Florida gas station store owner Mehedeun Hasan, 22, is facing a charge of attempted murder after shooting Rennie Defor, Jr. as he was trying to steal beer worth $36. It is another example of the common law rule that you cannot protect property with potentially lethal force.
Defoe walked out of the convenience store with three 18-packs of Natural Ice beer to his Toyota Camry. Hasan ran after him with his 61-year-old father. Hasan first run in and grabs a handgun. On this way out, he drops the gun and kicks it.
Hasan shoots at the car and Defoe is hit. Defoe later crashes the car and is taken to a hospital with gunshots to the left arm and chest. Defoe has a criminal record that includes charges of robbery, domestic battery and drug possession.
We have previously discussed this issue of the use of force to protect property (here and here and here and here and here).
Common law cases often involve the use of snare guns to protect property since direct use of force often involve claims of self-defense rather than defense of property. In famous cases like Bird v. Holbrook, 4 Bing. 628, 130 Eng. Rep. 911 (1825), courts have ruled that “[n]o man can do indirectly that which he is forbidden to do directly.” Not only are such devices viewed as immoral (because human life is more valuable than property), but dangerous because such devices cannot tell the difference between friend and foe. The case however also has been cited for the long-standing rule that no property is viewed as more valuable than a human life. That does not mean you cannot take steps to protect your property and a case of protection of property can become protection of self (with the right to use higher levels of force) when the suspect resists or attacks.
The attempted murder charge in this case is higher than some past cases of battery or assault. It is even possible under the common law for a felon to sue for civil damages, though such successful cases are rare. In the famous case of Katko v. Briney, 183 N.W.2d 657 (Iowa 1971), the defendant owned an unoccupied farmhouse left to him by his parents. It was repeatedly broken into despite no trespass signs and boards on the windows. Briney then wired the house with a snare gun and shot Katko. He was found liable. While this case also addresses the common law rule against man traps or snare guns, it was premised on the principle that that no property is worth more than a human life. The court held:
“The intentional infliction upon another of harmful or offensive contact or other bodily harm by a means which is intended or likely to cause death or serious bodily harm, for the purpose of preventing or terminating the other’s intrusion upon the actor’s possession of land or chattels, is privileged if, but only if, the actor reasonably believes that the intruder, unless expelled or excluded, is likely to cause death or serious bodily harm to the actor or to a third person whom the actor is privileged to protect.”
Jurors do not hold much sympathy for shoplifters or burglars suing their victims.
Castle doctrine laws (or “Make My Day” laws) have in some cases been extended to car or businesses. Some are called “Make My Day Better” law. The pursuit of the victim presents a challenged even under some of these laws. We have seen other cases of pursuit that have resulted in criminal charges against the owners.
“Mehedeun Hasan”
This incident will disappear down the memory hole quickly.
But to get back to the actual subject of this incident. I do think the shooter overreacted, but on the other hand the charges against him are too harsh.
Would this be a sharia law enclave? Cane em!
Is this going to be a Ferguson moment? I’m sure the next day the thief will start to turn his life around.
Years ago, I worked as convenience store clerk at a store located next to negro housing projects. I could tell you stories about thieving negroes, but you all know them already. I have no empathy for negro thieves. We should tie them to posts and bull-whip them as was done in the Old South.
And white thieves should get what, a stern talking to?
Or are there no white thieves in your racist world view?
BTW, Mr. Dirtbag, that anecdote sounds just like a lie.
Uh, no. I did work in a convenience store in the late 80s after I got out of the military, and the management sent me to work in this store in the nnegro hood. I had no white people at this store who tried to steal. The store was situated in Brown-town right next to the nnegro housing projects. No whiteys were dumb enough to frequent a stop and rob during my midnight shift. You are probably a young Millennial who fancies yourself a ‘nnegro-whisperer’ so I understand your petite snow-flake abhorrence to my ‘evil whitey racism’.
You’re a dumb azzed lying racist A-hole but other than that I’ve got nothing against you.
Did I upset the sensitive cuck snowflake? You will be alright. Shake it off.
I am pleased with this demonstration of the virtues of cultural diversity. Let me explain., I suspect the perp was a native and the merchants were immigrants from a third world hellhole somewhere that doesn’t allow a merchant to be weak and tolerate theft. In their cultural experience, hardness is key to survival.
But in the american perp’s cultural experience, he is allowed to get away with theft and a lot of other bad acts, perhaps because he believes he is a descendant of african slaves. So, thinking that this gives him a free pass to break the law, he improperly estimated that the immigrant vendors gave a fig about that. He estimated wrongly.
