Standing your ground

Self-defence in America

Curtis Reeves and John Walters are both killers. Curtis shot a man dead at point-blank range in a cinema in Florida, and John shot a man dead on the forecourt of a petrol station in San Antonio, Texas.

Curtis was tried on a charge of second-degree murder, and acquitted. John was never charged. Never arrested. He pulled out a gun in sight of a security camera, shot a man dead on a petrol station forecourt, and then got into his car and drove away. Shortly afterwards he called the police to tell them. I reckon he realised he’d left a cadaver at the petrol station and someone might have seen his registration number.

Neither Curtis Reeves nor John Walters was guilty of a crime, however. Because the laws of Florida and Texas say they didn’t commit any crime. Because both men alleged that they were frightened of the man they shot.

Chad Oulson, who was killed at the cinema, got into an altercation with Curtis Reeves, who had demanded that Oulson turn off his mobile phone whilst the previews were being shown. Chad ended up chucking popcorn at Mr Curtis. Mr Curtis pulled out his gun and killed Mr Oulson on the spot. He had never been so frightened in all his life. Mr Curtis is a retired SWAT commander and police captain.

William Hawkins, who was killed at the petrol station, was homeless and approached Mr Walters at the petrol pumps. Maybe to ask for small change. It happens a lot to me as well, people asking for small change. Hawkins was unarmed, but Walters killed him. Didn’t even pump any gas, such a hurry he was in to leave the petrol station.

The laws that justify Mr Reeves’s and Mr Walters’s acts are called stand-your-ground laws. Back in 2007, when these laws started to be enacted, it was felt that the duty of citizens to remove themselves from confrontational situations as enshrined in the Castle Doctrine of law (playing on the notion that an Englishman’s home is his castle) heaped an undue burden on law-abiding citizens, especially if they were in a place where they had every right to be (such as their home, or, indeed a cinema or a petrol station). The law reversed the burden of avoidance, from the perceived victim of aggression having to remove themselves from the situation, to their being justified in killing the person aggressing them (thus neutralising the confrontation by removing the aggressor, rather than themselves).

There is no test of reasonableness in the stand-your-ground legislation. The killer does not need to prove their fright. Fear is a sentiment that cannot be measured. For example, anyone who says they were scared to death clearly wasn’t: otherwise they would be dead and unable to say it. But how scared they in fact were is a purely subjective question. If you drag a small child into the deep end of a swimming bath, it is quite conceivable that he might develop a blind panic, such as I once did, for which I was later ridiculed at school. Yet, we poo-poo people who climb on chairs when they see a spider or a mouse, even though the fear could be just as great.

The Scottish court case of Donoghue v. Stevenson [1932] AC 562 established liability for causing fright to someone who is reasonably within the field of contemplation as being affected by one’s acts. The case involved two ladies in a café in Paisley, one of whom bought a bottle of ginger beer for the other, who was Mrs Donoghue. Mrs Donoghue did not drink the ginger beer as such, but it was poured over ice cream as a float, and when the remainder of the bottle was poured into a separate glass a dead snail was discovered in the beverage. Mrs Donoghue had not in fact bought the ginger beer, so she had no contractual relationship either to the Wellmeadow Café or to the manufacturer of the ginger beer, D. Stevenson. We know nothing about what kind of a shock the lady treating Mrs Donoghue to her refreshment received from this event, but we know from the court reports that Mrs Donoghue herself received a shock and felt ill. The case is a landmark case in the law of tort (or delict, as it is called in Scotland) and is cited daily in cases across the common-law world. Mrs Donoghue said she felt ill and that entitled her to damages. Eventually, the House of Lords agreed. She did not require to prove her queasiness other than to say she had felt queasy.

In the criminal sphere, Scotland knows the doctrine of the thin skull rule, which provides that, if I touch the skull of someone else in such a manner as cannot reasonably be foreseen to cause harm, but, because the person in question has a thin skull, he dies from my touching it, then I am criminally guilty of the harm caused. It is no defence to say, “I didn’t realise he had a thin skull.”

