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Law of Self Defense Tag

Posted by Andrew Branca on April 02, 2018 51 Comments
The Supreme Court just handed down a police use-of-force decision, Kisela v. Hughes (pdf.)(full embed at bottom of post), the most notable characteristic of which is the gutting of a typically nutty Ninth Circuit court of appeals ruling and a typically silly dissent by Sotomayor (joined, unsurprisingly, by Ginsburg). The legal issue in play is whether a woman who was shot by a police officer should be permitted to sue that officer personally.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 18, 2017 11 Comments
Safe spaces are all the rage on campuses. The safety promised is not physical safety, but emotional safety from ideas that do not fit the progressive and social justice warrior narrative. At Vassar College, my planned lecture on "hate speech" and free speech was so *scary* to the intolerant far-left that they not only engaged in a smear campaign against me, they also organized safe spaces replete "coloring books, zine kits, markers, construction paper etc."

Posted by Andrew Branca on July 18, 2017 39 Comments
Two years ago tomorrow University of Cincinnati Police Officer Ray Tensing, who is white, shot and killed black motorist Sam DuBose during a traffic stop. The stop, DuBose' attempt to drive away while dragging Officer Tensing down the road, and the fatal shot were largely captured on Tensing's body-cam.  Today, after trying Tensing twice and achieving only two hung juries, Prosecutor Joe Deters announced that he is not seeking to try Tensing a third time, reports WCPO news and other sources.

Posted by Andrew Branca on July 05, 2017 50 Comments
“Stand-Your-Ground” was back in the headlines against over the just-concluded Independence Day weekend, thanks to a 14-page decision by Miami-Dade Circuit judge Milton Hirsch that recent legislative changes to Florida’s self-defense immunity law were unconstitutional, reports the Bradenton Herald newspaper and other sources. (That decision is embedded below.) Specifically, the recently signed law switched the burden of persuasion on pre-trial self-defense immunity from the defendant to the state, and changed the standard of evidence required from a preponderance of the evidence to one of clear and convincing evidence. (We wrote about these changes more extensively here: “Florida Changes Burden of Proof of Self-Defense Immunity.”)

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 10, 2017 14 Comments
Yesterday, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed into a law a modification to the state's self-defense immunity statute, according to Reuters and other news sources. The self-defense immunity, generally mis-identified by media as a "stand your ground" law, provides for criminal and civil immunity for a use of force that is determined to constitute lawful self-defense.

Posted by Andrew Branca on April 14, 2017 6 Comments
Some of you may be aware that the United States Concealed Carry Association (USCCA) has licensed my book, "The Law of Self Defense, 3rd Edition."  They've added their own cover, and a foreword by their CEO, Tim Schmidt, but otherwise it's the same book.  I'm also a member of USCCA's Legal Advisory Board (LAB). USCCA is currently offering "The Law of Self Defense" as part of a package with their own excellent book, "Concealed Carry and Home Defense Fundamentals" and several instructional DVDs at a very steep 50% discount.

Posted by Andrew Branca on March 10, 2017 75 Comments
Curtis Reeves has been denied legal immunity from prosecution and civil suit over his fatal shooting of Chad Oulson, in an order issued today by Judge Susan Barthle (that order is embedded at the bottom of this post). Reading Judge Barthle’s order, however, suggests that her legal analysis may be sufficiently defective so as to render this denial of immunity a miscarriage of justice, thus warranting another self-defense immunity hearing in which the proper legal standards and analysis are applied. We have previously covered this case here at Legal Insurrection in numerous posts, including:

Posted by Andrew Branca on February 21, 2017 74 Comments
It was three years ago last month that retired police officer Curtis Reeves, then 71 years old, shot and killed 43-year-old Chad Oulsen in a Florida movie theater. The case became known as the "popcorn shooting" because the shooting allegedly happened over spilled popcorn. Reeves has been charged with second degree murder and aggravated battery.  He has pleaded not guilty to both charges and raised the legal defense of self-defense. As usual, the media has been slathering the phrase “Stand-Your-Ground” all over this case, when in fact the case has nothing to do whatever with “Stand-Your-Ground” or any legal issues of retreat. What is relevant to this case, however, as it is to pretty much any self-defense case in Florida, is self-defense immunity. Yesterday was the first day of Reeves’ self-defense immunity hearing, taking place in a Pasco County courthouse, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 27, 2016 27 Comments
The scientific journal JAMA Internal Medicine has published a paper utterly devoid of scientific or public policy merit, fraught with abject error and ignorance, and utterly lacking any arguable purpose other than to deceive gullible readers about the nature and merits of Florida’s Stand-Your-Ground law. The JAMA study follows another supposedly scientific study by others I have previously debunked: Published on Monday, Nov. 14, the JAMA paper is entitled: "Evaluating the Impact of Florida’s 'Stand Your Ground' Self-defense Law on Homicide and Suicide by Firearm: An Interrupted Time Series Study." How this paper passed peer review and why it has not already been withdrawn is a question left to the reader.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 27, 2016 15 Comments
The University of Tennessee  at Knoxville apparently doesn't want to take on the leader of the Army of Davids. We reported the other day that UTK was "investigating" Prof. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit over the tweet suggesting that drivers surrounded by the violent racist mobs of rioters on Charlotee highways "run them down," Twitter suspends Instapundit for suggesting people not become victims of racist thug rioters (Update): Instapundit Tweet Charlotte Riots Any reasonable person would have understood that tweet to mean that if threatened with deadly force by the rioters, you could escape by driving through the mob. That tweet and advice was consistent with the law of self-defense.

