We wrote about this guy before. Naturally the gun-rights crowd was on his side, until the conviction that is. Now, they'll write him off as just another nut, an inevitable little bit of collateral damage in a system of freedom and rights.
A Texas man who claimed the state's version of a stand-your-ground law allowed him to fatally shoot a neighbor after an argument about a party has been convicted of murder.
A jury convicted 47-year-old Raul Rodriguez Wednesday in Houston in the death of 36-year-old Kelly Danaher. He faces up to life in prison.
Rodriguez, who videotaped the incident, can be heard on the recording saying he feared for his life and was standing his ground.
Prosecutors called Rodriguez the aggressor who took a gun when he went to complain about Danaher's party in 2010.
Defense attorneys argued the retired Houston-area firefighter acted in self-defense.
You know what's a shame? Pro gun bloggers like Robert Farago, Sebastian, Uncle, et al, keep preaching their false doctrine and guys like Raul Rodriguez believe it.
This is a guy that was so convinced of his "rights" that he videotaped the incident and actually thought it would exonerate him. It's pathetic. And his more intelligent heroes who write all those eloquent arguments on blogs are the first to disown him when he acts stupidly.
The problem is there are a million Raul Rodriguezes out there. And the pro-gun movement on the internet is responsible for encouraging their bad behavior.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
Can we finally drop the “license to murder” crap? Why is this guy in prison for life if he was preapproved by the state to kill? And here you are blaming pro-gun people for encouraging bad behavior. We are the ones who rationally explain that the law protects legitimate self-defense and not someone who is the aggressor. We are the ones who speak of qualifications such as “ability, opportunity, jeopardy”. We never hear words that that from your side. All we hear from you guys is hysteria like “license to kill!” and “all one has to do is say they felt threatened!!!”. I am specifically looking at Dog gone and Japete, who are the worst offenders in this regard. And then when someone listens to your version of the law, you blame us? Un-freakin-believable.
ReplyDeleteNaturally the gun-rights crowd was on his side, until the conviction that is. Now, they'll write him off as just another nut, an inevitable little bit of collateral damage in a system of freedom and rights.
DeleteThanks for confirming what MikeB wrote, TS.
Unfortunately, it is being shown that these laws do protect aggressors, which anyone with a brain can recognise.
If you really believed the shit you say, then you should let the cases go to trial, where the justification of self-defence can be judged by his a jury of his peers.
What exactly did I confirm? Where was I on his side before the conviction?
DeleteLaci: “Unfortunately, it is being shown that these laws do protect aggressors, which anyone with a brain can recognise.”
It didn’t here. Can you recognize that?
What will you say when/if a jury of Zimmerman’s peers says that he was not the aggressor? If you believe the shit you say, you would respect that.
And not all cases need to go before a jury. Does this man need to be tried before his peers to determine that he was not the aggressor?
http://mikeb302000.blogspot.com/2012/06/california-home-invasion-4-dead.html
Now, they'll write him off as just another nut.
DeleteThat's because there was overwhelming evidence that his claim of self-defence was pure bullshit.
Yes, the possibility of criminal liability is what keeps the armed populace from going crazy and saying it was self-defence or otherwise justified when it was murder, plain and simple..
P.S. TS, what is your opinion of OJ?
DeleteLaci: “That's because there was overwhelming evidence that his claim of self-defence was pure bullshit.”
DeleteSo what’s the problem then? Overwhelming evidence is needed to convict someone of a crime. You know, “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Dog gone and Japete have said anyone can get away with murder who claims they felt threatened. This is obviously not true.
OJ? I haven’t put much thought into him for a long time. I don’t necessarily think juries are always right, but I know they were privy to much more information that me. What is the best piece of solid evidence that OJ did murder his ex-wife? Other than “everyone thinks he did it”? I really don’t remember the details. I accept that our system needs to be heavily biases towards the innocent because it is better to let the guilty go free than punish the innocent. Do you subscribe to that principle as well?
TJ, one of the aspects you're leaving out is that it's not always clear that the claim of a stand-your-ground shooting is total bullshit or legitimate. In the middle there is a large gray area. Even in this case, the guy himself seems to have believed in his right to do what he did. Do you think he's the only one who thinks like that?
