Jury acquits delivery driver of main charge in shooting of YouTube prankster
abcnews.go.com
A jury has found a delivery driver not guilty in the shooting of a YouTube prankster who was following him around a mall food court earlier this year
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Pulling out a gun should have a VERY HIGH bar. This kid is clearly an idiot but was the bar high enough to kill him?
From the description of the incident, it definitely sounded like he feared for his life. A 6 foot something guy keeps advancing on him, asking why he's thinking of the guy's penis. He tells the guy to leave him alone multiple times, but the guy keeps advancing. He retreats multiple times, but the guy keeps at it. He even tries knocking the phone out of the guy's hand, but the guy keeps at it.
It definitely sounds like the guy was afraid of where this was going and tried all of the non-lethal options (retreat, tell the person to stop) before resorting to pulling out his gun. The YouTube "pranker" has nobody to blame but himself. He should have stopped when asked instead of repeatedly pressing the defendant for a YouTube "prank" video.
(I use "prank" in quotes because I don't consider this type of thing a real prank. It's just a guy acting like an idiot and calling it "a prank." A real prank should leave all involved laughing when it's revealed, not leave one person fearing for their life.)
No it fucking doesn't. The whole thing lasted less than 30 seconds and the driver never tried to retreat. He told the prankster no a few times, tried to swat the phone out of his hands, and then shot him. It's not shocking that the jury had a difficult time coming up with a verdict.
The driver did try to retreat:
Well like the article said, he fucked up by shooting immediately after drawing the weapon, instead of giving Cook (the YouTuber) a chance to see the gun and finally back off. I agree with their decision to keep him in jail because of that one simple fact. The guy should have warned him that he was going to shoot if Cook didn't back down.
This is wrong and will firmly land you on the wrong side of the law in many places. Pulling a gun is a last resort to defend yourself when de-escalation doesn't work. You pull the gun when you've already determined that you have to fire it. Otherwise you're just escalating and making the situation more dangerous for yourself and any bystanders. This is also why I don't carry a gun in the first place even though I might legally be allowed to.
Hey I never said that he should draw the gun before the warning. Warn first, then draw if they still keep advancing.
Brandishing a firearm can be illegal even if you don't draw it.
I get what you're saying, but even just making the threat without pulling a weapon is enough to get a charge in some places. In any case I don't think we should be carrying guns around in our day to day as if it was normal anyway. It's kind of like wearing a rubber suit all the time because you're worried about lightning strikes.
Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Can't fathom you people that don't get this.
Are you living somewhere abnormally dangerous? You are far more likely to use it when it isn't needed. It's the worse bet for most people and if you can't understand that then your fear is blinding you. This is like someone with OCD saying it's better to wash their hands constantly "just in case". Sure maybe you don't wash your hands for the 20th time one day and catch ebola, but more likely you just destroy your hands over time.
Currently no, where I live is not particularly dangerous. That doesn't stop the fact that I've been held up at gunpoint here by a meth head that was quite a bit larger than I am. And I moved here from a large city, well known for it's gang violence. People that are so afraid of guns have never been involved in any kind of dangerous situation, and put far to much faith and trust in the Police and Government. There is nothing wrong with being prepared for the worst. Most here that are saying the guy shouldn't have been afraid because it was a prank are looking at it through hindsight.
Your anecdote is irrelevant. Carrying a gun is not a rational decision for most people because it increases the risk of harm to yourself and others regardless of how you feel about it. I'm not saying this guy should be in jail for defending himself either, but he ultimately was not in mortal danger and wouldn't be facing charges if he didn't have that gun.
I always find it interesting when folks like you try turning "we don't all need guns on us all the time" into a fear of guns. When you seen to be afraid of leaving your house unarmed.
There is something wrong with it. There's always that temptation to use the gun in a situation that doesn't call for it. We've had two "self-defense" shootings in my town in the past few years and in both cases, someone legally carrying a gun used it in a situation where they could have simply walked away, and they probably would have if they didn't have their guns. The shooters in both situations ended up with felony convictions.
He was in a public food court at a mall during lunch
Oh true. Violent acts had never happened in a food court before! /s
Okay, but the only violent act that happened in this case was the shooting of the prankster idiot.
And?
So was Dominic Billa.
I've been robbed at a busy, open public library with a gaggle of elementary kids literally 15ft away. Being in public ain't the deterrent you think it is.
Running a youtube prank channel should justify a drone strike.
I'd watch the prankster-drone strike channel though.
Can the narrator be the cart narcs guy?
What would you have done in that situation?
Walked away, if necessary run away? Maybe throw a punch?
He did try to back away. And punching someone significantly larger than oneself is generally unwise.
He didn't continue to back away. He didn't run. Punching someone bigger is unwise, but not as unwise as trying to kill someone who arguably didn't even commit a crime.
