Senate [American Just Us] white man convicted of attempted murder after successfully murdering black teen

yeah ok so it seems to me like dp and I agree; the man is morally culpable of murder and his acts show a reckless disregard for human life. I'm not sure if dp agrees that the 2nd amendment and Floridan carry/conceal + stand your ground law facilitated this outcome, or not. But to satisfy the 1st Degree Murder charge, we don't agree that it would be possible to make that claim and maybe we agree that it wasn't an appropriate charge to level against Mr Dunn?

 

Sigh. Ender, Stand Your Ground doesn't work the way you seem to think it does. In its negative dimension, it removes the duty to retreat. This is what was in play in the case. In its positive dimension, it allows charges to be dismissed before going to trial, if the defendant invokes Stand Your Ground. He didn't. The state had to disprove he was acting in self-defense because he claimed self-defense as the legal basis for his actions. Period.

So no, I don't have a lot of confidence you understand the issues well when you can't even articulate the relevant law correctly.

 

OK, so because he didn't invoke it, it doesn't apply at all and will not form the basis of the court's discussion?

I'll find transcripts and find the judge instructing the jury to disregard it as a factor?

 

I just mentioned the ways it applies. Read. My posts, and about the case.

 

So you're saying yes, the judge will be compelled to tell the Jury to disregard any suggestion that the accused acted in self-defence because he felt threatened?

It's a simple question, Wocky. Yes or no?

 

American jurisprudence already allows people to act in self-defense when they feel threatened. The state of Florida already did before Stand Your Ground existed. Other states that clearly don't have "Stand Your Ground," like the state of New York, already allow it. However, they have qualifiers that Florida currently does not: namely, a duty to retreat. Your focus on being able to defend yourself because you feel threatened is not the unique element here. In other words, the judge would say that either way.

 

I don't necessarily feel that Florida carry/conceal or any part of Stand Your Ground had anything to do with this -- under normal 2nd Amendment and a carry permit, no one would necessarily see it with him driving a car.

To me, it sounded like any second-degree murder: two random people got in an encounter, someone said "Boy, that escalated quickly..." and one of the people ended up dead. I do agree that it didn't seem to satisfy the first-degree charge.

 

So you would both argue then that Stand Your Ground did not fundamentally alter the threshold under which a person would use potentially lethal force in self-defence?

I would tent to concur with the arguments articulated in this Rolling Stone piece: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/jordan-davis-stand-your-grounds-latest-victim-20130425

 

I think it has, but I don't think it applied in this case -- I think he just got angry, pulled a gun and then tried to claim self-defense way later.

 

Jello -- my only (possible faulty) understanding different in FL's application of SYG is that it doesn't have to occur in one's home, removing the "castle doctrine" overall. Which is... mind-bogglingly stupid, if true.

 

Yes, this is my understanding too. SYG no longer means the home, but the person.

Jello as I understand it, citing SYG concerns to the officers who arrived was deemed insufficient by those officers who charged Mr Dunn with murder. But as a mitigating circumstance, if SYG is applied to the person (have you read the whole article? And nice work fighting your own battle Wocky ) rather than the home can you not conceive of a scenario in which the concept of self-defence is distorted by SYG?

 

Having read that article, I don't even see what specific applicability you're finding, Ender. He correctly discusses the clause for pre-trial dismissal hearings. He correctly notes the overall trend in self-defense killings after the law's passage, and it's deeply negative overall effects. But nowhere in the article do I see him attribute the right to use force in self-defense to Stand Your Ground in the way that you are.

EDIT: It's also worth pointing out, again, that this all happened when Dunn was inside his car. So, as the article itself notes, it already would have been permissible in Florida.

 

Jesus H ****ing Christ, Wocky. I'm not saying SYG can be invoked. I'm saying that it must be acknowledged that legally, the threshold for self-defence has shifted as a result of the unholy mess that is the combination of idiot American guntards with ancient British doctrine.

Do you understand this Wocky, or is it not abstract enough for you?! Florida has created a climate in which a person who has a carry and conceal permit would be said to be reasonably aware of SYG and what it means. Consequently, it would fail a reasonableness test to say that Mr Dunn's belief of his rights with respect of the law and self-defence were not influenced by Floridia's SYG statutes and as such, if he says he acted in self-defence because he felt threatened it's hard to rule out that was not the case. He didn't need to walk away from it; he felt he was empowered by law to act how he did.

That the Jury could easily pass the attempted second degree murder charges but not the first degree actual murder charge completely supports my position. It makes no sense that a random disbursement of bullets should be attempted second degree but the random ones that actually hit could be deemed premeditated. Had the prosecutor not been overcompensating viciously for not getting Zimmerman a more reasonable charge would have been laid and possibly, given the outcome to date, convicted.

Make sense?

Actually, why am I asking you if you get this. Jello, does this make sense?

 

Actually, that's something I disagree with -- it's perfectly possible to have a first-degree murder in conjunction with attempted second-degrees on top of that.

Plan to kill person X and open fire on them in a crowded area -- that'd probably cover it.

 

Sure but that's got no basis on what I'm saying and would actually make no sense in this case, because as you said earlier there's too short a time frame to establish intent to kill.

But I take your point - you plan to go kill your ex- and hit and kill some bystanders. Totally. But in this scenario, the jury rejecting 1st degree murder but convicting on second degree attempted strongly suggests the first degree charge was tenuous at best.

