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talozin
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Post by talozin » Wed Jul 17, 2013 6:29 pm

I have mixed feelings on the whole notion of "duty to retreat". On the one hand, it's virtually always a better idea to retreat than to stand and fight if you can. Even if you are fully justified (in the legal sense) in killing your attacker, as a moral person who wants to avoid taking human life you are probably in for a lot of sleepless nights if you do. Nor is there any guarantee that you won't be arrested and tried and your life turned upside down even if you are eventually acquitted.
At the same time, if you're under immediate threat to your life, you are probably under the most extreme stress you'll ever experience, and it would be pretty surprising if your senses and your judgment were equal to those of 12 people calmly considering the situation in a secure courtroom. What might seem like an obvious opportunity to retreat in the eyes of a prosecutor or a jury may not seem quite so practical to someone trying to escape her (or his) murderous spouse. Second-guessing someone's decisions under those circumstances is easy; making the decisions is much harder. And I tend to think that it's better for guilty "self-defenders" to go free than for people who genuinely felt they had no other option to be imprisoned.
One of the canonical difficult cases for "duty to retreat" seems to be Commonwealth v. Roberta E. Shaffer. Shaffer had previously been beaten by the same man who engaged her in an argument and, when she fled downstairs to the room where her children were playing, threatened to follow her down and kill both her and them. He then declared that he would leave the house, but instead, after about five minutes had passed, started down the stairs to the basement, and was shot once and killed by Shaffer. Shaffer was convicted of manslaughter, which sentence was upheld on appeal (she was later pardoned). For someone who believed she was protecting her children as well as herself and who had already retreated once in an attempt to de-escalate the conflict, that seems like a harsh sentence.
Commonwealth v. Tyson J. Benoit is a little less clear in terms of what actually happened; here a (white) teenager came up onto a (black) teenager's porch, used racial slurs, and threatened him with stabbing. A fight resulted in which the threatener ended up dead, and the person being threatened was convicted of second-degree murder. When an appeal on other grounds succeeded, he pled guilty to manslaughter in the second trial, since the appeals court had ruled that he did not have a self-defense claim. In this case the "duty to retreat" law essentially mandates that if Benoit wanted to have a self-defense claim, he had to retreat from his own porch in the face of what can probably be fairly described as "racist thuggery". Racist thuggery isn't murder, so yes, the smart thing to do would have been to retreat the scene, but I'm a little uncomfortable with the notion that we have to cede space on our own property to racist thugs who are threatening our lives in order to claim the right to self-defense even if we don't start the fight. This would seem to privilege the kind of behavior that we want to discourage.
The saying "hard cases make bad law" is probably appropriate here on both sides of the debate; strict duty to retreat laws are going to eventually result in some injustice, and strong "stand your ground" laws are also going to result in some injustice. (And both are probably likely to result in unnecessary deaths; the latter for obvious reasons, but making it more difficult for people to claim self-defense is likely to result in more people trying to avoid self-defense even when -- seen in retrospect -- it would have been necessary.) I do not have a good solution for that, other than, perhaps, "don't make laws that are stupidly strict or tolerant of people acting like morons". Easier said than done.

> TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.

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nockermensch
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Post by nockermensch » Wed Jul 17, 2013 6:42 pm

> Grek wrote:The only way you can argue things the other way is if you say that your attacker has less of a right to live than you do. That your life is more valuable than the life of the person you want to kill. That you should get to decide who is worth killing to save you own life. It isn't your place to make that judgement.

Eh, what the hell. I'm as liberal (in the american sense) as they come, but if I at least worry about not causing the death of other people and the guy before me is threatening to kill me, then he already answered the question of which life is more valuable. Obviously that getting away and letting competent people deal with the lunatic/criminal is usually preferable but in any of your scenarios the right answer is to attack the other guy with whatever will incapacitate him faster.
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sabs
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Post by sabs » Wed Jul 17, 2013 6:59 pm

Actually, if someone is attacking you, they have lost the right to claim their life is more valuable. Grek is just a reprehensible asshole. If you are being attacked and threatened with death I go with Captain Mal on this one.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch » Wed Jul 17, 2013 7:02 pm

Value does not work that way.
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hyzmarca
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Post by hyzmarca » Wed Jul 17, 2013 7:10 pm

> Grek wrote: That your life is more valuable than the life of the person you want to kill. That you should get to decide who is worth killing to save you own life.

