"...it would be hard to convince a jury that a person’s not allowed to hit someone who instigated a confrontation by storming into their business and barking the most aggressive and inflammatory term in the English language in their face."
Said Andrew Warren, the state attorney for Hillsborough County, quoted in "Customer’s Racial Slur Drew a Fatal Punch. The Sentence Is House Arrest. A plea deal in a confrontation at a Dunkin’ shop in Tampa, Fla., 'holds the defendant accountable while considering the totality of the circumstances,' the prosecutor said" (NYT).
The sentence was 2 years of house arrest.
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56 comments:
the most aggressive and inflammatory term in the English language
What is this term? I've got No Idea. Did he call him a newt? 'cause That's Pretty aggressive
It wasn't just the thrown popcorn. It was also the cell-phone light.
That shooting was deserved doubly.
I strongly suspect that neither incident is accurately described. Nobody successfully pled "stand your ground" for a shooting motivated by popcorn and that person did not merely shout a racial epithet. I don't have to research the cases to know that they're both heavily shaded to support the desired argument.
Two years of house arrest? Meaning about the same sentence as many of us got for the sin of living in a country where authorities listened to the corrupt Tony Fauci?
It's amazing how lightly the words our officials use touch on the reality of what thy are describing. Omission is the most powerful tool of rhetoric.
A carjacking victim in California is killed by his own car, not a peep out of these guys. Carjacking is kind of rare in Florida.
From just the quote there's one thing I know with a high degree of confidence: Andrew Warren is a Democrat.
"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but racial slurs? I'll kill ya!"
That would be a lousy argument for an Internet troll, but it is really sad to see it from a professional lawyer.
The judge in the popcorn shooting case denied the defense's request for a "Stand Your Ground" ruling. The defendant was acquitted under the regular self-defense standard, wherein a seated 71-year-old man shot a 43-year-old man looming over him in a dispute over the younger man using his phone during a movie.
No bonus points for guessing which Hungarian millionaire backed Andrew Warren.
Fighting words is a legal defense.
"Stand your ground" is also a defense paradigm, that needs to be 'opened' by the court. It carries a list of elements that must be met to allow the defense be used at trial, like the 'insanity' defense.
What is frustrating, is the purpose of the "Jury by peers" is corrupted by the legal profession. The purpose of the jury is to listen to the facts...then apply the facts, and apply the law, or not, to the facts. A jury can look at this case and decide amongst themselves if any punishment is warranted. If Jury instructions does not allow the jury to suspend punishment, they have the option to deliver a not guilty verdict.
But the system tells the jury they don't have the power to evaluate the law. But they do, and they should.
The defendant in the popcorn case was explicitly barred from raising a stand-your-ground defense by the state supreme court. His defense was simple self-defense. It's perfectly fair to disagree with that verdict, but the prosecutor shouldn't lie about it.
Any law prosecutors find frustrating can't be all bad.
This is the lie that just won't die: Reeves thought the much younger man was about to attack him. Somebody calling you a name, any name, does not justify violence. If the verbal assault led you to reasonably expect a physical attack, then that may be another matter.
"Reeves told ABC News he was unaware that popcorn had hit him until after he opened fire.
"What was in my mind was he was either trying to hit me or he was trying to come over the seat," he said."
Except that in the popcorn case, it was a 68-year-old man who claimed fear for his life in a confrontation with a 6'4" much younger man. In this case it was a young man causing the death of a 77-year-old, and who didn't even claim he felt in any physical jeopardy. Not I think the popcorn case was decided correctly, but it's not comparable.
I don't think we are comparing apples to apples.
Lawyers and progressives just cannot tell the truth when it comes to self defense cases.
Paywall blocks any context. It would probably be a lie from the NYT's anyways.
"...it would be hard to convince a jury..."
It's meant to be hard, and it's your job.
Merely alluding to a defense in a case that didn't apply or decide the outcome of that case doesn't change the duty.
I didn't pay attention to the entire trial, but I thought the judge ruled that Stand Your Ground did not apply? To where does an old guy in a movie theater seat retreat?