No one was killed, so....
the whole point of firearms is that it's deadly force. you can't fire one at a person without being ready to take their life because it's always a likely outcome.
But no one was killed. You can't put a person in jail for shooting at someone else assuming that their intent was to kill.
This is coming from someone who despise the idea of owning a gun.
Shooting at someone is intending to kill them.
Source?
I would have thought it common sense, but sure: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/use-force-continuum
Firearms are at the bottom, under lethal force. There is no way to use firearms to be less-lethal.
Understood. I know that firearms can kill. Stabbing too.
But not every use of a firearm is with the intent to kill. Someone could just shoot to a foot or a hand. Foolish? Sure. Intent to kill? Nah.
Those are very small targets. They'd be hard enough to hit on a static range with no pressure. They'd be even harder to hit when moving, in a stressful situation, at close range. If you miss, you could hit someone else. Even if you hit them, the bullet will probably go right through and into whatever is beyond. This is why you aim for center of mass. Easier to hit, less chance of overpenetration, and more effective in stopping an attacker in a life-or-death situation.
Despite what the movies may show, you can't just shoot to wound. If you shoot someone in the leg, and hit the femoral artery, they can bleed to death in seconds: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17334183/
Those are just strawmen. It doesn't matter if "those are small targets" or if "you can still hit an artery." What matters in the persons's intent.
That's like saying that "any person delivering a punch to someone else's face intends to kill them because of the possibility of the punched falling down and cracking their skull open on the floor."
Yeah, for fights that's very possible. And in fact that would have been preferable if feasible in this scenario, because it's still far less likely to be fatal than shooting someone.
Proper use of a firearm is intending to kill someone. Again, there is no way to use a firearm to be less-lethal. If you shoot someone, you are shooting to kill. Presumably this guy had some CCW training and would know that.
I disagree with you. Of course there is a way to use a firearm to be less lethal. Regardless, and again, no one was killed in this story, so....
By dumb luck nobody died. The guy was shot in the chest, an area of the body known for being home to all kind of vital organs and arteries.
Nobody that's ever used a gun is taught to shoot at the edge of the target. Aim center-mass or don't even pull the weapon.
Making a lot of assumptions here. What about people who use guns without that kind of training? Because those people exist, or else you wouldn't see gun-related accidents being reported in the news.
Regardless, and again, not the point. As there were no people killed here, and the shooter was acquited, so.........
That's just luck.
An inch either way that bullet could have been fatal.
You can certainly put them in jail for attempted murder. And that doesn't require proving they intended to kill that person, it only requires "conscious disregard" of whether their action could kill someone. For example, randomly shooting into someone's house.
I am not a lawyer. So everything I say could be wrong and every state is different but generally I think there's a five point test for claims of self defense: Avoidance, Innocence, Imminence, Proportionality, and Reasonableness.
Avoidance is moot because I think this is Virginia and I think they have a no-retreat provision. Innocence is just that you didn't willingly engage in a fight that got out of control. So that applies. Imminence applies because it happened in the moment. I just don't see how Proportionality applies here. I just don't see how holding a cell phone is proportional to a shooting. Emotionally I get it that the YouTuber is a major jerkwad and may have deserved a comeuppance. But I don't think the jury followed the law.
I'm not a lawyer. Everything I said there could be wrong
I kinda waver on reasonableness for cases like this but I generally think using a weapon against an unarmed aggressor is reasonable when there is a significant size disparity or a disability or something like that. In this case the "prankster" was significantly larger and had a group of friends with him so I don't think it's out of the question that the use of a gun for defense is reasonable in this situation.
If the defendant has been carrying a less lethal self defense measure, such as a taser, mace, or a baton, and had used that to defend himself, would you see that as more proportional?
I honestly don't know. Emotionally I agree with the verdict but intellectually I question it.
I'm happy he didn't die over this, but I'm also kind of happy he got a little fucked up over it.
I tend to think about these situations with small people as the initial victim. How far should a smaller person or woman let something go before they can defend themselves? If the person is way, way bigger, do you just have to let yourself get beat?
He's still making videos, so apparently he didn't actually learn anything from the experience
I honestly don't know what the right answer is here. I don't like that it seems like it's easier to shoot someone because of a threatening feeling. This makes me think of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. People will say these are completely unrelated cases but both involved a shooting and a claim of self defense. Again I don't know what the answer is.
In that one I think ol' zimmy kinda deserved it and I wasn't happy with the charges/trial results.
I don't think it's the same at all, though. Zimmerman was the OG aggressor. He fucked around, found out and got butthurt and killed a kid.
I guess not according to Lemmy, lol. I don't care if the youtuber was. the size of Shaq, you can't just shoot someone for showing a phone in your face not even if he is following you.
This sounds like jury nullification more than an actual legal judgment.