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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
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This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
There's a moderately interesting documentary now on Netflix called 'The Perfect Neighbor', which uses police footage to tell the story of one case of Stand your Ground (SyG) killing. The way the piece is framed attempts to demonstrate that the killing was racially motivated. The mixed-race community is shown in a positive light, and includes plenty of footage of the kids in the community reporting that the eventual killer used racial epithets towards them, although there's no hard evidence of this. They also put up some statistics at the end that indicate that killings have increased in SyG states, and that SyG killings target blacks at a higher rate. In the end, the Stand your Ground defense doesn't hold up and the killer is convicted of manslaughter.
The publication and pushing of this documentary, to me, shows that SyG is on the rise culturally - otherwise why would Hollywood feel the need to push back against it? What's striking to me is that this was the case they chose to highlight, given the fact that the SyG defense failed. I won't go too into the details of the case, but the main weakness was that the killer reported a longer timeline from when she called the police to come help here to when she shot and killed the woman on her doorstep, which they argued indicated she didn't really fear for her life but instead set the whole thing up to get away with killing her neighbor. Franky, if I were on the jury I would probably have acquitted, just on the basis of how SyG works. As far as I understand (IANAL), the only requirement for self-defense under SyG laws is reasonable fear of death/harm. In this case, it really seems like the jury concluded there wasn't a reasonable fear because the killer was racist.
My takeaway from the whole thing is that it seems the makers of the documentary are implicitly arguing that juries should nullify the SyG defense. The documentary was not directed towards the voting populations of states likely to adopt SyG laws, but rather towards blue tribe types who sympathize with minority communities. I don't think it's a mistake that this outcome was publicized on Netflix, I think it's meant to be an example. (Edit: I'll add that I initially thought the takeaway would be the opposite - that the woman would be acquitted and this would be an example of why these laws shouldn't exist. I was quite surprised when they convicted her.)
I'm curious if anyone else watched this documentary and had a different take.
So SYG only removes the requirement that someone flee from a deadly force encounter, if possible - it still requires the person to have not of started the deadly force fight, be reasonable in the fear for their life, be in imminent danger of gross bodily injury or death, AND only matching deadly force with deadly force.
Thanks for the clarification. Does reasonable doubt standards apply to all those provisions? In this case, the killer reported that the woman she shot said "I'll kill you" and was banging on her door - assuming it's true, is that sufficient for a reasonable fear? for 'imminent' danger?
So IANAL, but I do enjoy law as a hobbyist - so take my answers with that in mind.
As far as I know, every state in the US now has it such that if you claim self defense and meet a very low standard, the burden goes to the state to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt that you did not act in self defense. The state does that typically by attacking at least one of the pillars, as if they can disprove any one pillar beyond a reasonable doubt, they win.
So for the scenario you laid out, it really depends - it would probably meet reasonable fear, but if the lady has done this once a week for years without anything coming of it, well then, probably not. If the door was well secured and locked, then that cuts against the imminence pillar - as she still needs to get through that door and close distance. However, if the door banger is armed with a gun, well, bullets can go through doors, so it may be a more reasonable argument on imminence.
Also, if the person performing self defense was in her house, it becomes a castle doctrine issue, not stand your ground, just fyi - but that is just one more thing people mix up.
At the end of the day, the defendant has to hope the prosecution can't convince 12 random people that the defendant broke one of those pillars beyond a reasonable doubt; and given the number of trials I've watched where I was shocked with the jury result given the legal and factual claims on the table, I'd always try to avoid using deadly force until I had no choice remaining, even if that means I am taking actions not required to meet the legal standard.
I know in that situation I would personally have retreated and called the police and had my gun trained on the door in case she breaks it down - but that doesn't mean what this person did was illegal, I just wouldn't bet on a jury to save me if I am firing on someone through my front door without knowing they were armed (it also breaks several of gun safety rules to do so, though those aren't laws, just best practices).
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If you want the serious legal talk you'll either need to pay for it or go to a Massad Ayoob seminar, but Cornered Cat's summary is pretty reasonable for the state of the law in most* Red States. For a tl;dr, it's not enough for someone to want to express the desire to kill you: they must be reasonably perceived as able to do so at that time, and reasonably perceived as trying to do so. That's fundamentally fact-based to be evaluated by the jury, but a jury is going to treat someone outside trying to beat a door down with their bare hands very differently from someone taking a fireax to one.
/* a tiny number of red states allow lethal force to defend property in limited situations; these are outside of the current scope of discussion.
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