Wasn't it Reeves's popcorn? Didn't Reeves accuse Oulson of also throwing another object at him? Isn't there a lower standard in Florida for what constitutes assault when the assault victim is elderly person?
But why bother with facts when it's more fun to run around saying "He shot someone for throwing popcorn" or "He shot a guy for texting in a theater"?
My first reaction is: it is so obviously potentially life-shortening to walk up to a healthy black man and spew vile racist epithets into his face -- especially after spending many minutes verbally tormenting that black man's employees -- that the outcome of this encounter is not surprising in the least.
The fact that the dead man was an ex-con who did serious time for pedophilia, and therefore likely has very poor impulse control, is beside the point; there is no way the black store manager could have known that. The only way this could have ended peacefully is if the police had shown up earlier after they'd been called **; an irresistible force was locked in mortal combat with an immovable object.
A tragedy for the black manager, his employees and his customers who had to witness this. For the "frail" 77-year-old racist pedophile with the death wish, not so much. He got his threescore and 10 plus a couple of bonus rounds, and used them very poorly, right up to the last second.
I even think that the charges, and the sentence, suit the circumstances. The guy still winds up with a felony conviction on his record, which can have lifelong consequences for certain jobs in the US.
I do have a lot of problems with the legal analysis used by the state attorney to plea down from manslaughter to felony assault. Mention of 'stand your ground' laws is a non-sequitur; did the NYT reporter bring that up? Sounds like a handy excuse to (dishonestly?) avoid the deeper analysis.
And unfortunately our times require us to do that deeper racial analysis: would it be considered a 'just' result if the races had been reversed? If the answer is no, then the principle of 'equal before the law' has been utterly abandoned at the highest levels of American society. This is huge, a much bigger story than a fight in a donut shop.
As a result of this abandonment of principle to skin color, the attorney was probably consumed with concern about his own skin. There was absolutely nothing in it for him, except the total destruction of his livelihood by the press, the politicians and the internet mob, if he had followed the law and sought a conviction for manslaughter.
** I'm from Canada. What kind of donut shop do you have in Florida that doesn't have a half-dozen cop cars parked outside?
just don't go in that house, I guess
What movie was it?
That sounds nice, but the man doing the "Barking" was 77 years old. And the man who killed him was a strong young man in his 20s. The employee could have tackled him. He could've put him in a headlock. He could've physically thrown him out of the store. Instead, he smashed him in the jaw and killed him.
Meanwhile, in Denver, charges against the man who murdered a Trump supporter have been dropped. Antifa has a liscense to kill. You can thank the Democrat party.
Being afraid is you peoples stock in trade. You have so much in common with the cancellation wokesters.
So, what word can be screamed by a black person at a white person that would allow the white person to attack?
White people need to get together and come up with a word that only they can say.
A word so fearsome and holy, that it cannot, under any circumstances, be either uttered or even written by anyone who is not pale.
We are a foolish people and a foolish nation.
“White Hispanic” Zimmerman shoots a man trying to bash his head into concrete, but his attacker is black so he’s put on trial. Black man kills a 77 year old honkey and that’s more or less okay because bad word. Got it.
Payroll blocks me from reading the story but my thoughts on that is 2 years house arrest on a plea deal is actually 2 years in jail via the back door. That is to say he'll violate the house arrest and do hard time.
Incentives matter. The old Jim Croce song goes:
Yeah, you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Slim.
"Fighting words" exist as a concept of law for a reason. Use of such words is expected to provoke a violent reaction, in self defense against the speaker, because the words are so closely tied to criminally violent behavior towards the ones spoken to in such a manner.
Another example is lighting a burning cross on someone's front lawn. Meeting this behavior with immediate, self defensive violence against the perpetrators is perfectly sensible behavior, as cross burners historically follow up this action with violence against the homeowners.
A third example might be blocking a highway as a protest and violently attacking vehicles on the road. Drivers using their vehicles as weapons to escape the attacks are performing acts of self defense, not criminal violence.
A berserk person using language associated with violent behavior toward Blacks, seems to me justification for self defense by a Black person so accosted. Or, to put it bluntly, "F**k around and find out."
