Is anyone clearer than I on how the justified deadly force thing works when the suspect is actively fleeing(and this fact is both known to the shooter and not in dispute for legal purposes)?
I know that state laws cover the spectrum from ‘make my day’ to ‘you need to show some plausible attempt to retreat first’; but I was not aware of any that extended to ‘waste him, he’s getting away!’; so I’m not sure how this would have been justified even if he had identified the target correctly. Am I just uninformed in this area and some jurisdictions do allow this?
Also, does anyone know how the standards for things like reckless endagerment/various forms of culpable negligence interact with self/property defense provisions? Implicitly some level of risk is endorsed as acceptable, since humans attempting deadly force in haste and under stress are known to be a bit unreliable; but I’d have to imagine that the mere fact that there is a person you can legitimately defend yourself against isn’t a blank check for unlimited amounts of harm to bystanders and damage to property; and (one would hope) the tolerance for inadvertent damage would decline in proportion to the immediacy of the threat.
That’s what puzzles me about this: it’s distasteful, but would not surprise me for the jurisdiction, if just executing someone for attempting a property crime is OK; it’s more surprising that continuing to attempt to execute someone who did a property crime after they finish and are running away would be OK; and it seems downright surprising, even for Texas, that the mere intention to shoot the guy who was running away from doing a property crime would be exculpatory if you end up shooting an unrelated bystander.
