This is certainly not true in Maryland and Baltimore. If you kill a home invader, and can’t make a strong argument that you had the imminent fear of death for a specific reason, you can definitely be charged with homicide or murder.
I’m not clear on what that has to do with what I said up there. Could you read it again and poi t out the specific part you think relates to your post?
I may have extrapolated too much from the above. But let’s say two people invade your home here in Baltimore, and the homeowner kills one of them, but can’t reasonably show they were fearful of imminent death. In that scenario, the homeowner would be on the hook for that death, not the accomplice, even though it was the accomplice who was committing the crime (and not the homeowner).
Putting the law aside for a moment - how did this couple not expect to be shot at some point?
I’d say the odds are high (in parts of 'Murica) that a % of young offenders are packing.
Madness.
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What I was saying about the felony murder doctrine has nothing to do with the homeowner’s liability. It means that, in the situation you describe, regardless of whether the homeowner was charged, the surviving robber could also be charged with his accomplice’s murder, even though he wasn’t the one who killed his accomplice.
The point being not anything relating to the victim’s right to defend himself, but a response to the suggestion that the robbers could claim self defense when “defending” themselves from their victim.
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Consider the case of Lisl Auman - who was sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car when her accomplice shot and killed a Denver police officer back in 1997. She didn’t even know the killing had happened. She was sentenced to life in prison but eventually took a plea deal for 20 years.
The state legislature has been working on changing these laws.
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I’m not upset about doing something in your power to deter crimes that the police routinely ignore, not even doing it “in a language the criminals can understand.” criminals talk to each other.
getting caught doing this is completely antithetical to the stated goal.
so putting it on YouTube just makes no sense.
the only conclusion I can therefore draw is that they were monetizing beating people up, with the “bike vigilante” angle serving as an excuse. particularly since they weren’t even locking the bike. this would fall into the “two wrongs don’t make a right” category. on the surface of it, I want to be for the couple. but even if their YouTube channel didn’t pull any money, the vanity involved in making it a performance fundamentally taints it.
the good news is that, here in the 21st century, technology moots the violence angle, for bait bikes, anyway.
behold, citizen bike-baiting done correctly, and just a couple days ago, at that:
but not mentioned in the news item, according to bike-baiter himself, is that the house the police arrived at was full of stolen bikes and a stolen car. so, the perp gets busted, the baiter is lauded, and more than just the baiter get their property restored. oh, and the baiter used a cheap lock on the bait, so it was never a crime-of-opportunity, the theives were actual pieces of shit.
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Fuck that. Something not being locked down doesn’t mean it’s ok to steal it. Not at all. Saying it does is nothing more than blaming the victim.
Leaving something unlocked is not entrapment.
If I don’t lock my door, does that make it ok to walk into my house?
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/holsters finger-guns
As I read the replies to this thread, I can’t help but be reminded of the Trump supporter who was mad at Trump because he wasn’t “hurting the right people”. And here we find a whole bunch of people, not just in TFA, that have revealed that they believe in that same precept.
This story is about a sadistic pair who assaulted people for entertainment, and a society that is okay with hurting people, provided they’re the right people and said hurting isn’t too disruptive to everyone else’s lies. And it’s done us the favour of drawing out the members of our little community who feel the same way. Don’t worry. We see you.
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Since they are into YouTube, they should have found this guy’s channel and ordered one of his cat deterrent systems, but used it as a bike thief deterrent. I’m on board with hosing someone down who goes onto my property to take something; definitely not with physical harm.
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I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be sufficient deterrent.
Are you on board with having armed agents of the government catch them and lock them in a little room? That is also physical harm. If not, do you think people are obligated to just watch and do nothing?
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Getting flashed by a camera flash, splashed by a hose, with your face and reaction posted online? I’m not suggesting that they lose a $1000 bike for that, but a disabled, cheap bike or one that has a concealed leash so that the thief couldn’t actually make off with it? Hell ya.
What are you getting on about? That’s some kind of false equivalency you’ve got going on there, equating arresting bike thieves with giving them life-threatening injuries.
I did not advocate doing nothing. I advocated proportional response, with a side of recording the criminal act to aid the authorities in finding the criminals. If the police don’t follow-through, at least it scares the crap out of them and lets them know that their faces are known.
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Note: I’m not saying I would personally kick someone’s ass for stealing something from my yard. I wouldn’t, because personally, I’m really really not into violence.
I’m saying that I don’t blame someone else for doing that. Any blame for pretty much any result of that situation I would put entirely on the perpetrator, not the victim. Hitting someone with a baseball bat would not make me feel better, but if it made some other crime victim feel better, I won’t shed any tears for the perpetrator.
Actually… Florida.
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Im guessing you don’t know much about the US prison system. Not that I think it’s ok, or that we don’t need to keep prisons from being complete hellholes, but as it stands now, I don’t think that’s a false equivalence at all.
Except it doesn’t, because the police don’t follow through, and the know the police won’t follow through. If the police did regularly follow through, you wouldn’t see things like this happening.
I would say a proportional response would be the minimum necessary to stop it from happening again. If it keeps happening, you’re not there yet.
If you read the article I linked above, there are plenty of cases where the victims k ow exactly who’s doing it, and who keeps doing it, and the legal system still won’t do anything about it. That is clearly not a proportional response, and that’s why you see it escalating to things like this.
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Please check out these articles:
https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/crime/article220871165.html
tl;dr: Bike thieves do get caught, they do get prosecuted, but it takes a massive number of thefts or aggravating circumstances like violence during the theft before the thief is going to see jail time.
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So, still not a proportional response in my book, since the thieves can reliably get away with it for a long time before seeing any consequences.
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It’s not really much of a surprise. Aside from any baser motivations; unless one is 100% not on board even slightly with retributive justice(whether for purposes of abstract moral satisfaction, in the service of theories of deterrence, or out of pessimism about the viability of at least some rehabilitation projects) ‘okay with hurting people, provided they’re the right people and said hurting isn’t too disruptive to everyone else’s lives’ is a lot closer to a description of what several millennia of people theorizing about the nature of ‘justice’ were striving for a method to accomplish, rather than something someone would be cagey about admitting to.
Hashing out the details of who ‘the right people’ are remains a fraught issue despite much effort and churn in philosophy, jurisprudence; and sensor systems; while ‘isn’t too disruptive’ is essentially an entire wing of political science; but not being okay with hurting people for some definition of ‘the right people’ and ‘too disruptive’ is a vastly more atypical position than being okay with it is.
(edit: just in case this isn’t clear, the above is not an endorsement of the ethical suitability of beating bike thieves with baseball bats; just to note that at least some willingness to use violence is so overwhelmingly common that pretty much any culture, religion, theory of justice, legal code, etc. you can think of treats hammering out the details of ‘to who’, ‘by who’, ‘how much’, ‘why’; and ‘how best’ as a central, vital, set of questions to take a position on; and the position virtually always includes some cases where it’s permissible or actively meritorious, and thus implies the possibility of the ‘he’s hurting the wrong people’ complaint as one that is a legitimate critique of anyone whose job description includes hurting people but who is failing to adhere to the correct violence allocation protocols.)
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