Stevie Wonder to boycott "stand your ground" states

I'll be sure to write him & tell him Virginia is one of the states he needs to boycott. He hasn't done any worthwhile music in years and certainly won't be missed.

In related news, Stevie Wonder to begin his UK and Canada Tour.

I think that US Supreme Court precedent even supports the "stand your ground" position ... Brown v. US I think it was, in the 1920s. Yep, federal precedent, from sea to shining sea.

I suspect either old Stevie is screwed, or perhaps just didn't mean what he said. My money is on the latter.

There's only six states that require you to retreat:

Arkansas
Iowa
Nebraska
New Mexico
Virginia
Vermont

That's not going to be much of a fan base.

Vermont?!

Sorry Jim D., but Virginia is not a "retreat" state. In common law, Virginia is a SYG state.

Good. He's getting old. A hard travel schedule can be hard on an old man.

Raconteur, Happy to accept Virginia has "no duty to retreat". I think the list I found was looking for statutory exceptions and Virginia's is case law and didn't show up.

Gotta admit though, that fan base is shrinking faster and faster, particularly if Carl is right.

Ran into "DTR" my first criminal justice exam in law school. That led me to understand how unfair and artificial the idea is. It lets the prosecutor determine what is self defense or not: definition both so broad and so vague prosecution can interpret at will and use innuendo and supposition as evidence. It shifts the burden of proof to the defendant and it essentially eliminates the requirement of mens rea. I you donÂ’t retreat in any way the jury or judge might imagine you could retreat or should have at least tried, youÂ’re guilty.

The law school exam "case" was taken from one of the Prof's students in Chicago. Three times while riding the bus to law school, defendant was approached by a young apparently African-American man and asked if he had any spare change. Whether the response was affirmative or not, defendant was then beaten into submission and robbed. Three times he was hospitalized as a result. The fourth time, defendant struck his confronter pre-emptively, the potential assailant slipped, fell against the steel rail at the back of the bus seat, and was killed. I suspect from the Prof's comments to the class that almost none of us thought the DTR was relevant: how the Dickens does one retreat from a bus seat? Yet obviously the duty applied and there was no reason to exempt that particular set of facts. My argument was that the expectation that the defendant would be assaulted was reasonable if not unavoidable under the circumstances and that defendant could not have possibly expected his one punch to kill his assailant, that he had not used either dangerous or deadly force, and could not be held to a homicide. That was weak, legally, but should not have been. Prof was not impressed. His student was convicted of some level of homicide for failing the DTR.