Wyoming already had reasonable self-defense laws on the books before state legislators bowed to pressure from the gun rights lobby and made ours the 25th state to pass a “stand your ground” law last year.
Numerous and diverse stakeholder groups lobbied against adoption at the time and I wrote a grim prediction in this column: Innocent people will die if ‘stand your ground’ passes.
The state has just seen the first case in which a defendant’s lawyer has invoked the new law to argue that his client had no choice but to kill an unarmed man.
What happened at a north Casper trailer park last Aug. 3 when Jason John shot and killed Wesley Willow is so highly questionable that the judge advised both sides at the outset of the first-degree murder case that her decision should be immediately appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court, according to a story in the Casper Star-Tribune.
During a hearing that lasted more than two hours, a police detective testified that John shot Willow nine times, including multiple rounds in his back, with an AR 15 rifle.
One round was fired into the back of Willow’s head, likely as he lay face down, according to the medical examiner.
John walked out of the courtroom a free man.
Without the stand your ground law, John would have faced a jury of his peers that would have heard the details, weighed the evidence and decided his guilt or innocence.
Instead, under the new law, Natrona County Judge Catherine Wilking held a dismissal hearing to decide if prosecutors could prove that John was not immune from prosecution. The prosecutor could not convince Wilking that John had a duty to retreat and not to use deadly force.
Natrona County District Attorney Dan Itzen took the judge’s advice and, in conjunction with the state attorney general’s office, is appealing Wilking’s decision.
But after what transpired in court last month, the public needs to ask state lawmakers a fundamental question: Is this the kind of justice you envisioned when you passed this law?
Both the Wyoming Senate and House voted overwhelmingly in favor of the stand your ground bill sponsored by Rep. Tim Salazar (R-Dubois) and Sen. Anthony Bouchard (R-Cheyenne), the former director of Wyoming Gun Owners.
That organization and the National Rifle Association mounted an all-out attack against legislators who opposed the bill, notifying all 30 senators in handwritten messages that any attempt to strip the bill of its immunity provisions would be viewed as an “anti-gun” vote.
The groups wanted total immunity from civil lawsuits for people who used the stand your ground law in their defense. The Senate didn’t bow to the pressure and it removed such immunity, but it passed the bill 26-4. The House also approved the measure by a 41-9 veto-proof margin.
Then-Gov. Matt Mead warily viewed the Legislature’s work and wondered if the bill was necessary. He let it become state law but without the endorsement of his signature.
Based on the John case, Mead was right to be concerned. Questions about the bill were raised by the Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association at committee meetings long before it arrived on the governor’s desk.
After “stand your ground” became law, Thomas Jubin, a Cheyenne attorney and WTLA lobbyist, correctly assessed the situation. “The laws that existed in Wyoming were clear and strongly allowed people to defend themselves,” Jubin told the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle. “This bill just makes hamburger out of that law. It’s more confusing than anything else.”
Indeed it is. Last Friday, after learning what happened in the John hearing, Jubin told me, “Some of these difficulties were certainly foreseeable and anticipated. I wish the Legislature would have left the common law as it existed without creating these problems by enacting this bill in 2018.”
He could also have said, “I told you so.”
Wyoming already had what is referred to as the “castle doctrine” in its statutes. It states that people who are in their homes do not have a duty to retreat from an attacker and may use deadly force if they believe they are in danger of losing their life or serious bodily harm.
The Legislature created the new criminal statute that requires a judge to hold a hearing to determine if a suspect is immune from prosecution. This effectively takes a jury trial — long the foundation of our justice system — out of the equation by putting it behind the nearly insurmountable prosecutorial hurdle of an immunity hearing. Essentially the law asks a prosecutor to prove a negative — a logical impossibility — before they can seek redress for a killing.
The details of the killing of Willow are murky at best and involve a love triangle. Allegedly John was at his trailer home when he received a call from Willow threatening to beat him up. When Willow showed up at the residence with John’s ex-girlfriend and another man, John was waiting on the porch with a rifle.
In interviews with police, John and the two witnesses differed in several details about what happened next. They agreed that John fired several shots at Willow while he approached John’s trailer, but other details, including whether John’s front door was open to Willow, exactly where the victim stood and what he was doing when he was shot, were disputed.
But there’s no doubt about how the encounter ended: Willow was on the floor in the trailer, his body riddled with bullets. EMTs pronounced him dead at the scene.
