Judged by Twelve

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Kleanbore

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A man in Maine has been tried and convicted on charges of first degree murder. He had shot and killed a man in a confrontation that arose from a property dispute. He claimed that the shooting had been justifiable as self defense. He had declined an offer to plead guilty to a charge of manslaughter.

Sentencing has not yet taken place. The defense attorney announced his attention to file an appeal.

The story contains a few noteworthy items:
  • The persons involved knew each other and had been involved in a property dispute.
  • The shooter and his associates were attempting to take with them property to which they apparently had a legal claim.
  • The victim and/or his associates falsely accused the shooter and his associates of trespassing and ordered them to leave the property.
  • The victim was much larger than the shooter and had pushed him, knocking him down.
  • The shooter shot the victim, who was advancing, three times in rapid succession at close range.
  • There is a duty to retreat in Maine, and the prosecution asserted that the shooter could have retreated in safety.

Link from Claude Werner's blog here.

Here is a link to a news article.

Testimony included discussion about the shooter having consumed alcohol before arriving at the scene , and about indications regarding his state of mind.

The defense attorney has said that an appeal might be based on issues having to do with jury instructions.

The appeals process cannot start until after sentencing.

For now, there are two things that seem to be evident from an ST&T standpoint:
  1. Any dispute can lead to violence; it is best to avoid trying to handle volatile matters personally, and it essential to recognize early signs of escalation and get out fast;
  2. those who advocate taking a firearm with them to a controntation of any kind "in case it is needed for self defense" should understand the risks involved.
 
I suspect that this won't end well for the shooter.

The fact that the defense attorney is already talking to people about his appeal options doesn't make me think he's all that confident either.

Bad situation for sure. Shooting someone should be an absolute last resort. Someone pushing me down to the ground would not make me reach for my weapon.

Of course I don't know the details, as I was not there so I really can't speculate as to what occurred.
 
In a state with a duty to retreat, it would not be wise to bring a gun for an expected confrontation, especially if you do not normally carry a gun all the time.

I wonder if he rejected the manslaughter charge on advice from his attorney. Looks like a bad gamble to me.
 
Ive been in a few fights. I'm usually the big guy. So that may weigh in here... but if there's no weapon, there's no self defense application for a weapon in that scenario. If big and shovey had a knife or a gun, or a crowbar or something maybe. But the man's unarmed.

Even if the situation did turn out to be justifiable. You'd have a hard time convincing folk that your shooting of an unarmed assailant was in fact self defense.

This
 
Posted by TimSr:
In a state with a duty to retreat, it would not be wise to bring a gun for an expected confrontation, especially if you do not normally carry a gun all the time.
Click to expand...
Very true indeed.

But--in jurisdictions that do not have a duty to retreat, that is a bad idea. Elimination of the duty essentially just eliminates the burden on the defender to explain and produce evidence of how he or she had evaluated the avenues of retreat that may have been available before using deadly force. They do not otherwise lower the threshold of justification for using deadly force.

It did occur to me that, if one can provide evidence that one does carry all the time, that issue would be removed from the state of mind discussion.

I wonder if he rejected the manslaughter charge on advice from his attorney. Looks like a bad gamble to me.
Click to expand...
I doubt it.
 
Posted by xxjumbojimboxx:
Ive been in a few fights. I'm usually the big guy. So that may weigh in here... but if there's no weapon, there's no self defense application for a weapon in that scenario. If big and shovey had a knife or a gun, or a crowbar or something maybe. But the man's unarmed.
Click to expand...
If it is a fight, there is no case for self defense.

Even if the situation did turn out to be justifiable. You'd have a hard time convincing folk that your shooting of an unarmed assailant was in fact self defense.
Click to expand...
It may be an uphill battle, but a significant disparity of force can justify the use of a weapon in self defense.
 
So a couple geezers, motivated by greed, egged on by family, get into what shoud be a civil matter and one ends up dead and the other going to jail.

Forgive my sarcasm but I responded to too many calls invoving violence over petty, stupid stuff, when it would have been better if;

A Family didnt get others involved and just left.

B Those being called didnt go.

C the original 2 involved in the conflict/argument had called the cops sooner.
 
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You don't resolve a dispute that way. More lives are ruined because people take a civil dispute that should be settled in court into their own hands and force a confrontation. Emotions always are high in a situation like this. I know, I was called to the scene to keep the peace in a number of similar situations.

After reading through the narrative several times I would have to conclude that I still don't know enough about what happened to judge if the jury was right. The blog just gives identifies the actors and gives us snippets of the action. I have no idea what testimony was presented to the jury.

I also have to conclude that Daniel Lilley was not the right attorney to have in this case. I think that a lawyer familiar with justified use of force cases and good expert witnesses could have brought in another outcome.

One man is dead, another man's life is ruined, two families are facing losses over an issue that should have been handled in civil court.