I applaud this social interaction as it shows the value to society of the cultural diversity that such immigrants can bring with them. We should have tolerance for their differences, and applaud their contributions to our society!
I think it is a false assumption that some people’s life is more valuable than property. If I am on the jury, the shooter is getting an innocent vote for me. It’s not like the country has a shortage of shoplifting Negroes, or anything.
Plus, I think we need a statute that makes it legally c OK to shoot a shoplifter. Like in Texas:
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Am I the only one to notice how the criminal handled the beer? Wasn’t the beer’s well being in jeopardy?
Jim22:
“Am I the only one to notice how the criminal handled the beer? Wasn’t the beer’s well being in jeopardy?”
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You’ve got big time fizzy logic there, Jim.:P
mespo – I wouldn’t be too hasty here. I think Jim is on to something. The beer has a personhood. The beer has been kidnapped. The owner of the store is trying to stop a fleeing felon with 18 cans of personhood. He hits enough times that he saves the 18 cans of beer personhood and the bad, bad, bad, person first goes to the hospital and then the jail. Why are they not giving this guy a medal? If he was a cop they would. Actually, if he was a cop, they would be charging him if the shoplifter was black.
Paul:
I’m rethinking the “kidnap of an organic substance” as a defense. here. Plus, the potential bomb-making issue of throwing it around his car making our felon here a fleeing felon likely to harm others.
Bingo, it’s the “Natty Beer Defense” there, Paul Belli!!
mespo – we all know how dangerous a shaken beer can be to all and sundry. And we haven’t even talked about the tax implications of this case. The felon was stiffing the city and state for tax money. Our hero tried to stop him. Set an example so they both would get more taxes from beer.
Yes, I am thinking with the right defense attorney we could convict the state. 🙂
What do you the reaction would be if all 36 cans exploded simultaneously. Danger is right!! Free Hasan!
mespo – you have got to admit you would pay to see all 36 cans explode at once. 😉 And inside a car????
Paul:
Exploded some myself in game called “Shotgun” many moons ago.
Beer Lives Matter!!
Yes. Why did no one think of the beers’s well-being instead of the negro felon’s?
Joseph Angel – mespo and I have been working on a defense based on the improper handling of the beer making it a volatile object. 18 volatile objects to be exact. 😉
Assault with intent to stop great bodily harm. No crime.
Self defense and defense of others is allowed, even required. Deadly force to protect beer is a crime. The thief was in flight and there was not danger to anyone other than the danger created by the clerk.
The only way this guy could have got away with it is if her was a police officer. They’re the only ones allowed to shoot someone running away.
More false rhetoric from north of the border. Sgt. Preston would not be pleased.
whatever the case the world is a little better with Defoe out of it.
Our recently released from incarceration career criminal survived. More is the pity for bad aim.
Attempted murder? The prosecutor will have to prove that his intention was to kill the thief, and his defense attorney will argue that he was just trying to stop him by blowing out the tires. After all, if the shopkeeper wanted to kill the thief, he could have done so while he was standing next to the vehicle, pointing the gun at the thief’s head. If I were a juror, I could see some type of wanton endangerment charge, but not attempted murder. The “victim” is a POS, so I would be inclined to give the merchant a break.
This is just another example of stupid stuff mushrooming into a major debacle. The clerk now faces serious prison time all over a few packs of beer. Not worth it.
If he wanted to be armed while running after the suspect to arrest him for shoplifting that is his legal right, but I saw no attempt to harm the shopkeeper or a situation where the shopkeeper might have believed based on even the light most favorable to him that he was about to suffer harm.
I thought in the end this case will be plea bargained down to an aggravated assault or maybe perhaps an attempted manslaughter. But then I remembered a recent ruling in Division II of the WA Court of Appeals that is an interesting read:
In re: Personal Restraint of Marvis J. Knight
http://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/D2%2049521-0-II%20Published%20Opinion.pdf
The felon said “If you follow me to the car, I’ll kill you.”
“Defoe has 12 prior felony charges and nine prior misdemeanor charges, including firing a missile into a dwelling, domestic battery, grand larceny, grand theft and distributing cocaine within 100 feet of a school. He has been sentenced to Florida State Prison four times and was most recently released on June 12.”
http://www.theledger.com/news/20180718/pcso-convenience-store-owner-chased-down-shot-thief
Twelve prior felonies and nine misdemeanors. Why is this thug still on the street? Some judge needs to explain that. Must be criminal justice reform or its more accurate term “ get out of jail free.” And the Left wants to take my gun away? Good luck with that pipe dream.