But, that's the default position of nearly everyone.
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sabs
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Post by sabs » Wed Jul 17, 2013 7:12 pm

My life is more important than your life, my children's life is more important than both of us. And.. I hope to never need to choose between my kids, cause that's a special kind of hell.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch » Wed Jul 17, 2013 7:21 pm

Which is why society makes these rules as a group instead of letting people go on vengeful "but my babeh!" murder sprees.
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sabs
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Post by sabs » Wed Jul 17, 2013 7:34 pm

Yes, but society does not usually say: You have to let other people kill you, because killing someone is wrong! Very few people view self-defense as a bad thing.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch » Wed Jul 17, 2013 7:53 pm

Society accepts self-defense as a regrettable thing that can be excused in some circumstances. That is not the same thing as assigning value to lives. We have had many societies who decide these things based on the "worth" of all parties involved and I rather doubt you'd find very many of them just.
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Grek
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Post by Grek » Wed Jul 17, 2013 8:30 pm

@talozin: Yes, well done. Crazy, out-there hypotheticals result in crazy, out-there moral responses when using strict moral rules. See the Saw franchise, the Trolley problem, hell, most of the hypothetical cases in moral philosophy. But in real life, there is always some middle ground between "Kill them first." or "Wait passively for death." In short, fuck you and your excluded middle. This goes for DSM's first point as well.
With regards to DSM's second point: As far as enforcement goes, you wouldn't make a focus on punishing people by killing in self defense. You'd focus on getting people to voluntarily arm themselves with non-lethal methods to resolve the conflict in place of lethal ones. Getting people to buy pepper spray and tasers instead of guns. Making it easier for people to escape criminals by having call boxes nearby that they can get help from and getting better lighting in urban areas where crime is frequent. In short, make non-lethal more attractive, not lethal less attractive. The whole "torture people to death then post it on youtube" thing is so insane and appalling that I am shocked that you even thought it up. Seriously, what is wrong with your brain?
I'm not ignoring to the emotional distress that comes from having been attacked with a deadly weapon. And I definitely agree that killing in self defense should result in a lesser sentence than killing for other reasons, since it means that you're probably not going to go on and kill more people. But it shouldn't be a "get out of killing someone without punishment" card like it is under current law. Punishment on the order of involuntary manslaughter would be appropriate. Which, in my state is 2-20 in prison, with a strong probability of it getting commuted to 10 years on parole.

> FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.

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talozin
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Post by talozin » Wed Jul 17, 2013 8:53 pm

> Grek wrote:But in real life, there is always some middle ground between "Kill them first." or "Wait passively for death." In short, fuck you and your excluded middle.

So, where exactly does your middle ground lie? I mean, tell me to fuck off all you want, but your actual position -- that killing someone to save your own life should be legally and morally unacceptable -- is so far out of the mainstream that gun control advocates would accuse me of caricaturing their beliefs if I ascribed it to them. So if I go to bizarre lengths to try and find out how far you're willing to go with that position, it's not out of a desire to paint you into a corner but out of actual interest in the limits of your principle.
Last edited by talozin on Wed Jul 17, 2013 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

> TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.

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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Wed Jul 17, 2013 8:54 pm

> Grek wrote:And I definitely agree that killing in self defense should result in a lesser sentence than killing for other reasons, since it means that you're probably not going to go on and kill more people. But it shouldn't be a "get out of killing someone without punishment" card like it is under current law. Punishment on the order of involuntary manslaughter would be appropriate. Which, in my state is 2-20 in prison, with a strong probability of it getting commuted to 10 years on parole.

You are a crazy psychopath, and your continued existence scares me.
Also, you shouldn't say you "agree" to something that no one else in the entire universe except you believes.

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Grek
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Post by Grek » Wed Jul 17, 2013 9:33 pm

> talozin wrote:So, where exactly does your middle ground lie?

The general rule is as follows: When given a choice between two or more actions that could result in people dying, you should choose the one that results in the smallest expected number of deaths*.
The expected number of deaths for trying to flee someone that intends to kill you is less than 1, since there's always some chance (however small) that you'll escape or be rescued. The expected number of deaths when trying to kill someone trying to kill you is greater than one, since there's always a chance you'll both be fatally wounded in the struggle. Numbers less than one are always less than numbers greater than one. Thus, you should always try to flee, not fight, whenever faced with a murderous attacker.
*When comparing deaths to other bad things, you have to figure out some sort of conversion. How much non-lethal torture is worth one human life to prevent? How many years in prison? It's a hard question to answer and one that I'm not even going to try for on an internet forum.
@Kaelik: Many other pacifists and semi-pacifists would agree with my statement, so you can go fuck yourself with your "nobody else believes in never killing other people" statements.

> FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.

> Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.

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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik » Wed Jul 17, 2013 9:38 pm

> Grek wrote:@Kaelik: Many other pacifists and semi-pacifists would agree with my statement, so you can go fuck yourself with your "nobody else believes in never killing other people" statements.

Yes, clearly I meant that seriously with no hyberbole whatsoever, thus words like universe. And it isn't just that you just said you "agree" with something that no one else in TGD agrees with that makes you crazy.
Also, I very seriously doubt you can find all that many pacifists who want it codified into law that killing someone in self defense when it is impossible to retreat is wrong. Most pacifists do not want laws mandating pacifism, and instead recognize it as a personal choice.

> DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?

The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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talozin
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Post by talozin » Wed Jul 17, 2013 9:48 pm

> Grek wrote: The expected number of deaths for trying to flee someone that intends to kill you is less than 1, since there's always some chance (however small) that you'll escape or be rescued. The expected number of deaths when trying to kill someone trying to kill you is greater than one, since there's always a chance you'll both be fatally wounded in the struggle. Numbers less than one are always less than numbers greater than one. Thus, you should always try to flee, not fight, whenever faced with a murderous attacker.

How do you account for the possibility that someone willing to murder once may be willing to murder a second time? That is, suppose we grant that the expected number of deaths resulting from any given incident is < 1 if the intended victim attempts to flee; why is the expected number of deaths from a single incident the number we should strive to minimize, rather than minimizing the total number of expected deaths from homicide?
Last edited by talozin on Wed Jul 17, 2013 9:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

> TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.

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Grek
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Post by Grek » Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:10 pm

> talozin wrote:why is the expected number of deaths from a single incident the number we should strive to minimize, rather than minimizing the total number of expected deaths from homicide?

It isn't. Notice that I did not say "the smallest expected number of deaths from this single incident". There's a reason for that.

> talozin wrote:How do you account for the possibility that someone willing to murder once may be willing to murder a second time?

Exactly how you'd expect. You take your best estimate of the expected number of deaths in other incidents and add them to the total amount of death for that choice.
This "knock on" expected death count is going to be very low, since most murderers do not go on to kill more people in unrelated incidents. Usually the number is low enough not to effect your decision, since the chance that they'll go on to kill more people is dominated by the chance that both you and your assailant will die. Small enough that you shouldn't even consider the question, since you need to decide now what to do, not agonize over the moral choice as your attacker comes to kill you. Usually. It gets murky, so you should err on the side of not killing if you're not sure what's best.
Last edited by Grek on Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

> FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.

> Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.

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talozin
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Post by talozin » Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:14 pm

> Grek wrote: This "knock on" expected death count is going to be very low, since most murderers do not go on to kill more people in unrelated incidents. Usually the number is low enough not to effect your decision, since the chance that they'll go on to kill more people is dominated by the chance that both you and your assailant will die. Usually. It gets murky, so you should err on the side of not killing if you're not sure what's best.

Do you have some real-world statistics to support the above? And while I'm asking, do you know of any research that contradicts Wright & Rossi's findings vis-a-vis the deterrent effect of self-defense?

> TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:54 pm

> Grek wrote:In short, fuck you and your excluded middle. This goes for DSM's first point as well.

You have no idea what that means. At all. I feel like I just watched someone fall flat on their face. We would be guilty of excluding the middle if we demanded a choice between {kill attacker, die} and the actual options were {kill attacker, die, run away}. If the actual options in the situation are {kill attacker, die}, demanding a choice between those two is not an excluded middle because no alternative was excluded. By suggesting that we are guilty of the excluded middle, you are implying that there exist no situations in which running away is not an option. Is that something you genuinely believe? Because it's insane and stupid.
Also, I'm very sorry that uncomfortable hypotheticals make you uncomfortable. That is their point. The inability of your moral system to handle the hypothetical in a way you support means you disagree with your moral system. If you believe that in talozin's crazy hypothetical Donald should be justified in shooting Edgar, then your moral system has failed you and you must revise it in order to be consistent with yourself. Or you can agree with your moral system, and then everyone here instantly stops caring because it is immediately obvious that it (and you) are monsters. Or you throw on some additional information that explains how your moral system handles it. But at no point is "that makes me uncomfortable and I don't like the implications" ever a reasonable response to a hypothetical that can actually exist. That is deflection.
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Post by PhoneLobster » Wed Jul 17, 2013 11:18 pm