This is the prosecutor not doing his job, as we increasingly see today. The "Popcorn" case was ajudicated in trial, this one was apparently pleaded out to a house arrest for two years- a plea deal for what is textbook manslaughter. You either get a plea with some more stringent custodial sentence, or you take it to trial and let the jury decide. It may well be that the jury would have come back with a not guilty plea in this particular case, but I strongly suspect that the reason this wasn't taken to trial by the prosecutor had nothing at all to do with his belief that he couldn't win a jury trial- he pleaded it out because he was afraid he would win.
Separate but equal.
Joe Smith:
"White people need to get together and come up with a word that only they can say."
Shut-up.
The Times used a photo of the dead guy that shows him at a much younger age. He actually looked much older and weaker at the time of his death.
There is a more recent booking photo readily available on Google.
That was a deliberate effort to mislead the readers of the Times.
Some people seem to enjoy being misled.
https://offender.fdle.state.fl.us/offender/sops/flyer.jsf?personNbr=71952
And to follow up, how different would a reader's thoughts about the crime have been if they had been presented with a more current photo showing the old mam as he was at the time of his murder?
Very different, I'd say.
Trayvon all over again.
"If you can shoot someone for throwing popcorn at you under Florida’s flawed Stand Your Ground law..."
"...it would be hard to convince a jury that a person’s not allowed to hit someone who instigated a confrontation by storming into their business and barking the most aggressive and inflammatory term in the English language in their face.”
No, you can’t shoot someone for throwing popcorn in your face. You can shoot someone if they put you in reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily injury. Luckily for most of us here, the standard gets more deferential as we get older. It becomes more deferential because the standard for what is reasonable fear naturally gets more sympathetic as we get more frail - something that wouldn’t hurt you much in your 20s can break bones and permanently disabled you in your 70s and 80s.
All that “Stand Your Ground” did was to statutorily abrogate the common law self defense Retreat Doctrine somewhat (it was inapplicable to Zimmerman, because he couldn’t have retreated with Martin sitting on his chest at the time). Most states have done so. The basic problem with the Retreat Doctrine was that it had ceased to require reasonableness in many states. It asked one question: was there an avenue of retreat available at the time that deadly force was utilized by the defendant? Not whether he would have reasonably seen it, but whether it existed. This was made worse, because most people have tunnel vision when facing a reasonable threat of imminent death or great bodily injury, focusing on the threat. So, after months of 20/20 hindsight, not available to defendants at the time, unscrupulous prosecutors and investigators would find possible avenues of retreat, and with that, defeat otherwise realistic deference of self defense. It was to take this away from unscrupulous prosecutors that almost all states have either abolished this as an element of self defense, or at least weakened it greatly with a reasonableness test. I should also note that the Retreat Doctrine is a historical remnant of a time before firearms, when retreat was from edged and bludgeoning weapons. The time available and the distances involved made retreat more viable.
Oh, and the reason that “Stand your Ground” made its way into the Zimmerman trial had nothing to do with the Retreat Doctrine. Instead, at the same time that the Florida legislature had abrogated the common law Retreat Doctrine, they had also instituted an elective hearing that allowed defendants to prove self defense by a preponderance of the evidence, and if done pre trial, and the prosecution was unable to convict at trial, then the state was liable for defense costs after that point. You can see why unscrupulous prosecutors (like the ones in the Zimmerman case) hated this - they could no longer use the process as a penalty in unjustified prosecutions. Worse, defendants were also made immune from civil liability too, which means that they weren’t liable for wrongful death lawsuits for use of legally justified self defense. That’s probably why Crump, who had come into town to represent Martin’s family in such, never filed - since it turns out that the statute that introduced these self defense hearings doesn’t explicitly require them to be pre trial. Zimmerman’s attorneys never bothered with the self defense hearing, because his self defense claim was so strong, but could have, the minute a civil lawsuit was filed. Because these hearings were enacted at the same time that the Retreat Doctrine was abrogated, it was included in “Stand Your Ground” by the press. They intentionally confused the two, in the public’s eyes, to justify their highly partisan attack on the self defense hearings that leftist prosecutors hated so much.
