Joe Horn?

[Case Closed]

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OP, you suck at thread titles. Who else assumed it was NFL wide receiver Joe Horn?

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This aggravated me very much.

[ElliotR]

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I say: "Joe Horn doesn't have the jurisdiction or authority to threaten deadly force on his neighbor's property, and the guy who wrote the Texas law (see post above) never intended the law to function like that.

Just because Horn says "you move, your dead" and the guys move anyway doesn't give Horn carte blanche to fire away."

neblis says: "but what if the guys were on his property, does that matter?"

I say: "I don't know Texas state law"

tomdemaine says: "law != right"

This is total ACtarding. Yeah, I get it tom, law != right; when I note that Joe Horn doesn't have the jurisdiction and authority to threaten deadly force, it's pretty clear I'm doing so in the context of what the law allows. tom just wanted to ACtard up the thread by making a point I never disagreed with ('law != right') in the hopes someone would take the bait and start engaging him in the ACtard argument he desperately wanted to have, ie., pretty much a repeat of the entire history of this forum for about the last 2 years.

Cue the "zomg ACists just want to talk about the 'interesting' philosophy behind this, some of us don't care what the law is, stop being soooooo mean" whines from the AC crowd and their associated sycophants.

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QFT [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]

[adios]

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FWIW, this is going to be a key point if this guy every gets charged and it goes to trial. ....

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Yeah it might not go to a criminal trial. Even if it doesn't it may go court in a civil trial though. I think this one will have a criminal trial. If Horn cops a plea it would seem that it would hurt him in a civil case. Horn may be "judgement proof" though, don't know. If they decide not to charge him I'd really like to understand why but I'll probably concede that I was way wrong (they could have had guns or knives that we don't know about).

[Kurn, son of Mogh]

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Who else assumed it was NFL wide receiver Joe Horn

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[rwesty]

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Who else assumed it was NFL wide receiver Joe Horn

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My first thought was Joe Horn supports Ron Paul for president?

[She]

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Who else assumed it was NFL wide receiver Joe Horn

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<raises hand> [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

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My first thought was Joe Horn supports Ron Paul for president?

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I would sure hope so. lol.

[vhawk01]

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listen to the end of the entire recording, there is a longer time between when he puts down the phone untill he shoots. Its not alot longer but it is a bit more time than it souds like at first.

he goes outside recocks the gun so they hear it, they say something to him, hes says "you move your dead", then obv they moved. BANG BANG.

After that he calls back he says they came into his yard. And before going outside he says he cant see which way they are going. So if he went outside and they were coming up to his house then what should he assume?

OBV. he had already stated his intent to use deadly force. And again he might have shot too fast but if they were coming into his yard and the move they made looked like drawing a weapon, he should fire .

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None of this really matters. There are three reasons it can be OK to shoot someone:
1) In TX, because someone is committing one of the crimes mentioned in the statute. Even if they were trespassing, they weren't burglarizing his house. No good.
2) Second, self-defense. For this to work, he has to reasonably fear that someone's going to use deadly force against him. Unarmed men + only his testimony = fail. Also, by leaving his house and menacing people with a shotgun, he may lose the right to use deadly force at all.
3) Citizen's arrest. I really don't know much about this, but maybe under TX law he's entitled to use deadly force to effectuate a citizen's arrest. Doesn't matter though, because he never told them they were under arrest, as far as I can tell.

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Just to be clear, there are clearly more situations than this that it is ok to kill someone. If I see someone trying to kill someone else, I'm pretty sure I can use force to stop them. What if I see someone raping someone? Am I allowed to use force to stop them?

Now, just to preempt the analogyphobes, I'm not saying rape or murder = home invasion. I'm merely pointing out that protecting people from being victimized is also a legitimate reason to use force. This may or may not (and I'm sure LEGALLY it does not) apply to protecting someones property from being victimized, but this is much different than vigilante justice.

Maybe this is what you meant by citizens arrest, I'm not sure.

[DVaut1]

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Now, just to preempt the analogyphobes, I'm not saying rape or murder = home invasion. I'm merely pointing out that protecting people from being victimized is also a legitimate reason to use force.

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Shooting someone (I think) necessarily = using force
Using force != shooting someone

Right?

