Law of Self Defense Tag

Houston area Black Panther leader, Quanell X, is changing his tune after training with the Missouri City Police Department. Quanell X is Houston's own personal Al Sharpton. Wherever an incident can be construed as race-related, Quanell X is there with his activists, rambling to local news crews about the violence inherent in the system. Or at least he was before what appears to be a sincerely eye-opening experience. Recently, Quanell agreed to train with the Missouri City Police Department, located in a suburb of Houston. The experience dramatically altered Quanell's perception. "Wow. Damn," he said, after unloading countless paintball rounds at a mock suspect who was refusing to stand down in a routine traffic stop scenario. Quanell went through four scenarios where he was required to, "shoot, hold fire, or use his taser," KHOU News reports. "Shoot him in the leg? I was very close because he kept coming," an obviously distressed Quanell said.

Thanks to a tip from commenter Gremlin1974 right here on Legal Insurrection I was directed to this relatively high-quality body camera footage of a police officer engaging a suspect with gunfire, following the suspect pointing a pistol at the officer. Further details of the event were reported by local news station Fox 23 and by Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller. The shooting took place on January 16, 2015 in Muskogee, OK. The ex-girlfriend of 21-year-old Terence Walker, black, was getting married, an event to which he took umbrage. His solution was to threaten to shoot her on her wedding day, including such details as noting that he had a particular bullet selected just for her. When the bride approached her pastor in tears and shared these threats, he immediately called 911, saying of Walker: "He’s here with a gun,” Jones said of Walker on the 911 call. “I need a police officer because I got to stop this. I got a whole bunch of people here, and I don’t need nobody hurt." Police Officer Chansey McMillin, white, was dispatched to the scene. The body camera released begins as his vehicle is pulling into the church parking lot, captures the shooting itself, and continues for several more minutes until the crime scene has been secured and McMillin is on his way to the police station for debriefing.

To Shoot or Not to Shoot, That is the Difficult Question...

It all started when an 8th grader decided to wear his mother's wig to school as a joke. What could go wrong? Apparently, a great deal. By the end of the day that awesome judgment call had cost the wig wearer an eye, within weeks leading to a juvenile hate crime conviction on the 7th grader responsible for the injury, and as of this week led the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York to reverse that conviction on self-defense grounds (PDF of the decision and order to reverse is embedded below). (Note: New York is one of a small number of states in which "Supreme Court" does NOT refer to the highest court in the state.  In New York that highest court is instead referred to as the Court of Appeals--a term that in most states refers to the court of intermediate jurisdiction.) On June 5, 2012, the (then) 8th grade complainant, as mentioned, decided to wear mom's wig to Junior High.  Shockingly, other students began to taunt him over this, among them a group of 7th graders that included Mondy E., the appellant.  Also shockingly, their taunts included anti-homosexual/transgender epithets, thus opening up the "hate crimes" can of worms. The complainant asked the taunters to stop, which had the efficacy one might expect under the circumstances.

Let's focus on making judicious use of the 5th Amendment....

So, people send me stuff. Which I love. And sometimes what they send makes me want to both laugh, and cry. Today I was sent a link to a video on the Bloomberg news site, about a company named Hardwire that has for years provided high-tech armoring materials to combat vehicles in the Middle East wars. Of course, those wars are drying up (ha-ha, right), so companies serving that "market" now find themselves seeking alternative customers. In the case of Hardwire they've decided to take their high-end armor material, Dyneema, and use it to make small bullet-proof whiteboards for use in schools as shields--no, I'm not kidding, as shields--against active shooters who may attack as in Sandy Hook. Bloomberg's video embeds early an utterly trite quote from Obama, and then starts with the company's pitch:

I was interviewed by Chris Samples of KXDJ radio, way WAY up in the Texas panhandle, on the subject of (naturally) self-defense law.  This radio interview was triggered by the recent scheduling of a Law of Self Defense Seminar up in the Amarillo area of the Lone Star State. I don't have the entire interview recorded, but KXDJ was kind enough to send me a couple of brief portions, and Professor Jacobson has been kind enough to let me share them with you. Because these two clips are somewhat removed from the broader context of the interview as a whole (in particular, they each start off with my reply to a question you can't hear), I'll try to set them up a bit.

We have covered the recent shooting death by police of a handcuffed suspect in Georgia:

• GA Police Officer Shoots and Kills Handcuffed Black Suspect
• Handcuffed GA Man Killed by Police Had Extensive Criminal Record

By now we've all heard expounded the major theme propounded by protesters that a handcuffed suspect could never present a danger of death or grave bodily harm necessary to justify the officer's use of deadly force. Let's bust that myth. On Friday commenter MikeAT, who runs the very interesting blog A Cop's Watch, was kind enough to provide links to a couple of terrible cases in which handcuffed suspects not only presented police officers with death or grave bodily harm, they actually killed them. Both cases referred to by MikeAT are drawn from the web site "Officer Down Memorial Page."

