keeps on shoo

Postby Absentia » Tue Aug 14, 2018 4:38 pm

ghijkmnop wrote:Based on the three other reported incidents with this guy, I'm inclined to think that he was deliberately trying to goad someone into fighting for the sole purpose of thrill-killing them and then hiding behind the law.


That's possible. Seems more likely to me that he's just an asshole with anger issues who thought carrying a gun made him invincible.

If he was angling for a legal thrill killing, he should have read the law more closely.
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Re: Florida stand your ground is the gift that keeps on shoo

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Aug 14, 2018 5:11 pm

I still want to see how the trial goes, and without some revelatory new evidence I'll be pretty upset if this does end in an aquittal (though to be clear I find that unlikely). This isn't like the Trayvon Martin case, where it was Zimmerman's word against a corpse's and Zimmerman's claim that he was reasonably in fear for his life at the time of the shooting was plausible. This time, we have video showing Drejka shooting McGlockton as the latter was visibly backing off after a distinctly nonlethal assault. It was very clearly an illegal use of deadly force.
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Re: Florida stand your ground is the gift that keeps on shoo

Postby Absentia » Tue Aug 14, 2018 6:11 pm

I would be shocked if he gets acquitted. Like I said before, this is about as straightforward a case of manslaughter as I can imagine. The video makes it perfectly clear: Drejka was provoked, but was not justified in the use of lethal force.

In any sane jurisdiction I'd say he may as well plead guilty because he doesn't have a leg to stand on. Given that this is Florida, and for some reason they place the burden of proof on the prosecution to demonstrate that "stand your ground" doesn't apply, it's not implausible that some combination of botched prosecution and biased jury could sink the case. I wouldn't bet on it, but again: Florida.
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Re: Florida stand your ground is the gift that keeps on shoo

Postby blehblah » Sat Aug 18, 2018 8:20 pm

Crimson847 wrote:Holy shit, the goddamn NRA rebuked the sheriff.

“Nothing in either the 2005 law or the 2017 law prohibits a Sheriff from making an arrest in a case where a person claims self-defense if there is probable cause that the use of force was unlawful,” said Marion Hammer, Tallahassee’s NRA lobbyist who helped shepherd "stand your ground" through the GOP-led Florida Legislature.




Marion Hammer's (Wikipedia page here) motivation is likely quite straightforward. Having shepherded the "stand your ground" law into existence, she wants to make sure it continues to survive. While I disagree with just about everything someone like Hammer espouses, I recognize that she is a savvy political operator. She damn-well knows that lunatics using "stand your ground" to try to get away with brazen murder is going to invite some pretty bad PR around the laws, and potentially, deeper scrutiny.

Here is a New Yorker article on Hammer: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... n-policies. It is from March; after Parkland, and before this incident.

Here is an interesting tidbit:

In a recent book, “Engines of Liberty,” David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, devoted an admiring chapter to Hammer and the N.R.A. As recently as 1988, Cole notes, a federal court maintained that “for at least 100 years [courts] have analyzed the second amendment purely in terms of protecting state militias, rather than individual rights.” The subsequent shift toward individual rights can be traced back to Hammer. “Florida is often the first place the N.R.A. pursues specific gun rights protections,” Cole explains, “relying on Hammer and her supporters to set a precedent that can then be exported to other states.”

This strategy is far more effective than trying to overhaul federal laws, a complicated process that draws the scrutiny of the national media.


I had no idea who Hammer is until I had a look. Very interesting character, and one with a whole lot of power.

Another interesting tidbit:

The statute was supposed to be a bulwark against overzealous state attorneys, but Hammer and the Republican sponsors of Stand Your Ground could not point to a single instance in which a person had been wrongfully charged, tried, or convicted after invoking Florida’s traditional self-defense law. “There was no problem,” Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami, who has extensively studied Stand Your Ground, said. “There wasn’t a terrible epidemic of people getting prosecuted or harassed.”

Gelber said, “There were Republicans who, throughout the process, were expressing reservations to me about the bill. But their entire rationalization was that the legislation won’t have any impact, so we might as well just please the N.R.A.”

In April, 2005, Stand Your Ground passed easily; only twenty lawmakers voted against it, all of them House Democrats. Later that month, Jeb Bush, then the governor of Florida, signed Hammer’s proposal into law. He called the bill “common sense.”


Sounds a lot like measures to prevent the epidemic of voter fraud.