Mespo, according to isaac, you have no right to own a gun. You need to join the more advanced societies of the world.
I do but those advanced societies keep falling into chaos before I can get there.
How is it that these other advanced societies have far less gun violence? And just what chaos are they falling into, as compared to us?
Jay S – how is it that London has a higher violence rate than NYC?
Sure here’s one now: https://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/07/19/england-knife-gun-rape-attacks-homicide-continue-rising/
See Theodore Dalrymple on the British judiciary. It’s even worse over there. Judges should be confined to rulings during proceedings. They cannot be trusted with discretion over sentencing, which should be according to formulae written into the statute.
TSD:
“Judges should be confined to rulings during proceedings. They cannot be trusted with discretion over sentencing, which should be according to formulae written into the statute.”
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Not a fan of that type of robotic jurisprudence. How about we hold judges accountable for releasing felons back onto the street to commit more crimes. Do away with judicial immunity for releasing felons. A simple negligence standard is what we all work with in life.
Why are the folks with the most power and hence the greatest chance of negligently creating havoc above the rest of us in terms of civil accountability for the harm they cause?
Not a fan of that type of robotic jurisprudence.
There’s no philosophy of law incorporated into sentencing. It’s just a rough-and-ready collective judgment about the severity of a given crime. If that’s contingent on certain facts (such as the severity of injury from an assault or the quantum of street drugs), you can have a supplementary hearing in front of a judge and assessors. One problem you get with prescribing formulae is that many legislators and all judges are lawyers, and people go to law school because they can’t do math. So, have an ad hoc committee of the financial planners in the legislature write the session law which amends the sentencing rules). A commission appended to the state judicial council can produce manuals and charts for your innumerate judges to use.
Why? Because we do not execute felons in the numbers we need to, and now there are so damn many of them in the country, that we can’t afford to lock them all up.
The whole point of SCOTUS and other courts reducing capital punishment was to make us a more “civilized” society. Well guess what? It backfired in a big way.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
I’m an exile fan. How about some archipelago off the Alaskan coast? The Rat Islands sounds about right? Eh?
Except that after a few years, people like Elizabeth Warren and others of her mostly mentally defective mindset will be hollering, “We need to end Mass Exile!” and “We shouldn’t separate criminals from their families!”
No, I think Duterte was on to something more workable. Just kill the criminals. One day, when America gets its very own Hitler type in charge of things, it is what he or she will do to restore order and civilization.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
You are awaiting a neo-Hitler to become fuehrer of the US ??? And that is supposed to be a good idea?
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
– Niemoller
I imagine that in America, they will first come for the criminals, gang members, and drug addicts. Whether it goes beyond that is anybody’s guess.
Pinochet was pretty successful in just getting rid of the Commies, and today Chile is in much better shape than say, Venezuela. I think a Mexican Hitler would be necessary to fix Mexico. There is some pretty good history of this, where the military has to take over a country and restore order.
I am pretty sure it will happen here, too. Probably a few decades off.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
If other states are as efficient as the New York State Department of Corrections, the entire inmate population can be housed for about $200 bn a year. We can afford that. What we arguably do need to work on is the optimal balance of resource allocation between various subsets of the law enforcement apparat. New York’s experience (better than average results with a prison census per capita about 40% below the mean) suggests that optimizing would mean devoting fewer resources to incarceration and more to police patrols. With regard to this particular case, it looks like he committed his crimes in jurisdictions where turn-’em’-loose is the order of the day.
i think that ny is more densely populated and that may be the factor that allows what you observed most of all.
The violent crime’s in those dense settlements.
What happens on the day that the criminals are turned loose? Unless they are in their 70s or something, they will simply return to their previous ways.
Execution, though, cuts straight thru all that. Plus, I think that once criminals realize that the government means business about killing them, large numbers of them will change their evil ways.
Your way, incarceration and heavy police presence is both costly and does practically nothing to end the general underlying lawlessness.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Unless they are in their 70s or something, they will simply return to their previous ways.
You’re under the illusion that the rate of recidivism is 100%. It isn’t.
No. I don’t think that. Here are some stats for you:
“Inmates who were released while younger than 21 showed the highest level of re-arrest (67.6%), while those who got out after age 60 had a re-arrest rate of 16%. The prisoners covered in the study averaged age 33 at time of sentencing and 36 at time of release. The study included 1,048 prisoners who were older than 60 when released or paroled, over 4% of the total.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-zoukis/report-documents-us-recid_b_9542312.html
I would also remind you that “successful” recidivists simply don’t caught. Therefore, since the recidivism rate is based on “caught” recidivists, we must presume that there are also “uncaught” recidivists, and therefore the rate errs on the low side.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Buzz off.
