Standard procedure in Texas.
Legalities of defense of self or third party during a demonstration
- Thread starter daniel craig
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DeepSouth
Random Guy
Well, I suppose if keeping from being killed isn’t justification enough nothing will be.
We were speaking of how causing the truck to alter its course would be justified. If there is time and distance to do that in a manner sufficient to prevent being struck, there is time and distance to get out of the way. And such an action by the shooter could not prevent others from being struck.
It could cause other mayhem.
I disagree and so would many on a jury. That said I know much matters if said case was tried in a liberal safe haven like Portland vs Decatur county TN and if the jury was filled with people like you or me.
If you were charged with criminal negligence or worse after an out of control truck, the driver of which had been willfully disabled by you, killed or injured other people, I cannot imagine any jury would find that your actions had been reasonable.
If they were not reasonable, they were not lawful.
wiscoaster
Member
It should be noted that "reasonable" has a legal definition, and also has a subjective personal definition. The former is lawful, the latter may or may not be. You can never tell which definition is going to hold in a given juror's mind. It's dependent on the skill of the defendant's lawyer.
Yes, but this is Legal. So for our purposes, 'reasonable' is what the law says it is.
DT Guy
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I was taught as an LEO that shooting a person who is 'on the gas' could cause them to die 'on the gas' as easily as stop them. Not a preferred method of stopping a vehicle.
Larry
wiscoaster
Member
Or what a lawyer convinces a juror it is ... I think that activity qualifies as "legal" activity, no? I see you're a lawyer ... it's your job to interpret what the law says in favor of your client's interests, is it not? There's a lot of room for interpretation in the legal definition of "reasonable" and especially when it comes to self-defense.
No. At trial, counsel does not "interpret the law". That's the role of the judge.
No. It is defined as what a theoretical "reasonable person" would have done in circumstances similar to the case, knowing what the defendant knew at the time.
The jurors do not "interpret" that. They decide what they would have done in the circumstances, based on the evidence presented and on the jury instructions that define the law..
If the evidence showed that the defendant shot a driver, that the vehicle went out of control, and that the vehicle then killed or injured innocent people, the defendant may well be better off pleading to a reduces charge, it possible.
And that does not take into consideration the possibility of he defendant's fire striking innocents. That's what ended life as he knew it for the shooter who fired at the Jeep in the demonstrations in Aurora, CO, and hit two demonstrators.
wiscoaster
Member
Well, OK, maybe "interpret" is not the right word. What I'm saying is that the letter of the law is one thing, and that the outcome of a jury trial is another thing. The decision made by the jurors is dependent on the case presented by the opposing legal teams. That makes the outcome subjective and impossible to infer from the circumstances at the time of the incident. Which is why my position wrt to the legality of the scenario posed in the OP is that the legality of the action is not the most material with respect to deciding on course of action, it's the uncertainty of being found right in the end, and why the most prudent, and indeed the most reasonable course of action would be for the party involved to just take whatever course of action is necessary to avoid having to use lethal force in the first place.
..not at all clear to me.
wiscoaster
Member
Sigh. I'll give it one more shot.
The OP asks:
My response: since "legitimate cause" is dependent upon the "reasonable" action (both quoted terms have hard definitions) of the defendant, but what is reasonable under the circumstance is dependent upon whether a jury decides if it was reasonable or not, as you noted:
Kleanbore said:
Therefore the legitimacy of such action in such a scenario cannot be conclusively determined until the outcome of the jury trial.
And so, in conclusion, the real answer to the OP's question is: that question cannot be answered.
Given the outcome, which is likely to be very bad indeed, a couple of jury simulation exercises would provide very good insight into what the outcome would likely be.
Thus, I doubt that a defendant who had tried to use a firearm against a vehicle in "defense of a third party" would risk a jury trial if he could avoid it.