Posted by Andrew Branca on September 22, 2016 97 Comments
The details on the Charlotte riots and attacks on motorists trapped on the highway and others are in our earlier post. Instapundit (law professor Glenn Reynolds) was suspended from Twitter (then later reinstated) after posting the following tweet as those riots and highway blockades were ongoing: Instapundit Tweet Charlotte Riots Professor Jacobson has asked me to address whether such an act would be lawful as a justified act of self-defense.  I'm on a flight now using airplane WiFi, so I'll make this quick. (Before I go on, however, I should point out that Professor Reynolds has added some important context to his pithy tweet, and these later comments can be found at the link above.)

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 22, 2016 36 Comments
The rioting in Charlotte turned even uglier overnight, after the apparently false claim that a black man was shot dead by police for pointing a book. All evidence so far shows that the "victim" was a career criminal who had a gun and turned towards police. This appears to be another false media narrative, just like "hands up, don't shoot" in the Michael Brown case, but it was enough to spark mobs of racist rioters and looters who attacked people and each other, including people trapped in cars. Anyone who was old enough to remember the 1992 Los Angeles riots after the police in the Rodney King case were found not guilty is old enough to remember Reginald Denny:

Posted by New Neo on September 21, 2016 24 Comments
Last Friday night a black man named Terence Crutcher was shot and killed by police officer Betty Shelby in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The case has already received a lot of attention as one of a line of recent incidents in which an unarmed black person was killed by police, and Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan has called the video of the incident "very disturbing" and "very difficult to watch." It is quite early in this case, and experience has shown that what we know about it at this point is probably based on incomplete information mixed with at least a sprinkling of false information. So right now it's not possible to come to any firm conclusions about what happened and whether Officer Shelby will face any legal liability for Crutcher's death. Of course, that won't stop many people from having very firm opinions about it. With those caveats, here are some of the events and allegations so far:

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 10, 2016 18 Comments
I know many of you have been wondering where the heck I've run off to from the pages of Legal Insurrection, so I want to immediately dispel the most common rumor:  No, Professor Jacobson and I have not broken up. :-) More seriously, the reason for my absence has been that I've been hard at work finishing the thoroughly updated newest edition of my book, "The Law of Self Defense, 3rd Edition," which I'm proud to announce published last week.  Further, I learned this morning that we've already achieved the number one position in Criminal Law new releases at Amazon.com, at that we're #6 in the Criminal Law category overall. And today we also became #1 in the Hunting & Shooting category at Amazon.

Posted by Andrew Branca on February 27, 2016 17 Comments
Yesterday, on the 4th anniversary of the self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin, we wrote about Florida's just enacted changes to its "10-20-Life" mandatory minimum sentencing law in the context of aggravated assault and self-defense. There is also another substantive change to the state's self-defense law that is advancing through the Florida legislature:  a reduction in the threshold for obtaining criminal and civil self-defense immunity. More specifically, the Florida senate has approved a change to the state's self-defense immunity law that would require state prosecutors to disprove self-defense by clear and convincing evidence in order to deny a defendant immunity from prosecution (and civil suit).

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 21, 2015 25 Comments
This past Monday we wrote about the start of the re-trial of retired firefighter Raul Rodriguez who was previously convicted of murder and sentenced to 40 years in jail after shooting a neighbor over a dispute about the neighbor's noisy party. Rodriquez had claimed self-defense justification for the killing.  That prior post can be found here: Retrial Begins for Firefighter Who Selfied “Stand-Your-Ground” That re-trial ended yesterday with the jury returning a verdict of guilty of murder after three hours of deliberation, reports the Houston Chronicle. Rodriquez first murder conviction in this case was overturned because of a somewhat subtle error in the jury instructions on self-defense, as covered in some detail in a post last December, New Trial for Man Who Video Recorded Own “Self-Defense” Shooting.   No one knew, of course, whether the mistaken jury instruction had led the first jury astray and resulted in an improper guilty verdict, but a defendant is entitled to correct jury instructions and so a re-trial was ordered on appeal. This second conviction seems completely unrelated to the concerns surrounding the first--an issue of the timing of when Rodriquez may have openly displayed his concealed carry pistol--but instead focuses strictly on the issue of provocation.
"This case is about provocation, pure and simple," prosecutor Kelli Johnson told jurors in closing arguments earlier in the day. "The law doesn't allow you to create a situation and then claim self-defense."

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 06, 2015 48 Comments
I know I promised that my prior post would be my last on the thoroughly debunked "scientific" paper, "Race,law, and health: Examination of 'Stand Your Ground' and defendant convictions in Florida." The debunking took place in these posts: But then, well, THIS happened: Screen Shot 2015-11-05 at 4.33.05 PM Yep, I found two of the paper's authors in my Twitter timeline:  Melody S. Goodman and Cassandra Arroyo-Johnson, both of the Division of Public Health Sciences, Department of Surgery [!], Washington University School of Medicine.
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