DeleteSeems to me there are a lot more people who would hold their fire in that 'gray area' if they could be sued for wrongful death in civil litigation.
DeleteThat is as bad about the stand your ground laws as the license to kill aspect -- it is one more instance where people are not held accountable in law when they should be.
I hope the survivors sue his ass in addition to him going to jail for life. I want him to have nothing left to come back to from jail.
Mike, do you want to throw all the gray cases in prison? Yeah, it is a 50/50 case- maybe it is murder, maybe it is not. But let’s just throw him in prison. Is that the way you want it to be? Let’s be clear, the question I posed to Laci: is it better to let the guilty go free than to punish the innocent? Your answer is “no, it is better to punish the innocent.” Is that your answer?
DeleteThat there is any gray area is the result of bad law. The correct answer is to make far less legal gray areas, which was the case prior to stand your ground laws.
DeleteStand your ground laws have added nothing beneficial that we did not already have, and they have added a great deal that is harmful.
This is NOT a 50 50 case; this is a case, well proven, that the guy tried to use the stand your ground law to make this look like a legitimate shooting. There are so many bad cases where stand your ground has let someone off the hook who should never have gone free, including shooting innocent people through doors and in the back, that the law is resulting in many innocent people being killed.
That is a kind of punishment far worse than jail, and it is all because the NRA wants to make it easier to sell more guns for their real bosses the gun industry.
You form a false argument that this is about punishing the innocent or not.
Dog gone, “gray” means it isn’t very clear whether the party is guilty or innocent. It is not the result of a “bad law”- there are always gray cases for any crime, like plain old cold blooded murder with no claim of self-defense. Without SYG, a self-defense claim could still be just as gray, if not more so. There is the added judgment of “could the defending party have gotten away in complete safety, or not?”
DeleteI never said this case was 50/50. You guys are trying to argue that the 50/50s are all guilty.
I haven’t got an answer from Laci or Mike, but will you answer me? Is it better to let the guilty go free than to punish the innocent? Yes or no?
How guilt and innocence is defined under the law - the critiera - is defined by the law.
DeleteThat was made less clear, more ambiguous under stand your ground than it had been under prior law.
It is better not to have guilty people skating by under ambiguous laws. In the case of the death penalty I particularly think the benefit of the doubt should tend to favor the person charged.
I would dispute that there are more gray area/ ambiguous cases where there is a problem with the innocent being wrongly convicted.
TS said, "I haven’t got an answer from Laci or Mike, but will you answer me? Is it better to let the guilty go free than to punish the innocent? Yes or no?"
DeleteHere's my answer. That's not a yes or no question. Do you mean let all the guilty go free in order to not punish even one innocent?
That's part of your trick, saying guilty and innocent without clarifying what percentages.
The other part of your trick is it's not necessarily a question of letting them go completely free. Capital punishment should be abolished so we never execute an innocent man again, but we don't let them go free, do we?
Finally, these lofty philosophical questions are fun to argue, but really they don't have all that much to do with practical matters.
TS, see P.S. the comment approval system is stupid. for this bit of information:
DeleteWe are under no obligation to publish your comments, or even to read them.
I prefer to not read them, but concur with MikeB about how you are trying to reframe the argument.
If the guilty or innocent go free, it would be because they did it through the legal system rather than are given a blanket pass--Which is why it's called "licence to kill".
In common law, "A defendant is entitled to use reasonable force to protect himself, others for whom he is responsible and his property. It must be reasonable."
Opinions differ on what constitutes reasonable force but, in all cases, the defendant does not have the right to determine what constitutes "reasonable force" because the defendant would always maintain they acted reasonably and thus would never be guilty. The jury, as ordinary members of the community, must decide the amount of force reasonable in the circumstances of each case. It is relevant that the defendant was under pressure from imminent attack and may not have had time to make entirely rational decisions, so the test must balance the objective standard of a reasonable person by attributing some of the subjective knowledge of the defendant, including what they believed about the circumstances, even if mistaken. However, even allowing for mistakes made in a crisis, the amount of force must be proportionate and reasonable given the value of the interests being protected and the harm likely to be caused by use of force.