The best thing both sides could have done was to hire attorneys and take this dispute to court. If course that costs money and it takes time.

Now the shooter is going to have to try for a second trial where he can get an attorney with experience in these kinds of cases. If he can't convince an appeals court that there were enough errors made in the original trial that he deserves a new trial...it's all over.

The lesson here; if you feel you are in the right in a civil legal matter, settle it in court. Don't call for armed backup that's not wearing a badge.

If Karen Thurlow-Kimball had simply locked the place up and left, and called an attorney on Monday morning to straighten this out, none of this would have happened. This was a stupid property dispute that is rightly settled in civil court.
 
HOOfan_1 said:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/uc...s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8

more people were murdered by "unarmed assailants" in 2011 than were killed with rifles and shotguns combined.
Click to expand...
An interesting point. Kind of laughable, but isn't it kind of widely understood that most gun homicides are caused with handguns? I suppose the mere presence of any deaths caused by hands or feet etc (728 out of 12k+) is enough to prove that an unarmed man can be dangerous enough to draw a weapon on. What really draws my eye is that 12 people were murdered with explosives in 2011. Seriously? LOL I'm sorry but what? I can see accidental deaths... But homicides? Good lord.
 
Posted by xxjumbojimboxx:
I suppose the mere presence of any deaths caused by hands or feet etc ... is enough to prove that an unarmed man can be dangerous enough to draw a weapon on.
Click to expand...
Well, not really.

To justify the presentation or use of a weapon of any kind against a person or persons without weapons, one will have to present evidence regarding ability that would derive from a disparity of force.

Small defender vs large attacker, unfit defender vs fit attacker, female vs male, numbers of attackers, martial arts skills known to the defender at the time....

And, of course, all other aspects of justification would have to be present.
 
Two drinks hardly makes one intoxicated or irresponsible.

I know that the responding officer stated he smelled alcohol, but there is nothing in any of the information we have that mentions if field sobriety tests were done.

I certainly would have done them if I suspected the shooter was impaired. It certainly would have been relevant to the investigation and possible future prosecution.

It's telling that he wasn't arrested at the scene and he was only charged after a reenactment.

Unfortunately we are all guessing based on very sketchy information. I would want to read all of the reports and statements and the trial transcript before making a judgement.
 
From what we have, the big guy used soft hands and didn't articulate any threat to the shooter's life. Based on that, looks like a bad shoot. But as said, we don't necessarily have all of the facts.
 
Arkansas Paul said:
Someone pushing me down to the ground would not make me reach for my weapon.
Click to expand...

I dunno ... as far as I know the very next thing will be a boot to my face. Of course, being 60 doesn't bode all that well either.

I might not shoot, but I'm for sure going to get my hand on my weapon, and more than likely draw.
 
bikerdoc said:
So a couple geezers, motivated by greed, egged on by family, get into what shoud be a civil matter and one ends up dead and the other going to jail.

Forgive my sarcasm but I responded to too many calls invoving violence over petty, stupid stuff, when it would have been better if;

A Family didnt get others involved and just left.

B Those being called didnt go.

C the original 2 involved in the conflict/argument had called the cops sooner.
Click to expand...
Bikerdoc wrote it better than I could have.
 
Sounds like the shooter should have retreated and called Johnny Law.

If Johnny Law says there is nothing he can do, it's a civil matter, then the shooter should have called a lawyer.

Sometimes the Obama approach is the best approach: "My pen and my phone.."
 
Kleanbore said:
......The shooter and his associates were attempting to take with them property to which they apparently had a legal claim.(/QUOTE]

This reminds me so much of the O.J. Simpson case in which he discovered who possessed his "stolen property" and recruited some thugs to assist him in stealing it back at gunpoint.
It might have worked better for Simpson to go to the police and report it, and I think this character ought to have done the same for the same reason.
Click to expand...
 
If you do everything you can to avoid confrontation (to include just leaving when able or not going in the 1st place) and only use force when in imminent fear for your life or serious bodily harm (and cannot safely leave), then you hire a defense attny familiar with lawful use of force defenses along with expert witnesses, you'll probably be OK.

None of those things above seemed to have happened here...
 
Disproportionate use of force when looked at through the lens of duty to retreat, duty to scamper away, duty to not defend thyself lest you hurt a fly, duty to hug it out as per progressive state law.
 
From Kleanbore:

It did occur to me that, if one can provide evidence that one does carry all the time, that issue would be removed from the state of mind discussion.
Click to expand...

This occurred to both me and my wife while watching a recent episode of "Cops". Though the person in possession of the gun ultimately ended up being arrested (also a neighbor dispute, IIRC), he did answer the officer's question of why he had a gun with the statement that he "always had it with him", and was licensed to do so.

We had a brief discussion that it is indeed wise to make it known that one's gun goes on pretty much all the time, so one could not be accused rightly of "strapping on to go look for trouble."
 
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