These FL stand your ground shootings

LAhotsauce said

Well I'm not seeing what isn't there, because I don't know what the guy said. I keep saying that. Obviously, we're not talking about calling someone a doody head and pointing your finger. I'm not even going to address someone talking in front of a camera on a news station. Why would you even...

And someone did stay in the car in case it needed to be moved. Assuming someone approaches saying I need that spot. But Mr. Shooter didn't need that spot. He motivations went beyond that.

When I looked up verbal assault as a crime, it involves creating an "imminent threat" which often leads to physical assaults. Seeing a man approach your woman pointing his finger can be argued by a good lawyer of having all necessary elements.


Verbal assault

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I do not dispute that in some jurisdictions verbal assault can be a crime. Many people actually confuse assault with battery. Generally speaking, by definition, an assault is a threat not accompanied by physical harm. As a prosecutor, I reviewed and tried many aggravated assault cases. An aggravated assault is threatening someone with a weapon. An aggravated battery is actually using the weapon on them.

I spent a year in the DAs office screening cases, meaning all arrests I New Orleans would go by me and other screeners to decide which charges to take. In my last year there I was the chief homicide screener. So I saw just about every type of case involving an assault or battery.

Never, ever did a charge of simple assault cross my desk. For it to be a charge it would have to include an imminent threat of harm to someone. As I tried to explain, while verbal assault can technically be a crime, in practice people are rarely charged with it. You would have thousands of arrests from one Saturday night in the French Quarter.

So in the case at hand, is it possible the shooter threatened the gf with violence? Sure, its possible. It did not appear the shooter was physically threatening her. By the same token, I guess the shooter can argue the guy who pushed him continued to verbally assault him and he had to shoot him because he was being threatened. I don't see that either.

I am just reacting to what it looks like to me. The gf is a jerk for parking a handicapped zone. The shooter is a jerk for making a big deal of it. The boyfriend is a jerk for violating striking the shooter. The shooter used unreasonable and deadly force.

To be clear, I am not making any equivalency argument. Shooting is the big crime here. It appeared to me it was a series of poor judgments by all three that led to what happened.