There's "using force" to stop your neighbor's house from being robbed, and then there "taking your shotgun and blowing the guys away who are robbing your neighbor's house". I think there's probably some distance in between these two options, and I think Horn's utilizing of the extreme end of the force spectrum is probably what most people object to. Had he went over there just to threaten the guys with his gun (in other words, "using force to protecting people from being victimized") instead of opening firing on unarmed guys, this probably isn't a notable story.

That the guy was ostensibly doing something "nice" and "admirable" by "protect his neighbors from being victimized" doesn't give him license to use the most extreme and irreversible measures of force to do it.

I agree, it's probably legitimate for people to "use force to protect their neighbors property", but that's just a vague euphemism for what occurred here, hence why you rightly recognized you should be wary of using analogies here. There's a reason why people should be hesitant to rely too heavily on analogies and it's because they often obscure vital elements necessary to cast a prudent judgment. Yes, Horn "used force", true enough -- it was a specific kind of deadly force that (in light of the fact the guys were unarmed and not threatening Horn himself) was completely unnecessary. We can claim "well, maybe he didn't know the guys were unarmed", but he'd still be guilty of some kind of gross negligence or yes, even murder, for making a mistake like that. I don't think reasonable people operate under the "shoot first, ask questions later" principle.

[ALawPoker]

I don't know what the technical legal mumbo jumbo is on this case. I'm not a lawyer and only know what's relayed in that article, so I won't claim a strong opinion. Professionals who know all the facts and are good at dealing with this stuff should sort it out.

But I do know that if I walked down the street and saw this guy, I wouldn't think of him as a bad person. I certainly wouldn't see him as any sort of threat to me. So my mild opinion is that it doesn't seem like he did something seriously wrong. Maybe he has the character flaw of being trigger happy in the rare instance where his neighbor's house is being robbed and he happens to witness it. I don't think the choices of how to consequence his actions should be either 'perfectly fine' vs. 'oh that's murder.'

So the only strong opinion I have here is that (here you go, Dvaut) in the absence of an inefficient approach to justice, a better result would be more likely. I don't feel I'm in much of a position to have a strong opinion on what fabric Nike should use in their next Air Jordan's, so the same goes here. I really don't know what exactly would be fair, and I think the world would be a smoother place if others admitted the same thing, and worried about the approach instead.

EDIT: And yes, I also thought this was the football player and was annoyed by the title.

[Money2Burn]

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Now, just to preempt the analogyphobes, I'm not saying rape or murder = home invasion. I'm merely pointing out that protecting people from being victimized is also a legitimate reason to use force.

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Shooting someone (I think) necessarily = using force
Using force != shooting someone

Right?

There's "using force" to stop your neighbor's house from being robbed, and then there "taking your shotgun and blowing the guys away who are robbing your neighbor's house". I think there's probably some distance in between these two options, and I think Horn's utilizing of the extreme end of the force spectrum is probably what most people object to. Had he went over there just to threaten the guys with his gun (in other words, "using force to protecting people from being victimized") instead of opening firing on unarmed guys, this probably isn't a notable story.

That the guy was ostensibly doing something "nice" and "admirable" by "protect his neighbors from being victimized" doesn't give him license to use the most extreme and irreversible measures of force to do it.

I agree, it's probably legitimate for people to "use force to protect their neighbors property", but that's just a vague euphemism for what occurred here, hence why you rightly recognized you should be wary of using analogies here. There's a reason why people should be hesitant to rely too heavily on analogies and it's because they often obscure vital elements necessary to cast a prudent judgment. Yes, Horn "used force", true enough -- it was a specific kind of deadly force that (in light of the fact the guys were unarmed and not threatening Horn himself) was completely unnecessary. We can claim "well, maybe he didn't know the guys were unarmed", but he'd still be guilty of some kind of gross negligence or yes, even murder, for making a mistake like that. I don't think reasonable people operate under the "shoot first, ask questions later" principle.

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While I agree with your point about force, this man was 60 something years old and the two robbers, i'm guessing, were much younger. What type of force do you think this man would be able to employ that would effectively stop the two robbers with out using a gun? Unless he was Mr. Miogi I doubt he could have overtaken them. So should he have left his home in the first place if his only means to stop the theives was deadly force? I don't know. I certainly don't fault him for it though.