OK Neighbor Kills Man Attempting To Drown Kids

[alsaqr]

Charges are unlikely. The Pontotoc county DA today:

"Pontotoc County District Attorney Paul Smith says his office is currently looking at the fatal shooting in the violent attack that unfolded Friday in an Ada home as excusable and justifiable.

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“I can tell you based on the preliminary briefings I’ve received, the circumstances of that shooting implicate Oklahoma’s justifiable homicide law,” Smith said Tuesday by phone. “I have to wait on the official report, but we’ll be looking at it with that in mind.”"

http://www.theadanews.com/news/char...cle_57f41b14-4ae7-11e7-abaa-bf7cc106feca.html

Oklahoma district attorneys usually announce a decision on self defense shootings within a week or so.

 

[Frank Ettin]

It really is a sad state of affairs that a person has to wonder if they'll get in trouble for doing something like that.

What's really a sad state of affairs is that folks with guns sometimes seem to have such a poor grasp of the realities of using force that they think that.

So let's look, once again, at reality of using force against another person:

1. Our society takes a dim view of one person intentionally threatening, injuring or killing another person. Doing so is, in every State, prima facie (on its face) a crime of some sort. Nonetheless, there are circumstances in which an intentional threat or act of violence against another person will be considered justified and, therefore, excused.
   
   
2. So your intentional act of violence against another person, even when you believe it to have been necessary in defense of yourself, or another innocent person, will be considered by the authorities to be, prima facie, a crime; and it will be investigated as such.
   
   
3. Only if the evidence uncovered by the investigation establishes to the satisfaction of the prosecutor that your intentional act of violence was legally justified, will you be off the hook. If the evidence does not, your will be charged with a crime and prosecuted. At that point the question of your justification will be one for the court or a jury.
   
   
4. In this particular case, we have good reason to at least tentatively conclude that Mr. Freeman's use of force was legally justified. But conclusions are based on limited information -- the material published in a couple of news stories.
   
   
5. By now the police and the prosecutor probably know a lot more about what happened than we do. And it appears that the prosecutor is now considering Mr. Freeman's use of force to have been justified.
   
   
6. That's fine and the correct result based on what we know. But what's important here is the process, not the conclusion.