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Law of Self Defense Tag

Posted by Andrew Branca on October 18, 2018 107 Comments
On October 3, 2018, Michael Dunn—a City Commissioner for the city of Lakeland, FL—shot and killed Cristobal Lopez as Lopez shoplifted a hatchet from Dunn’s store, reports TheLedger, a local paper. The shooting occurred as Dunn was attempting to stop Lopez from leaving the store with the hatchet. The store's security recording captured the struggle at the door, the shooting, and the rapid demise of Lopez. You can be view below our video analysis of this shooting:

Posted by Andrew Branca on October 10, 2018 28 Comments
The Baltimore police officers who are suing State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby for maliciously investigating and defaming them when she criminally charging them over the death of Freddie Gray while he was in police custody have appealed the 4th Circuit’s dismissal of their case to the US Supreme Court, according to the Baltimore Sun. A copy of the officers' petition for certiorari to the US Supreme Court is embedded at the bottom of this post. In addition, you can find my extensive coverage of the Freddie Gray cases over at Legal Insurrection by clicking here.

Posted by Andrew Branca on October 05, 2018 15 Comments
Not that it ought to be any surprise to anybody who looked at the evidence, but Chicago Police Department officer Jason Van Dyke has just been found guilty by a jury of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald. There was a hypothetical narrative under which Officer Van Dyke's narrative of innocence might have been compelling, but he never offered such a narrative, even after testifying in his own defense -- likely because he hadn't the evidence to support it.

Posted by Andrew Branca on September 13, 2018 39 Comments
A prosecutor in Colorado Springs is going to once again test the legal boundaries of Colorado’s "make-my-day" statute, which came into law in 1986. The "Make My Day" law, properly §18-1-704.5. Use of deadly physical force against an intruder, has several substantive sections:  one relaxes the proportionality requirement when dealing with a home intruder under certain circumstances.  Two others provide for criminal and civil immunity under those same circumstances.

Posted by Andrew Branca on September 05, 2018 39 Comments
This case of the week, Williams v. State, is out of the Georgia Supreme Court, in a decision handed down just last week, and involves a man whose claimed “warning shot” earned him life in prison, even though the bullet he fired wasn’t proven to have harmed anyone. Stoplight Confrontation Between Two Groups The facts involve two groups of men stopped at a red light who get into a lethal confrontation. The Defendant was in the front passenger seat of his friend’s Ford Mustang, with others in the back of the car. The Defendant and others in the Mustang were armed. A Dodge Challenger rolled up next to the Mustang containing several other men. The two groups had some pre-existing animosity, and began to yell at each other.

Posted by Andrew Branca on September 01, 2018 74 Comments
Around 2:30 AM last Tuesday, a man attacked an Uber driver, saying he had a pistol while raising his cell phone in his right hand. He abruptly discovered that the Uber driver was willing and able to defend himself from a deadly force attack with a lawfully carried handgun. Now the Uber driver, who coincidentally had just graduated from the local police academy, is being showered with praise by Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, Florida, where these events took place.

Posted by Andrew Branca on August 22, 2018 24 Comments
This week’s case is not so much a case as it is a cautionary tale about the risks of relying upon the purported use-of-force law expertise of others based solely on their job title, and dangers of not you yourself being educated on that law. I warn students in every class that certain job titles, like lawyer, cop, or firearms instructor, do not guarantee that a person in those fields knows a darned thing about use-of-force law.

Posted by Andrew Branca on August 17, 2018 95 Comments
This week’s Case of the Week is inspired by the so-called “documentary,” Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story, produced by Jay Z and Trayvon Martin’s parents. The first two episodes focus enormous attention on the fact that George Zimmerman was not arrested until April 11, 2012, 44 days after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin on February 26.

Posted by Andrew Branca on August 13, 2018 140 Comments
Michael Drejka, the 47-year old shooter of 28-year-old Markeis McGlockton over a July 19 dispute about a handicap parking spot, has been arrested and charged with manslaughter, reports the Tampa Bay Times and other news sources.  He is being held on $100,000 bail in Pinellas County Jail.
[AFB: Update, just reading the charging document closely now, and see Drejka was charged under Florida Statute §775.087(1)), Florida's so-called "10-20-Life" mandatory minimum sentencing law, the one that caught up Marissa Alexander. I'll discuss the details of this in more detail in a future post, but in effect it means that if convicted under that provision of the law Drejka is looking at life in prison, even though charged "merely" with manslaughter rather than murder, because manslaughter is a first degree felony and this killing involved the use of a firearm.]
We previously covered this case immediately after it occurred here:

Posted by Andrew Branca on August 10, 2018 64 Comments
With the “documentary” Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story by Jay Z in the news, I though it worthwhile to make this Case of the Week about the lies created by doctoring the audio file of the call George Zimmerman made to the police moments before he was viciously attacked by Trayvon Martin.

Posted by Andrew Branca on July 30, 2018 37 Comments
It's hard to believe, but my first post here at Legal Insurrection was on June 5, 2013. Naturally, it was a post covering the murder trial of George Zimmerman, after Professor Jacobson noticed some of my comments on his own posts and kindly invited me to contribute to the site. I ended up watching every moment of the trial and reviewing every piece of evidence, and wrote about the trial and surrounding events rather extensively.

Posted by Andrew Branca on July 29, 2018 58 Comments
When I tell you that you must assume that everything the news media has to say about self-defense law and events is 100% wrong until proven otherwise, this is why: CNN: "What you need to know about 'stand your ground' laws". The errors on "Stand-Your-Ground" in particular and self-defense law in general, whether these errors are borne of ignorance or malice, are almost too numerous to count. But let us make the effort, shall we?

Posted by Andrew Branca on July 18, 2018 77 Comments
I’m often asked to describe the most common way people screw up their self-defense claim. The truth is there isn’t a single most common way. Too many people manage to find an apparently infinite number of ways to step outside the bounds of the law. Often, there were a bunch of exits off that jail-bound freeway that they could have taken, but didn’t. For most normally law-abiding people this is not done out of malice, but ignorance. I mean ignorance not in a derogatory sense, but in a technical sense--they didn’t know where the legal boundaries were, and stepped over them without even knowing it.

“I can’t believe I got arrested for self-defense!”

In their minds they acted lawfully. “I can’t believe I’m being prosecuted for self-defense,” may be amongst the most common statements I hear from clients.
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