The way Wyoming’s stand your ground bill was originally written by Bouchard and Salazar and backed by the NRA and WGO, police could not have even arrested John if he had “credibly” claimed self-defense. That would have required an on-the-spot judgment that would have been incredibly difficult in many cases.
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Fortunately, the Legislature didn’t pass that version. But the John case shows beyond a doubt that the law they approved is a bad one.
If there is a civil lawsuit filed for wrongful death, another hearing will be held. If the court finds the use of force to be justified, it can award reasonable court costs, attorney’s fees and other compensation to the defendant.
John is presumed innocent unless proven guilty. Hopefully the Supreme Court will rule that he must be tried for first-degree murder as prosecutors determined was the proper action. Then a jury can decide whether self-defense justifies his killing of Willow.
Justice has not been served for Willow and his family, nor for John, who will live under a cloud of suspicion unless this case is further adjudicated. The public needs to hold state lawmakers accountable for their politically driven, ill-conceived attempt to change state self-defense laws.
That’s often what happens when idealogues use their undue influence to bend laws to conform to their beliefs. Sixty-seven legislators showed they were more concerned about what grade they would receive from the NRA than the public’s safety.
I believe they deserve an “F” rating and a rebuke from voters at the polls next election.
I love it when liberal writers trying to make a story fit their narrative. First off how many times or where you shoot someone is mostly irrelevant. Yet the writer mentions these points as key facts in the basis of his narrative. The more important details are left out like where the people were when first shots were fired. Instead the writer uses the term “murkey”, a clear indication the writer does not want to discuss the facts.He is only trying to bend the story to fit his narrative. Here are the facts: new boy friend calls exboy friend to threaten him for some reason. He brings his friend in case the ex boy friend is too much to handle. Weather he was on the roof or in the bushes is largely irrelevant. The law does not saw you can only defend yourself from the prone position or in your bedroom, or you have to wait till they beat the door down and then you are only allowed to shoot once and never a head shoot and you have to stop when you have the advantage. I would argue this is exactly the point of the law to keep from having to argue about the details or trying to apply logic to a chaotic situation, or argue about the restraint the victim could have used.
Clearly, shots fired from the front porch didn’t stop this assailant from proceeding towards someone who was clearly standing his ground from what he decided was his point of best defense against an intrusion from someone who has made clear his intentions.
Do you do any actual research into the facts or just copy and paste what your ideology tells you to write? What does any of this have to do with SYG? All it means is that you don’t have a duty to retreat, no more and no less. It is the standard in the world. While 25 states passed it by statute, many simply put in statute what was common law, all but 15 have it. I can’t think of a single country that doesn’t have SYG. They may define reasonableness different, but still SYG. If Wyoming’s immunity hearing is anything like Florida’s, the defendant has to show by preponderance of the evidence to a judge. If defendant doesn’t, it goes to trial and the State has to prove BARD that the killing wasn’t self defense.
Simply because there isn’t an arrest doesn’t mean there wasn’t an investigation.
Back to the story. This story reads that it was inside a house, making SYG not relevant.
https://trib.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/prosecutors-charge-man-with-first-degree-murder-in-connection-to/article_20ce448b-4237-5008-85de-55f43080db3f.html
“That’s often what happens when idealogues use their undue influence to bend laws to conform to their beliefs.”
Good point Mr. Drake, keep that in mind with all of your liberal whining……it works both ways, you reap what you sow.
Good article. People in places like Wyoming need to drop the “wild west”, gun loving nonsense and join the 21st Century. It’s as though gun nuts are trying to mount a last-ditch effort to assert their authoritarianism on the rest of us.
Gun nuts will fail. They are a tiny minority. People have had a bellyful of their nonsense!
Right, Harvey. I am sick of the “wild west”.
Thanks, Kerry Drake. I expect we will see more un-necessary deaths before this issue is resolved in favor of sanity.
I appreciate you, Mr. Drake, keeping an eye on the laws that our passed in our state. I believe it is true that WY sees itself as some kind of conduit to the power of the NRA… too bad common sense and sensible law making fall aside.
Thank you for your through commentary!
Kerry, you are the one that deserves an “F” for this commentary. Your analysis is very confusing and inconsistent.
Which words did you have trouble understanding? A man was shot nine times, some in his back , one to the back of his head as he lay on the floor because . . . why? This new law just gave every school shooter a defense. Try to think about that.
“This new law just gave every school shooter a new defense”? Really? How’s that? Defense against children carrying lunch boxes loaded with peanut butter sandwiches? What? Get real! Very knee jerk, emotional, irrational, thoughtless comment.