Meanwhile, in a town near me, a man was sentenced to two years in jail just last week for speeding, going through a stop light, and killing a woman.
Compare and contrast.
“This is the prosecutor not doing his job, as we increasingly see today. The "Popcorn" case was ajudicated in trial, this one was apparently pleaded out to a house arrest for two years- a plea deal for what is textbook manslaughter. You either get a plea with some more stringent custodial sentence, or you take it to trial and let the jury decide. It may well be that the jury would have come back with a not guilty plea in this particular case, but I strongly suspect that the reason this wasn't taken to trial by the prosecutor had nothing at all to do with his belief that he couldn't win a jury trial- he pleaded it out because he was afraid he would win.”
Plea deals are an unfortunate result of the complexity of our legal system. A century or so ago, criminal trials were usually fairly quick. Then the sentence was carried out within days. No expert witnesses. No Rules of Evidence, etc. now, prosecutors rarely have the resources to actually have the resources to try in court more than a couple percent of their caseload. So, it has become somewhat of a game - prosecutors overcharge, or they stack a bunch of charges, then agree to a plea deal dismissing a lot of the charges. Of course, it is abused by unscrupulous prosecutors, like the Mueller team did with Gen Flynn, threatening prosecution of his son, or federal prosecutors did for Michael Milken by threatening prosecution of his brother.
Elective abortion with plausible cause for social, redistributive, clinical, and fair weather causes?
"If the answer is no, then the principle of 'equal before the law' has been utterly abandoned at the highest levels of American society."
Has it really ever been in effect?
Or, put more directly: the principle of "equal before the law" has never really been in force in America.
"Meanwhile, in Denver, charges against the man who murdered a Trump supporter have been dropped. Antifa has a liscense to kill. You can thank the Democrat party."
Don't be a drama queen.
"So, what word can be screamed by a black person at a white person that would allow the white person to attack?"
How about, "I can't breathe?"
It is almost a given that white people can attack blacks without serious consequence. The presumption is always that the blacks attacked by whites probably deserved it, were probably up to no-good, and simply by dint of their skin color were no-good.
"If you can shoot someone for throwing popcorn at you under Florida’s flawed Stand Your Ground law..."
It wasn't a "Stand Your Ground" case.
It was a plain old self-defense case
So Andrew Warren, the state attorney for Hillsborough County, is a lying sack of shit.
"...it would be hard to convince a jury that a person’s not allowed to hit someone who instigated a confrontation by storming into their business and barking the most aggressive and inflammatory term in the English language in their face."
Now we come to the root of the matter: the defendant is black, the victim is white, and the Democrats in Hillsborough County don't want to even try to convict a black man of killing a white man.
Should the guy be in jail for throwing a "lethal punch" at someone who called him a n word? I don't know.
I'd love to know what's claimed to have happened, but even if I were willing to read teh NYT, I'm not willing to believe they won't lie about it, or just get things wrong because they don't care about doing a good job.
But I do know that Andrew Warren shoudl be fired
** I'm from Canada. What kind of donut shop do you have in Florida that doesn't have a half-dozen cop cars parked outside?
At a guess, that area has more donut shops than cops
rcocean said...
That sounds nice, but the man doing the "Barking" was 77 years old. And the man who killed him was a strong young man in his 20s. The employee could have tackled him. He could've put him in a headlock. He could've physically thrown him out of the store. Instead, he smashed him in the jaw and killed him.
Sorry, but we've seen people die when cops did any of your "alternatives".
besides, you put someone in a headlock, 5 seconds later you discover they had a knife in their pocket, that's now in your kidney.
Meanwhile, in Denver, charges against the man who murdered a Trump supporter have been dropped. Antifa has a liscense to kill. You can thank the Democrat party.
So do conservatives. Because they know they won't be protected
Scapekernel? Self-defense is a basic human right realized through a process of reconciliation in a moral society, through opportunity in an ethical society, and in darkness in a legal society.
So murder is OK if they hurt your feelings? Oh, only if you are black and they are white. Got it. You know what I learned from this? Stay far away from black people because I will get no justice if they harm me. It’s like they WANT to push Americans apart. The Left want to separate people into groups which are easier to control and manipulate.
