Hey Florida! How’s it hanging? Kinda loose, and to the right of unfathomable idiot-crazy just like always maybe?
Taking a cue from both Stand Your Ground and the Bush Doctrine (yes, the Bush Doctrine, just wait) Florida man William T. Woodward did the only thing he could to defend himself from imminent danger, he “snuck up” on three of his neighbors and unleashed a campaign of shock and awe on their Labor Day backyard barbecue in the form of over 50 rounds, killing two and severely injuring the third (the “shot him 11 times” kind of injured).
But wait, he has pretty serious back-ups to this plan you see, because now his lawyers have cited not only the state’s perfectly reasonable “Stand Your Ground” law, but also “President George W. Bush’s pre-emptive war in Iraq and the “Bush Doctrine” as a defense.” And really who could blame them?
In their motion, Woodward’s attorneys claimed that the victims had called him names and threatened to “get him.”
The motion referenced Enoch V. State, which suggests that an “imminent” threat can include something that is likely to occur at sometime in the future.
“I think legally that term has sort of been evolving especially given changes of our government’s definition of ‘imminent,’” attorney Robert Berry, who is representing Woodward, told Florida Today. “It’s become more expansive than someone putting a gun right to your head. It’s things that could become, you know, an immediate threat.”
You really can’t fault the dude’s attorneys for the obvious stand your groundness of this, even if it was the neighbor’s ground. Because after the outcome of the Zimmerman case, we understand that the law stands squarely for the proposition that you can hunt (the guy was in fact wearing the standard camos) and stalk someone to provoke them into confronting you, and if you get a shot, you can kill them. But the Bush Doctrine? That’s just ingenious.
The court document filed by the defense also cited “The Bush Doctrine,” a foreign policy principle used by President George W. Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. “The Bush Doctrine” embraces “preventive” or pre-emptive war.
And really, that is all this was. People do not just go around saying they are going to “get you” without starting a full on war, ya know? And this guy thought that they might could possibly really mean they were going to “get him” in the future, some day, maybe. And if the Bush Doctrine taught us anything, it is that one does not leave possible threats out there when they might be plotting to sneak up and attack. “Imminent threat” now means “something that might happen in the future” and “no duty to retreat” means “You can hunt down unarmed people and shoot the fucking shit out of them on their own property.”
And JUST LIKE in Iraq, No weapons of mass destruction have been discovered as of yet at the neighbor’s house, but William T. Woodward insists that he knows where they are, to the north, and east, and south, and west of the neighbor’s property lines. What else could he do? He had to take the gun he had, not the gun he wished he had (probably one of those real fast AR-15 would have come in real handy) and fight them over there, so he didn’t have to fight them at his house. Because they weren’t at his house, but still. And it was a party y’all, so insert your own joke about yellow-cake here.
By Fakakta South
[RawStory]
