Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Thoughst on Missoula murder verdict (self-defense case)...

And no I was never ever a stupid kid.

The Grand Prairie police (TX) placed a flatbed trailer (with a flat tire) loaded with brand new tires on the shoulder of Interstate 20. That night, they made 18 arrest for theft. A judge dismissed all 18 cases calling the endeavor; "entrapment".

The Fort Worth police placed a bicycle on a sidewalk next to a parking meter along a commercial (retail) street. (University Drive), however the bicycle had a tracking device hidden in it. The police followed the signal to a garage and made an arrest. This conviction stood.

The difference in these 2 cases is the Grand Prairie Police had "eyes on" even filming the thefts, while the Fort Worth police followed a tracking signal. Entrapment laws are confusing to me and I won't pretend to understand them, but in my opinion all of the arrests should have stood!

When I was a teen, MANY years ago, another case involved a store-owner who was burglarized multiple times. He set up a booby trap that killed the next intruder. He too, was convicted of murder. Doesn't make sense to me..., either you can protect your property or you can't.


DMc

except for all the stupid chit i and my friends did, two things we did not do were steal and go into strangers houses....yeah we destroyed chit but it belonged to one of us....we damn near killed each other in our stupidity but we werent stealing chit from people......

About 3 years ago I defended a murder case (successfully) in which the trespasser was found on a third story balcony in the middle of the night. He then climbed down to a second story porch and stood on the railing. The female homeowner was freaked, had two little twin girls in bed on the third floor and called her ex-husband to come over ASAP. Th ex lived a few doors down. He had the trespasser at gunpoint and told him he was armed and don't move. So the stupid trespasser (later determined to be drunk) jumped down from the railing to the floor of the 2nd story porch (he had been on the third story window peeking) onto the same level as the homeowner. The ex-husband was inside the house, pointing a .357 mag out the window maybe 6 feet away from where the trespasser was standing (on the railing) and when the trespasser jumped, he drilled him.

Turned out the trespasser was an intoxicated 25 year old kid looking for a piece or ass (which he'd gotten once a month or two earlier) from the ex-husband's wife. Course, the ex-husband didn't know that and didn't have a clue who the trespasser was at the time of the shoot.

The argument that worked was, 2:00 in the morning, on the third and second floor of a house in a remote part of the county, a stranger peeking in the third story windows where your little girls are sleeping. What'sa reasonable parent to do? Trespasser could have been armed and could have been anyone, a rapist, a gang-banger, chi mo, who knows. Ex-husband gave him a firm order not to move and warned him he had a gun on him and would shoot and the kid jumped anyway.

Jury acquitted. Said it was a perfectly reasonable response from the ex-husband. We could not use California's Castle Doctrine (presumption that deadly force used inside the home against an intruder is lawful) because the trespasser was not inside the home.

Tragic case, actually. Alcohol, marijuana, trespassing and burglary is plain stupid when you don't have a clue whether the homeowner is armed or not.

Jordan

We have all come across reports where game wardens use deer decoys to catch poachers committing all kinds of illegal acts similar to the GP police with their flat bed bait. How is it that the wildlife police are successful at getting convictions whereas the GP police could not? Is there more to the story with the GP police?

The best lawyers in the world can't save you from your own stupid statements.

Two things: 1) Only a fool would set a trap like that for someone he knew wasn't a threat; and 2) Only a bigger fool would tell ANYONE about it beforehand if he did and give any kind of statement afterwards.

Whatever the facts of what the man actually did, given that the kid was clearly an intruder in another's home, there would never/could never have been a conviction without statements from the accused before and after the event. Ninety percent of the people in prison today would not be there if they could master one simple skill, shut up.

The case hinged on this:

"Montana Shooting Sports Association President Gary Marbut said those laws were not in question during the Kaarma trial. Neither, he added, was the "Castle Doctrine" concept that a person is entitled to use lethal force in self-defense.

But a legal change that Marbut supported in the 2009 Legislature did get tested and come through with a good result, he said. That was a new law that required the prosecution to prove someone claiming self-defense was in fact guilty, instead of making the defendant prove innocence.

�That�s the standard that applied to the Kaarma trial, and the prosecution was able to meet that burden,� Marbut said."

http://missoulian.com/news/local/gu...85cb983-cbbc-5986-b336-8f4f5b401513.html

It's a fairly well known fact a lot of Missoula HS students go into garages in hopes of finding booze, which was apparently the German kids motivation.

Teenage kids do stupid and irresponsible things that don't deserve what is essentially an execution. If that's not true, we'd all have been executed by age 17...

The German kid did something stupid and it cost him his life.

Karma did something stupid and it cost him his life.

Lesson of the day: Let's not do stupid stuff. More than just two lives were ruined here.

We have all come across reports where game wardens use deer decoys to catch poachers committing all kinds of illegal acts similar to the GP police with their flat bed bait. How is it that the wildlife police are successful at getting convictions whereas the GP police could not? Is there more to the story with the GP police?

Is the guy with the most ironic last name ever still wrongfully convicted?

The real mistake here was failure to execute the latter of the 3 S's.

Shortly after college dad and I were driven off Sam Rayburn by a thunderstorm on a July holiday weekend. I motored dads little bass rig up a long winding willow lined branch, tied up and we walked the trail through the woods to camp where we fried some fish. After eating we headed down to the boat where we found no rods or battery. I had two fenwick glass rods I made up with 5000 Cs and tackle box stolen.

How I wished I had returned a little earlier with my model 94.

Lots of Oilfield Pumpers augmented their wages by making and selling "drip" gasoline, and kids were always stealing it. Cops couldn't be called because it was illegal to sell or use in cars or pickups.

Ol' Bill Jackson over at Squaw Mountain in Jack County knew that whoever was stealing his drip wasn't a kid, so he laced a barrel of it with Treatolite, a chemical used to treat crude oil to lower the B.S. level in the tank.

Next morning the offender's car was parked about 200 yards, pointed away from Bill's drip stash.