>>> You'd have to quantify "many" since I don't think this is a
>>> very common case at all.
>
> http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/florida-shooting-focuses-attention-on-stand-your-ground-law/?scp=2&sq=stand%20your%20ground%20law&st=cse
Wherein we find:
"In the years since the law was amended in 2005 [...] accounts of 93 cases involving 65 deaths in confrontations in which the new law could be applied and found that 57 of them resulted in no criminal charge or trial"
Yeah, that's a big problem alright: 60 in 7 years. I see your point :-)
(I guess we can add to the list of thing we disagree on whether 60 cases in 7 years is a big number or not)
---
The testimony given in that blog entry is interesting; I don't see a way that guy is going to get off going to prison. He left his house to confront skateboarders and he brought his gun with him. Then he got into a fight with a guy, drew his weapon, and it became a furball. How is that anything other than manslaughter (except maybe 2nd degree murder!), and what does it have to do with the standing your ground laws?
Just because a lawyer says: "hey, let's argue it this way!" doesn't mean it's going to work. It's a desperate act of a guilty person.
> I did not say that the stand your ground law encourages killing
> but rather than it makes it easier to get away with it legally.
Well, maybe you intended that, but what you said was that you can't see how the Castle Doctrine isn't anything other than license to kill someone you don't like.
I'm going to guess that you think that Floridians don't like each other at a rate of, oh, about 60 per 7 years?
I guess it would be interesting to look at the other 36 cases where there was an attempt to use the law to get out of a charge but was unsuccessful. We can probably add this Dooley fool to that list.
>> unlikely that Trayvon Martin was killed by someone who understands
>> what the Castle Doctrine is. "
>
> [WS:} You are probably right, but it is not germane to this
> discussion.
If your thesis is that a law becomes a license to kill, it's very much germane. Because if he doesn't know what the law means, he's not likely to have been using it as support for his actions.
> Let's just face, this country has a long history of lynching
> in lieu of "justice" and many legal and quasi-legal protections
> of this practice.
Well, I guess I just don't agree that this is one of those things.
> So here I am - on the one hand legal gobbledygook of people with a
> political agenda trying to defend stand your ground laws in terms of
> 'law and order" - on the other hand, the long history of legally and
> semi-legally justified and virtually never prosecuted lynchings
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#Laws. I
> will go with the latter.
I can't tell: did you just accuse me of supporting lynching?
Isn't there some little sociology or something that you should be doing right now?
/jordan