A lawyer's job is to put his or her client in the best possible position, given the facts of the case and ethical boundaries. That may mean arguing to a judge or jury how the attorney how the attorney believes a statute should be interpreted. I supposed it could be argued that I would have to interpret the statute first, before making such an argument. There's another step in there that hasn't been discussed in this thread, though: Reading through the caselaw and looking at how appellate courts have already interpreted the statute in question. If I were a defense lawyer whose client did A, B, and C, and an appellate court with binding precedential value had already determined that A, B, and C, under very similar circumstances was reasonable, I'd argue to the court that it should direct a verdict in favor of my client. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if that same appellate court had said A, B, and C were definitively unreasonable under very similar circumstances, I'd be playing "Let's Make a Deal" with the other side.
Note Kleanbore's explanation of "reasonable:"
Reasonable is an 'objective' standard, or at least as objective as anything that can't be boiled down to numbers can be. It's what the Reasonable Person would do, in the same circumstances, with the information available to the defendant at the time. It's not what Juror 9, or Spats McGee would do. I wandered through Google results for a little and found some instructions that were given in federal court in Rhode Island that provide a good example, but bear in mind that these are from a civil case:
Source: https://www.rid.uscourts.gov/sites/rid/files/juryinstructions/civil/07-435T Theroux v. Estrada.pdf
As I mentioned, those are from a civil case, but the definition of 'reasonable' is pretty consistent across civil and criminal law.
A quick aside: As one law school professor pointed when I was in law school, the great irony is that the Reasonable Person (he was the Reasonable Man back then), is (allegedly) never unreasonable. He never lets his tires get bald, he never drives over the speed limit, always reads and follows the directions for everything he uses, always uses his turn signal, never takes shortcuts on anything that might impact safety in any way. The reality, though, is that literally everyone does one or more of these things at one point or another. Thus, the Reasonable Person is actually quite Unreasonable.
That's kind of true for every jury trial. You never really know what a jury will do. There's a reason that every trial lawyer that I know will plead a client to a misdemeanor, rather than risk a trial on a felony, given half a chance.
@wisecoaster, you seem to have been hinging your reply completely on whether the action of the defender would be reasonable. That diverted the discussion into how to define reasonable in the courtroom. However, keep in mind that there are five elements required for a legitimate claim of self defense: innocence, imminence, proportionality, reasonableness, and avoidance (Branca, Law of Self Defense, 3rd ed.). Note that reasonableness is only one of the five elements. As pointed out in this thread several times, the situation of a car in the middle of a group of protesters raises serious questions about both imminence and avoidance, as well as reasonableness given the likelihood of the car momentum even without the attacker being in control is still a danger to others. Overall, as I said earlier in the thread, I cannot see the scenario resulting in legitimate use of force under the full five elements, except under potentially unique details of the specific circumstance.
We'll agree to disagree. You are wrong and have been several times, so I'll not bother to waste anymore time.
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Morally wrong? Think about it.
Unless the charge is simply for discharging a firearm in a reckless and unlawful manner, the charges will most probably involve injury or death caused by the moving truck--injury or death that would not have not occurred but for the discharge of a firearm by the accused--or the act of having put people at risk of such harm
Explain how that result would be "morally right".
Regarding any charges related to harm to the driver, those would be adjudicated, based on the totality of the evidence, considering the usual facets of the legal defense of self defense or the defense of others,, as outlined above by Craig.
In the case of the aforementioned incident in Aurora, the driver of the vehicle was uninjured, but two people were stuck by bullets from the shooter's handgun.
wiscoaster
Member
Guilty as charged.
... and so, regardless, we reach the same conclusion.
Yes indeed.
And in jurisdictions in which avoidance is not legally required, failure to avoid, when avoidance is safely possible will, in most such jurisdictions, enter into the assessment of reasonableness.
This is a point which is commonly overlooked. Just because a Self-Defense Shooter isn't required to retreat in a given jurisdiction does not mean that a jury cannot consider whether the failure to retreat was reasonable.
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