It's not about hypotheticals or about deterrents. Self defense is about dealing with the real world in a way that does not punish the largely blameless.
The situations self defense, especially as a defense against murder, should occur in are RARE. They ARE the edge cases, they are never going to be wide spread enough to be a deterrent and they are so edge case that your hypothticals might as well be real examples.
IF you are attacked, IF you can defend yourself, IF you cannot run away or do anything other than fighting, IF you win that fight, and IF you do so in a way that kills your attacker... those are a lot of ifs. It makes self defense both rare in actual practice and hard to prove, but when it IS proved, the whole point is we don't want to punish that person. Nothing else, no bullshit about fucking cowboy deterent fantasies, we just don't want to punish that unlucky individual.
Now, when you DO start having those cowboy deterrent fantasies and they contaminate your juries, or worse the laws themselves and we start removing the requirement of "could not run away" and "no other option than to fight"... then you get the thing where you are allowed to stalk and murder unarmed black kids for no reason.
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Drolyt
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Post by Drolyt » Wed Jul 17, 2013 11:41 pm

> talozin wrote:I have mixed feelings on the whole notion of "duty to retreat". On the one hand, it's virtually always a better idea to retreat than to stand and fight if you can. Even if you are fully justified (in the legal sense) in killing your attacker, as a moral person who wants to avoid taking human life you are probably in for a lot of sleepless nights if you do. Nor is there any guarantee that you won't be arrested and tried and your life turned upside down even if you are eventually acquitted.
> At the same time, if you're under immediate threat to your life, you are probably under the most extreme stress you'll ever experience, and it would be pretty surprising if your senses and your judgment were equal to those of 12 people calmly considering the situation in a secure courtroom. What might seem like an obvious opportunity to retreat in the eyes of a prosecutor or a jury may not seem quite so practical to someone trying to escape her (or his) murderous spouse. Second-guessing someone's decisions under those circumstances is easy; making the decisions is much harder. And I tend to think that it's better for guilty "self-defenders" to go free than for people who genuinely felt they had no other option to be imprisoned.

Well, part of the problem is there is no middle ground. Prisons in most countries are hell, and honestly I wouldn't wish them even on most murderers. There should be a way to tell people like Zimmerman that what they did was not acceptable without ruining their lives.

> Commonwealth v. Tyson J. Benoit is a little less clear in terms of what actually happened; here a (white) teenager came up onto a (black) teenager's porch, used racial slurs, and threatened him with stabbing. A fight resulted in which the threatener ended up dead, and the person being threatened was convicted of second-degree murder. When an appeal on other grounds succeeded, he pled guilty to manslaughter in the second trial, since the appeals court had ruled that he did not have a self-defense claim. In this case the "duty to retreat" law essentially mandates that if Benoit wanted to have a self-defense claim, he had to retreat from his own porch in the face of what can probably be fairly described as "racist thuggery". Racist thuggery isn't murder, so yes, the smart thing to do would have been to retreat the scene, but I'm a little uncomfortable with the notion that we have to cede space on our own property to racist thugs who are threatening our lives in order to claim the right to self-defense even if we don't start the fight. This would seem to privilege the kind of behavior that we want to discourage.

I think the appropriate way to deal with this is to make that kind of racist thuggery illegal and ensure it is punished, but people should leave that to the police.

> The saying "hard cases make bad law" is probably appropriate here on both sides of the debate; strict duty to retreat laws are going to eventually result in some injustice, and strong "stand your ground" laws are also going to result in some injustice. (And both are probably likely to result in unnecessary deaths; the latter for obvious reasons, but making it more difficult for people to claim self-defense is likely to result in more people trying to avoid self-defense even when -- seen in retrospect -- it would have been necessary.) I do not have a good solution for that, other than, perhaps, "don't make laws that are stupidly strict or tolerant of people acting like morons". Easier said than done.