The tit-for-tat back-and-forth between the races has got to stop, or all that will result is a new era of Jim Crow, followed by another of whatever the hell we're going to term this one, where it's possible to cry "racist" and get off for murdering a member of the "oppressor race".
Just like with the claim that "racism" is a one-way crime, that only whites can commit, this does not end well. The various minorities won their arguments over overt prejudice entangled in the government and culture; now, they're in the process of convincing the same people that they had to convince to put an end to such things that their efforts to be fair were meaningless--Other than that they were now to be taking a turn as the oppressed. When you are trying that Ju-jitsu move on a majority from a position where you're less than 13% of the population...? Yeah; that's gonna work out well.
What needs to happen is a total ban on any sort of official or judicial notice of race, creed, or color: You can't get a lower sentence because you're white, black, brown, or purple with pink polka-dots. Anything else just leads to divisiveness that a not-yet-blended multi-racial society cannot survive.
It's a lesson we are going to have to learn, or the bad old days are going to come right back, once Whitey figures out the con he was sold about all the amity and love that would result.
The lesson to be drawn is: is if you are going to be a nasty, quarrelsome, racist old shit, you better be armed. So much for "Am armed society is a polite society."
“How about, "I can't breathe?"”
Shouldn’t OD on fentanyl then. I assume that this is about George Floyd, and his lethal dose of self administered fentanyl is why he couldn’t breathe. That’s pretty common with any narcotic, but esp fentanyl, which is supposed to be used only by Anesthesiologists who have equipment available to support breathing.
“It is almost a given that white people can attack blacks without serious consequence. The presumption is always that the blacks attacked by whites probably deserved it, were probably up to no-good, and simply by dint of their skin color were no-good.”
Leftist drivel. Sure, in Dem strongholds, during Jim Crow, this was the case. But most here know that it has long been untrue in this country, and with the green light given BLM, we now face the opposite, with Blacks being allowed to attack Whites with impunity.
So murder is OK if they hurt your feelings? Oh, only if you are black and they are white. Got it. You know what I learned from this? Stay far away from black people because I will get no justice if they harm me.
@M, agreed. If you’re white (including Hispanic) or Asian you need to avoid patronizing black-owned and black-operated businesses because you’re taking your life into your hands to do so.
Actually, we need to think about why this post is here. My takeaway is that liberals — and I include Althouse herself — really believe that black people are inherently poor at anger management, consequently when they respond to verbal insults with violence it’s understandable and excusable.
'How about, "I can't breathe?"'
Don't OD on fentanyl and breathing wouldn't be an issue...
No shooting, no scalping, no vacuuming the evidence, no planned patronhood in theaters or anywhere else. Self-defense is a basic human right, not rite, processed through reconciliation where there exists an immediate and progressive risk.
No color judgments, no class-based bigotry. No inferential logic or ethical religious decrees. Diversity breeds adversity. Reconcile.
“'"How about, "I can't breathe?"'
"Shouldn’t OD on fentanyl then. I assume that this is about George Floyd, and his lethal dose of self administered fentanyl is why he couldn’t breathe."
It was a reference to Floyd, yes, but it was really more a mordant observation that it does not take much for whites to kill blacks. Also, Fentanyl was not the cause of Floyd's death; his death was due to asphyxiation caused by neck compression performed for nine minutes by a so-called peace officer, as per the official autopsy. Don't promulgate lies. Moreover, any police officer who continues to exert extreme physical force or restraint against a compliant, handcuffed person is a sadistic fuck and is culpable for any adverse consequences of his (or her) use of force, even if there are other contributing health issues. Chauvin well deserves his murder conviction.
Robert Cook,
The presumption is always that the blacks attacked by whites probably deserved it, were probably up to no-good, and simply by dint of their skin color were no-good.