And no, deadly force is not reasonable force for most occasions in a civilised society.
Ok Mike, allow me to rephrase a bit? Which way should our system be biased? Should the bias lean towards protecting the innocent? We have been talking about 50/50s, so let’s just start there. You’re half sure the defendant is guilty. Right on the fence. You can go either way. What do you do with the accused?
DeleteWhat we have now is the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. To me that means somewhere in the 90% sure range. There can still be a doubt, but it would be unreasonable to let somebody go just because there was a miniscule chance it was a perfect frame job. So no, I don’t mean let all the guilty go free in order to not punish even one innocent- I am staying it should be biased towards the innocent, and heavily biased at that. What do you think?
Laci: “…the defendant does not have the right to determine what constitutes "reasonable force" because the defendant would always maintain they acted reasonably and thus would never be guilty. The jury, as ordinary members of the community, must decide the amount of force reasonable in the circumstances of each case.”
Yes, finally someone from the gun control side who says it right. Can you please tell this to Japete? She doesn’t believe it when I say it. She still thinks “reasonable belief” means whatever the defendant says they were thinking at the time. If she hears it from someone who is for gun control and a lawyer, maybe she can move on. One thing I can’t agree with is your use of “each case”. Not every case needs to go before a jury, agreed? If the prosecutors believe there is no jury in the world that would convict them, then there is really no point in proceeding with charges.
"The problem is there are a million Raul Rodriguezes out there. "
ReplyDeleteReally? There's a million other people convicted of murder based on their own incriminating video tape?
No, there are millions of people past and present who have tried to stage situations to get away with murder by trying to make things look different than they really are.
DeleteBut then pseudo-Patrick Henry, you knew or should have known that.
Although I bet there are far more people who get caught by someone ElSE video-ing them in this era of cell phones and security cameras, public and private, than you realize, quite possibly a million or more.
The real Patrick Henry would be appalled by this fraudster who uses his name to try and hide his perfidy. From Henry Mayer, a Patrick Henry scholar:
DeleteIn this connection, however, I need to say something about a recent popular misconception concerning Patrick Henry’s legacy and the genesis of the Second Amendment, which states, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Despite efforts of a number of misguided scholars to construe this language as justifying individual, unregulated gun ownership, I am firmly convinced that the Second Amendment is concerned with the state’s power to control its own militia as a civilian alternative to a professional standing army. In raising the issue in the Virginia Convention Patrick Henry several times pointed to Art. I, Section 8, Clause 16, as an example of the potentially threatening effect of dual state and congressional jurisdiction over the militia and the possibly dangerous union of the purse and sword vested in Congress. Yet wielding the scholar’s power of the ellipse several partisans of gun ownership have edited Henry’s remarks about how best to regulate the militia into an inflammatory half-truth “The great object is that every man be armed….Every one who is able may have a gun.” The NRA has blown this up into a poster-sized blurb embossed with Patrick Henry’s image.
This is not, I repeat NOT, part of Patrick Henry’s legacy. Clearly speaking of the problem of militia organization, what he actually said is, “The great object is that every man [of the militia] be armed.–But can the people to afford to pay for double sets of arms &c.? Every one who is able may have a gun. But have we not learned by experience, that necessary as it is to have arms, and though our assembly has, by a succession of laws for many years, endeavored to have the militia completely armed, it is still far from being the case. When this power is given up to Congress without limitation or bounds, how will your militia be armed? You trust to chance….”
Not to belabor the argument, but cinch it, I would also remind you that the liberty or death speech itself was in support of a resolution to put the colony in a mode of defense, and the plan proposed by Henry’s committee as a result of its passage included a militia law that described in great detail not only the number of men, but the amount of ammunition to be raised by a collective levy, and a very clear procedure for maintaining county and provincial control over the militia system. If Henry’s remarks were intended to cast doubt upon the adequacy of a hypothetical Congressional militia law, they only affirmed his commitment to the traditional method of state control over a militia that, far from being a privatized collection of gun-toting individuals, was a community temporarily called to arms and always subservient to public authority and law.
from A PATRICK HENRY ESSAY(No. 5-98) THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF PATRICK HENRY
A million hidden criminals would be a low-ball figure.
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