Well, I suppose you would like to see guillotines in every public square. Or do you prefer Stalin’s gulag system, if just exiling people and working them until they drop?
Leader in the clubhouse for most ill-informed post of the day. The utter lack of any factual or empirical foundation to support such harebrained inanities is simply breathtaking. While this in no way is intended to limit the matters you posted which are totally unsupported by evidence, just for one example: Texas releases approximately 70,000 people from prison each year. To subscribe to such a nonsensical belief that the totality “will simply return to their previous ways” is laughable, and a sorry reflection on your ability to use common sense in evaluating the dogmatic hogwash in which you immerse yourself. But it’s typical.
this is to SqueeKKK
Marky Mark Mark – could we get a cite for your empirical evidence? It shouldn’t be hard to prove.
Thank you for this information!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
God knows what would have happened to Rennie Defor Jr if instead of attempting to steal beer, that he’d asked Mehedeun Hasan to bake a Gay Wedding Cake!!!
Is Rennie Defor Jr getting married? How do you know he is gay?
I’d suggest a different approach next time for our intrepid shopkeeper. Stand in front of the thief’s car with gun drawn in combat position yelling for him to stop and drop. . At the slightest hint of an advance of the vehicle on your person, empty the clip into the center of the driver’s side windshield. If necessary, reload. Scenario changed and self-defense established.
Yeah, I’m sure trying to ruin this merchant’s life for giving a local hoodlum some condign punishment is an optimal use of resources. The courts are run by asses.
The idea is to protect the negro. In Black Run America, the entire rotten edifice is set up to protect their colored pets and to make whitey think twice about defending himself from negros or other colored/protected minorities. Regards whitey’s rights and well-being, well, that is not on the agenda.
The black population is largely composed of wage-earners and moderately impecunious. They run nothing but some municipal governments, a few dozen colleges and some interesting commercial enterprises here and there (e.g Johnson Publishing).
More precisely JRA (Jew-Run America). Jews raised the persecuted ‘impecunious’ negro to the status of a protected/endangered species, thus they are protected by the law (Jews control our legal/criminal justice system/jewdiciary) via Civil Rights, Affirmative-Action, and all of the other white and jew cuck B.S. that is denied us whiteys. Thank you for letting me clarify that.
Joe, blaming Jews like that, lets white folks off the hook for screwing up their own situation. Let me give you this social-darwinist viewpoint, that the anti-jewish critics avoid:
if whites could let the small number of jewish people in the US so completely control this country as asserted, they are by nature weak; and if so few white people are aware of it, then they are not only weak as a group but stupid, very much so. and thus, perhaps not fit to survive.
they arent weak or stupid, and they are fit to survive.
so, the premise of overweening jewish control is probably what’s flawed.
keep in mind their small numbers and the fact they are humans and not preternaturally empowered demonics.
life is complicated. pax vobiscum
Non sequitur. We whiteys have the attributes of a conscience/empathy/sympathy/compassion (these attributes are our fatal exploited flaw that I call White Disadvantage– as opposed to our so-called White Privilege). These attributes are encoded into our genome, and, with proper guidance, we develop these attributes to create stable and high-trust societies. Jews are the anti-thesis of this. They were clever enough to know that our own fatal flaws, as they see them, could be used against us. You see, the jews were expelled from many countries due to their destructive/parasitical/subversive behavior, since the Romans exiled them from Judea 2000 years ago. The jews had to ‘evolve’ a means to not let that happen in America. Thus, they insinuated themselves into those traditional ‘power levers’ e.g. politics, banking-finance, publishing, academia, entertainment (Hollywood/TV/radio/The Internet), advertising, the legal system/judiciary, etc. With their kind in firm control of these levers (a lever uses a small force to move/manipulate much larger objects), they now control immense wealth/influence to manipulate the pressure points and wield tremendous influence relative to their small numbers. Look at any controversy or controversial issue of the last 80 or so years, and you will find jews somewhere in the mix. Hint: you can Google it. MAGA vince!
Here ya go, trump cultist. This is your fellow traveler. Invite it over for dinner with the family. Your day glo bozo’s word and actions makes cretins like this think they’re something besides the inbred, ignorant piece of crap that they are. But by all means be sure and get a selfie with it at the next convention.
the above refers to angel garbage
Petite Snow-flake, the truth is brutal sometimes. You’ll be OK. Shake it off.