"Up to no good" is, of course, an excerpt from the Hispanic Zimmerman's 911 call in the Martin case. The prosecution deliberately obscured the conversation here, eliding the tape so that it appeared that Zimmerman had volunteered Martin's race, rather than responding to a direct question from the 911 operator. This was exposed a long time ago, but the NYT recently revived it, evidently deeming that enough time had passed that people wouldn't remember that fact clearly by now. I trust you aren't following them down the rabbit hole.
The N-word, right? Nerd. Probably a worse connotation than the G-word. Geek.
Revenge of the Intels
Althouse, I was really disappointed by this post. I don't subscribe to the NYT (it was once our BEST newspaper, but now I wouldn't use it to line a bird cage, even if I had a bird) and I couldn't tell from your post that it referred to two separate cases. Very confusing. Thanks to the commenters who figured it all out and explained it.
The paywall at the NYTimes is easily bypassed. If you want to read the story, it's at archive.today.
“It was a reference to Floyd, yes, but it was really more a mordant observation that it does not take much for whites to kill blacks. Also, Fentanyl was not the cause of Floyd's death; his death was due to asphyxiation caused by neck compression performed for nine minutes by a so-called peace officer, as per the official autopsy. Don't promulgate lies. Moreover, any police officer who continues to exert extreme physical force or restraint against a compliant, handcuffed person is a sadistic fuck and is culpable for any adverse consequences of his (or her) use of force, even if there are other contributing health issues. Chauvin well deserves his murder conviction.”
What you have mostly with Floyd was the testimony of a single, highly paid (funded by the entire state of MN) “expert” witness, plus the serious threat to the judge and jury of physical violence for an adverse verdict, versus all the forensic and video evidence. Floyd did have a potentially fatal amount of fentanyl in his system at the time of his death. He was showing signs of narcotics OD in the officers’ videos from first contact, was removed from the cop car and put on the ground on his side (to prevent him from aspirating his own vomit) precisely because he was ODing and couldn’t breath. The video never actually showed a knee actually on the neck, nor was there more than minimal bruising in that area, not significant enough show his breathing was cut off.
Let me repeat some of that. Floyd had ingested a lethal dose of fentanyl, mixed with some meth, right before his arrest. He started foaming at the mouth early in their interactions with him. He was arrested, and put in the cop car. He then couldn’t get comfortable and complained about not being able to breathe. Yes, he was complaining about not being able to breathe before he was removed from the cop car, and his distress at that was why he was removed. Fearing that he was ODing, the police officers removed him from the car, put him in the approved position for narcotics ODing prisoners - on his side, to prevent him from aspirating his own vomit, held on his side by the officer’s knee. The handcuffs were not removed (again policy) due to the chance that he was faking it, and was trying to escape. Arrestees had done just that in the past. Confusing things, Floyd was interspersing bouts of manic behavior (from the stimulants in his system) with symptoms of narcotics OD. An ambulance had been called Code 2, then upped to Code 3 (lights and siren), but couldn’t get through the crowds in time.
I consider you the one (unintentionally) propagating lies. I know the testimony I read or listened to, the video I watched, the autopsy reports I read, etc. With the evidence presented to the jury, with me sitting safely a thousand miles away at the time, I would never have voted to acquit. But the judge and jury weren’t sitting safely a thousand miles away, and that was a big part of why militant Black Muslim AG Keith Ellison got the verdict he wanted, and paid for, or rather, as AG had the state of MN pay for.
Finally, Blacks kill many more Whites every year than the other way around. Of course, Blacks mostly kill Blacks, but that doesn’t advance the narrative that you adopt so completely. Whites kill very few Blacks every year, but your narrative demands the opposite, so that is what is focused on (my statistics come from the FBI every year). It’s all political - that narrative is one of the big things keeping Blacks, as a group, from switching back to voting Republican. But it has been Democrats, for over 200 years now, who have been the ones oppressing Blacks. And, to rid them of Trump, the Dems got Blacks across the country to burn down their own businesses, and create food and pharmaceutical deserts in their communities. Here is a table for 2019:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
Stephen St. Onge
The paywall at the NYTimes is easily bypassed. If you want to read the story, it's at archive.today.
The problem is that between the NYT's dishonesty and incompetence, there's no reason to believe you'll learn anything of value from reading the article
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