The article makes it quite clear that Hammer is a king-maker in Florida. If you are a Republican, and want to not lose elections, you need her blessing. That means you can have all the most wonderful ideas about taxation, human rights, immigration, and whatever else, but if you're not an A+ player for the NRA, you're toast.

It makes me suspect that Hammer's statement about this particular incident did more than flesh-out the copy of a few reports.

Canada is not without controversy when it comes to questions which are similar to "stand your ground".

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ ... -1.4551488

RCMP in Alberta have taken a rural homeowner into custody after a shooting that police allege happened when he confronted two people rummaging through his vehicles.

Police say members from their detachment in Okotoks were called to the property at around 5:30 a.m. on Saturday.

They say that during the confrontation between the owner and the suspects, an unknown number of shots were fired before the suspects fled.

[...]

Last fall, Alberta's Opposition called for an emergency debate in the legislature to deal with rural crime and the subject came up following this month's acquittal of a Saskatchewan farmer in the shooting death of an Indigenous man on his property.

[...]

Rural crime on the Prairies, and what landowners are allowed to do about it, has come up a lot recently.

A crowdfunding website for Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley, who was acquitted last month of second-degree murder in the death of Colten Boushie, has raised over $223,000.

The jury heard that Boushie and some friends had been drinking before they broke into a truck on one farm, then headed onto Stanley's property to ask for help for a flat tire. Stanley testified that he thought his ATV was being stolen.

After firing warning shots, he said his gun went off accidentally, striking Boushie in the head as he sat in the group's SUV.

In the year following Boushie's death, the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities called for the federal government to expand the rights and justification for people to defend themselves, people under their care and their property. Both Ottawa and Saskatchewan officials dismissed the idea.

Meanwhile, an Alberta man, Daniel Wayne Newsham, will face a manslaughter trial in December after police allege he was involved in a fatal collision that happened when he pursued a truck stolen from a rural property in August 2016.

Stanley Dick, who was the lone occupant of the truck, died in the crash.
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Re: Florida stand your ground is the gift that keeps on shoo

Postby cmsellers » Sun Aug 19, 2018 5:01 am

Yes, the NRA does a lot of unethical stuff, but this case is not such an example. I am a long-time supporter of stand-your-ground laws and believe that it is the opponents of these laws who are being at best obtuse and at worst dishonest.

In common law, there is a presumed duty to retreat in public places, which means that you are obligated to retreat from dangerous circumstances if it is possible to safely do so or lose your right to self-defense. I first learned about such laws when I was told (by a supporter of duty-to-retreat) that in Massachusetts you legally have to give your wallet to a mugger if you cannot retreat without doing so. I later learned that particular example is a myth, however during the period when I believed this a good many liberals I argued about this with saw it as a good thing because it places (the mugger's) life over (my) property.

But even with the actual application of duty to retreat I still dislike it, because it essentially says that if someone is getting violent and threatening in a place where you have a right to be, then by staying in that place you lose your right to self-defense. I do not have the motor skills to believe that I could win such a confrontation and would therefore personally retreat in such cases out of pragmatism, but it galls me that I am required to all the same.

Stand your ground laws first came to national attention following the murder of Trayvon Martin, however despite the media frenzy over it they were not applicable to Zimmerman. Zimmerman had not merely been in a place where he had a right to be; he had harassed Martin and repeatedly escalated the situation. His defense, in exploring every avenue briefly looked into using stand-your-ground, realized it was not remotely applicable, and dropped it in favor of Florida's terribly-designed normal self-defense laws.

In this case, the sheriff misinterpreted the law, which I would like to note again: police officers get the law wrong and then aggressively offend their misinterpretations against all evidence to to the contrary all the fucking time. It does not usually make news, because it does not tie into Black Lives Matter (who I support) and the liberal hatred of all things gun-related.

Given that this is Florida, it would not have surprised me if there is some dangerously stupid loophole in their version of the stand your ground law. And yet every time that liberal critics and the mainstream media claim to have found their smoking gun of an example, they have been dead wrong. It is not dishonest for me, David French, or even the NRA to point out when the law is being misinterpreted.

Since I learned about stand your ground laws I have seen liberals portray them as a literal license to kill. With both the murder of Trayvon Martin and this case, their confirmation bias has found proof of it the moment that a black man is murdered by a thuggish hothead. I think that liberals would be happy to prove that stand-your-ground has led to more people thinking they can get away with murder because of it, and yet neither of these cases demonstrate even that, much less that it is a viable defense against murder in cases where the murderer instigated and escalated. That is politically motivated dishonesty.
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