 

There were two volleys of bullets. Those in the first killed Jordan Davis. Several seconds later, when the vehicle was clearly pulling away, Dunn decided to fire another volley of shots into the vehicle. It was easy to distinguish between the two charges because there were two separate volleys. The second, made when the victims were clearly trying to flee, pretty easily constitute the charges of which he was found guilty. The first, which killed Davis, are at issue in the charge that saw no definitive verdict.

Once again, I'm telling you, if you actually bothered to look into this, your points might be less erroneous. Why do you think it's a good thing to argue from ignorance? You may as well join Moviefan in loling at evolution and denouncing geology. A number of your points now have had no more factual basis.

 

I'm aware there were two separate volleys. You know, for an expert in psychology, pharmacology, Wagner and law you really don't seem to have much courtroom experience. Or actually I know what it is; you can't conceive of reasonable doubt because reasonable doubt must exist in a reasonable mind and there is not one person on these boards would accuse you of that.

Wocky, I actually hate your nation's gun laws. I kind of wish every person who was a gun advocate or lobbyist would pick all the lowest hanging fruits off the cancer tree and die slowly, preferably letting me know when they were going to expire so I could watch and fill my black little heart with joy. They're monstrous, inhuman, and have lead you as a nation to rival third world failed states in how little value you ascribe to human life.

I fail to see, what the prosecution was thinking in trying to establish premediation in a heated argument last a matter of minutes at most, when the accused had no record of similar behavior and when the state had redrawn the boundaries of acceptable measures to defend one's person.

Just to be sure, you are use the following in your above post.

1) That the first volley of shots, which killed Jordan Davis, constitute first degree murder
2) The second volley of shots, fired at least in part when Dunn was trying to exit his car and shoot from outside it, constitutes the second degree murder charge.

So even though he exited the car in order to improve his aim, and even though witnesses only recall him saying "you can't talk to me like that", you want us to believe that a man who could put 9 rounds of a 10 round volley into a car was accurate enough to do that even as the car moved, but not accurate enough to aim just for Jordan Davis, so therefore 6 of the 9 bullets that hit the car but did not hit Davis were still attempting to hit him and no other passenger.

How can that possibly make sense? How are you able to argue that when he exited the car and assumed a two handed stance that his intent was only to kill Davis, whom he hit with his first volley; and not the other passengers?

That's what you're doing. I'd argue you have a subjective filter on this, but I doubt I'd believe you if you denied it.

 

I'm arguing that there could be a dispute for the following reason. In the first volley of shots, several of the jurors basically believed him. He was reasonably and truly afraid for his life. Maybe those guys were coming out of the car after him. So he needed to fire in order to defend himself from imminent danger. So, versus the people who think Dunn's actions were unjustified, the jury is hung on the murder charge.

In the second volley of shots, the car was fleeing. He can't feel fear, because no one is even trying to come after him. But he keeps firing. The jurors could all agree that this was excessive and illegal. But what was he doing at this point? Firing a missile into a motor vehicle and shooting recklessly into a car, including at individuals he never had any confrontation with. Those would be the four things he was actually convicted of.

 

More; in Florida, a person could form the reasonable view that discharging a firearm at someone they believed intended them harm would be consistent with self-defence provisions under Florida law. Especially when someone was permitted by law to carry a concealed and loaded firearm on their persons (and therefore would be in a position to act without thinking through their actions).

Therefore, the circumstances under which Mr Dunn could reasonably claim to have felt threatened justified, legally (though in my personal view, not morally or ethically), his use of force.

In a jurisdiction without an analogous SYG statute, such actions would not be legally defensible. Similar, in countries without the idiocy of the 2nd amendment, I would argue that a loaded firearm would strongly hint at premediation. But enough on how terrible your country is.

In simple terms, based on the statutory framework, he thought he was doing a legally sound thing.

Wocky, the second volley of shots can not be ruled to happen devoid of fear. The man would absolutely be a fight or flight situation and if we take it he felt fear - mostly because I doubt we could prove he did not - then I would allow that he felt fear when assuming a two handed grip and continuing to fire.

But I would argue that taking steps to improve accuracy are in fact more deadly than a random and restricted spray of rounds from the front left hand side of a Volkswagen sedan. I don't know what the SUV looks like in the flesh but I can make estimations based on dimensions - it seems from the Rolling Stone article that the back seat door did not stop the rounds but the front passenger side door did. Again, makes it hard to conceive of a mens rea when a random act stopped one set of bullets but not another.

Your argument more and more feels like "black kid gets shot by white racist; of course it must be premeditated."

 

essentially florida is a state full of gun-toting hermit crabs

 

Ender, your arguments feel more and more like a combination of 1)flailing around about a statute you don't know well and can't admit you didn't know and 2)making random accusations of bias on my part.

Of the two of us, I've been much more frank about the possibility that our judgments can be influenced by non-objective factors. Once again, I'm forced to remind you that you're the only person who claims that your opinion represents some sort of absolute truth. In this particular given two different sets of targets (one Jordan Davis, with whom he argued; the other, 3 passengers with whom he did not) and two different sets of bullets, it's not really difficult to build distinctions. I don't think pointing that out is evidence of some failure of objectivity on my part.

As to your specific response about the fight or flight instinct, one must feel a reasonable fear. His pause gave him time to re-evaluate the situation. The fleeing vehicle was clear evidence he was no longer under attack. It is enormously harder to call something that happens reasonable after that fact than before it.