I doubt very much whether this Scottish jurisprudence per se played any role in the enactment of Florida’s or Texas’s laws, or the laws of any of the other 36 US states that now have such statutes. But its pervading sentiments were, whether by coincidence or design, present in the lawmakers’ minds: whether I am afeared of you is a matter for my own, sole judgment. If I say that I am, then I am. And that alone gives me the right to stand my ground and kill you. Shoot you dead on the spot. And, what’s more, to then get into my car and drive away.

Image: screen grab from Al Jazeera, in which Mr Walters is supposedly seen walking around the dead Mr Hawkins to get into his car before driving off.

Now, I find that a somewhat astounding proposition, but John Walters and Curtis Reeves don’t. What is striking is that, in the vast majority of the 700 deaths whereby no criminal conviction of the known, named perpetrator has ensued in cases in which self-defence has been pleaded in terms of these stand-your-ground statutes, the killers were white and the dead aggressors black.

And, because there is a widespread narrative that blacks are dangerous, and they also happen to represent a disproportionate number of homeless and destitute persons, and the homeless and destitute are well known for approaching strangers to ask for alms, what these laws appear to sanction is the ridding from society of homeless and destitute blacks other than through police or official action. It is as though the statutes contain a subtext: if the general public feel threatened by the mere presence of another person of an undesirable allure, no action will be taken against them if they secure said undesirable’s removal from our presence.

Now, I don’t know who all owns guns in the US and, to be sure, nor does the US. There is no central register of gun ownership in that country, whereby it bears an astonishing likeness to a similarly unregulated country: the Russian Federation. However, I do know for a fact that there are some people, some blacks even, who do own guns.

Forgive me extrapolating here, but let me just suppose: if there comes to be a general acceptance that approaching someone (to ask the time, or how to get to Alberson’s) could be deemed a threat to the person being asked, thus resulting in their pulling out a gun and shooting the enquirer on the spot, all in terms of a right generally known to have been invested in the populace at large, by dint of its having been set down in legislation expressly permitting such a course of action, then would the enquirer themselves not be entitled to shoot the person of whom they requested such information before even asking for the information?

This, on the grounds that asking the way could incite such irrational and unjustified fear in the person being asked that there is a cogent danger of that person shooting the enquirer and so the enquirer is reasonable in preempting that danger by simply killing the guy before asking him the question, or, at the very least, immobilising him to such a degree as to obtain the requested information before finally finishing him off with a slug to the temple.

And this, on the ground that giving the information might just have put the guy in such fear that he then reached into his pocket to get his gun out and shoot the thereby informed enquirer. I was frightened that asking you what time it is would frighten you so much that you might shoot me, so therefore I was justified in shooting you first. As self-defence.

If there is no test of reasonableness attached to the qualification of fright, it makes approaching another person in states that have these laws a tricky business. You step up to the teller in a bank, and they simply shoot you out of fear that you’re a bank robber. You run into a shop to get a pound of butter, and the assistant shoots you, because he’s taken aback by your haste. You arrange a viewing of a house that’s for sale, and the estate agent shoots you as you come up the driveway saying, “Good after-.”

That all may sound a little ridiculous, and I’m not sure what part is played in any of this by a constitutional need to ensure a well-disciplined militia, but, in all events, I don’t think pre-emptive shootings or engineered shootings have yet come up for discussion, let alone been put to the test. They sound outlandish. And yet, does the stand-your-ground law itself not sound outlandish?

I simply asked him what the time was and, all of a sudden, he reached inside his breast pocket.

- He was going to look at his mobile phone to tell you the time, I think.

I couldn’t know that! I was more frightened than I’ve ever been in my life! So I slugged him.

- Just like the cops do!

Yeah … hey! That’s right! Just like the cops do!

I’ll warrant you one thing: when to the test it is finally put, it’ll be the white guy who asked what time it is.

We used to have wars to trim the population, and now fentanyl is doing it for them. And homelessness is doing it for them. Caused by poverty, which is doing it for them. Boat people drowned and dead in the Med. Carpet-bombing to erase Gaza. Bullets in the brain in Ukraine. Maybe.