I don't think there is a perfect solution, but Florida's law is insane.
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Post by Koumei » Thu Jul 18, 2013 12:51 am

> Grek wrote:Which, in my state is 2-20 in prison, with a strong probability of getting murdered in there or being turned into a proper criminal who is happy to commit many more crimes and indeed kind of has to just to make a living.

I fixed your typo for you.
That said, I have a strong plan for what to do if I'm ever attacked with lethal force. Actually, it's not so much a plan as just an acceptance of what's going to happen, and that's "panic, freeze up and get killed".
In foresight, that's a really shitty plan, but I'm still pretty sure it's what will happen. If I did suddenly veer off course from the plan and defend myself, I wouldn't want to be incarcerated for failing to be murdered, though admittedly any veering from "panic and freeze up" would likely be in the direction of "run away like brave Sir Robin".
But the law really should take into account the fact that most people, when suddenly attacked by someone else, will probably panic and then ??? happens, and ??? could very well be "the attacker dies, as a result of recklessly putting themselves and others in danger by attacking someone". I'm pretty sure that in most cases, the law does take that into account. The bit where "being black" is apparently cause for other people to shoot you in Florida is mental, but Florida is a bit of a joke state anyway.

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Post by Whipstitch » Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:04 am

I fight like someone who's taken a '60s women's self-defense class. It worked pretty alright.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Drolyt » Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:12 am

> Koumei wrote:

> > Grek wrote:Which, in my state is 2-20 in prison, with a strong probability of getting murdered in there or being turned into a proper criminal who is happy to commit many more crimes and indeed kind of has to just to make a living.

> I fixed your typo for you.

I think this bears elaborating on. Prison, as it exists in the US and most other countries is not actually a solution for stopping crime. Prison rape is epidemic, studies have shown that spending longer in prison actually increases recidivism rates, and once you are out you can't get a job because you have a criminal record. It is a horrible system. This on top of the fact that prison is just generally a horrible place to be, with no privacy and very few opportunities for self-improvement. And honestly that is just scratching the surface of how awful our prison system is.
I am sympathetic to Grek's argument insofar as I would prefer no one die and that the law encourage that outcome, but putting people through that kind of hell for defending themselves is pretty fucked up. In fact Grek's line of reasoning seems to suggest we shouldn't do that, if it isn't okay for people to kill in order to defend their lives how in the fuck is it okay to put people through living hell to punish them?
Edit: Also, I think people's general bad math skills has an impact here. People talk like 2 years is a light sentence, do you realize how fucking long 2 years in prison is? That is a huge chunk of someone's life, never mind 20 years.
Last edited by Drolyt on Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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talozin
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Post by talozin » Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:15 am

> Whipstitch wrote:I fight like someone who's taken a '60s women's self-defense class. It worked pretty alright.

That's my purse! I don't know you!

> TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.

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talozin
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Post by talozin » Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:24 pm

> Drolyt wrote: I think the appropriate way to deal with this is to make that kind of racist thuggery illegal and ensure it is punished, but people should leave that to the police.

Well, I agree that letting the police handle it is the best course of action, but at the same time we have to accept that the police aren't Time Lords. And what Benoit appears to say (admittedly, IANAL) is that if you call the police and then before they show up you are attacked on your porch by a racist thug who dies as a result of the fight, you cannot claim self-defense and are guilty of second-degree murder.
Now, Benoit did not as far as I can tell actually call the police, so I cannot be 100% certain that this was the intent of the court. But the decision says that Benoit can't claim self-defense because "there was no evidence of an attempt to avoid further physical combat or of the defendant's inability to retreat", and that does not suggest to me that if he had actually called the cops he would have been entitled to self-defense. We also cannot be certain that Benoit did not himself start the fight. But if the defense can't claim self-defense without the aforementioned evidence, it doesn't matter.
It is stupid not to try to get away when a racist white dude who has attacked you in the past comes onto your porch and says "I'm gonna stab you, n-----." You'll get no argument from me on that. But the kid got 18-20 years after he pled down to manslaughter. And that is not a reasonable sentence for defending yourself from a racist who attacks you on your own porch.
Last edited by talozin on Thu Jul 18, 2013 1:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

> TheFlatline wrote:This is like arguing that blowjobs have to be terrible, pain-inflicting endeavors so that when you get a chick who *doesn't* draw blood everyone can high-five and feel good about it.

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