Police Officer Guy P. Gaddis, Houston Police Department

Officer Guy Gaddis [24-years-old] was shot and killed while transporting two handcuffed prisoners to jail. One of the prisoners had managed to conceal a gun and shoot Officer Gaddis twice in the back of the head. The suspect was convicted and sentenced to death. He was subsequently executed on January 22nd, 2014.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post titled "When can you legally use a gun against an unarmed person?"  That post discussed the self-defense law element of proportionality, with a particular emphasis on disparity of force, to explore (as the title suggests) when a gun could be used against an unlawful attacker even if that attacker was armed with no more than their bare hands. Out of Oregon this past Monday comes a classic real-life example of exactly this scenario, in which one man armed with a .38 pistol shot another, completely unarmed man in the chest, killing him, as reported by local KTVZ News 21.  Although the matter has not yet been adjudicated, no arrests have been made and all witnesses are cooperating with the police investigation.  Further, the Sheriff leading the investigation has made public statements emphasizing the disparity of force between the shooter and the victim, strongly suggesting he considers the use of the gun to be justified.

Well, this weekend I learned there's a guy named Ray Rice who's got a pretty mean left hook, at least when he's punching his wife in the face on an elevator. It seems he also plays something called "football," or at least he used to do so until surveillance video of the punch was released by some kind of news organization called TMZ. What caught my attention about this story was not, of course, Mr. Rice or football or TMZ, about all of which I know pretty much nothing, but a raging series of debates I see on Twitter today about the matter. As is typical of such debates argued in the 140 character "jabs" of the Twitterverse, there's a great deal of mis- and cross-communication, undoubtedly much of it deliberate. (UPDATE: Note that this topic can now also be viewed as a Law of Self Defense University Video Lecture, or listened to as a Law of Self Defense Podcast, here: http://is.gd/1HOsaT) The key issues leading to angry pitchforks and torches appear to be:

• Is it ever permissible for a man to physically strike a woman?  Here the two sides are "No, never," and "Yes, if done in necessary self-defense."
• Was Ray Rice's punch to his wife's face an example of a lawful use of force in self-defense?

Yesterday I wrote of yet another vicious deadly-force gang attack: "Caught on video: Another black-on-white racially motivated gang attack."   In that post, I cautioned that gang attacks of this kind were likely to end very badly for the attackers once they stumbled upon a victim who was lawfully armed and prepared to defend himself. It wasn't long before I received an example of this type of attack happening in Milwaukee, four days prior to the September 7 attack described in yesterday's post. As reported by the Daily Caller (video embedded below), on September 3 a gang of teens attempted to rob a group of people in Milwaukee. According to police spokesman Lt. Mark Stanmeyer, the gang had been involved in dozens of robberies in prior days,

Fast on the heels of the gang attack upon the white couple described in yesterday's post, "Caught on Video: Vicious Group Attack by Thugs on Young Couple," comes another video capture of a gang of black teenagers beating unconscious what appears to be a randomly selected white man intent on nothing more than doing his grocery shopping, as well as two store employees who came to his aid. Breitbart news site Big Government reports that:

According to Memphis police, the group emerged from a restaurant in the same strip mall and immediately attacked a 25-year-old man as he left his car in the parking lot and headed for the grocery store. Two grocery store employees ran to the man's aide, and the black mob attacked them as well, brutally beating all three victims into unconsciousness.

Cell phone video of the attacks as captured by an observer is embedded below. The screen cap of that video in the image above captures the moment that one of the attackers stomps down upon a fallen store employee's hand, which had been protecting his face, so that the attacker could next swing a kick directly into the now unprotected face. The victim was, not surprisingly rendered utterly unconscious by the vicious attack, as were the other two victims of the gang. The attacking gang can be heard laughing throughout, as can spectators.

What timing.  Just last Sunday I put up a post exploring the question of "When can you legally use a gun against an unarmed person?"  In that post I explained that deadly force, such as a gun, can be used in lawful self-defense even against an "unarmed" attacker, where the "unarmed" attack nevertheless presents a threat of death or grave bodily harm.

Disparity of Force Can Justify Defensive Use of Gun Against Even "Unarmed" Attack

In determining whether a deadly force threat is presented by an attacker the law looks to see if there existed a deadly force disparity of force between the attacker and the defender, such that the defender would be unable to reasonably defend themselves without resort to a deadly force themselves (typically in the form of a firearm). There are many circumstances in which a deadly-force disparity of force can exist.  One, of course, is where the attacker is himself armed with a deadly weapon, such as a gun or knife. Such a deadly force disparity of force can also exist, however, even in the absence of an deadly force weapon wielded by the attacker. (It should be noted, of course, that anything can be a deadly weapon, if used in a manner likely to cause death or grave bodily harm--and this includes one's hands/fists and feet.) One of the most common deadly force disparity-of-force circumstances is where there is a disparity of numbers, such that the attackers substantially outnumber the defenders. Another is disparity of gender, where the attacker is male and the defender female--a disparity further aggravated when the woman is dressed in a manner not conducive to physical self-defense (e.g., wearing heels and a dress).