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Dec. 1, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

02:04:08

Sidebar with Self-Defense Attorney, Andrew Branca - Viva & Barnes LIVE

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Time	Text
	I think we're exactly on time.
	No Fs.
	Oh, there's Fs in the chat already.
	Let me just bring up the obligatory Fs.
	Late again and all.
	Missed the beginning because of ads.
	Yeah, so I haven't figured that out yet, although I'm in the process of trying to figure it out.
	But so that no one misses anything of any importance, I'm just going to stare into the camera for 30 seconds.
	I'm joking.
	Tonight we have an amazing guest.
	The beautiful thing of this world of LawTube that we have managed to create amazing guests and guests who I've only met through this journey of the Law YouTube.
	Now, how is my mic?
	No jokes.
	Let me just go see if my mic is good.
	When everyone gets in, I'll fix it up.
	Andrew Branca, the law of self-defense.
	It's an amazing world where people have specialties that...
	They're unique specialties.
	And I've gotten to know Andrew in the context of the Rittenhouse trial.
	And I guess, you know, when you're a lawyer and when you're a lawyer analyst, there's always going to be stuff to look at and discuss and analyze.
	And we have no shortage of it tonight.
	So I'm going to give everyone a few minutes to come in for trickling in standard disclaimers.
	I think it's still going to be true of tonight.
	No legal advice.
	No medical advice, no election fortification undermining of the legitimacy of everything that has ever occurred in the history of the United States in Canadian elections.
	None of that.
	Superchats, by the way, here we go.
	You miffed my...
	Real Bambunga, thank you very much.
	Superchats, thank you all in advance for the support.
	YouTube takes 30%.
	So if you don't want to support the YouTube beast, we are simultaneously streaming on Rumble.
	Where you can find, I have an account on Rumble, Viva Fry, a link to our Locals page via Rumble.
	And Rumble takes only 20% of the Rumble rants.
	Oh, you're going to stop doing that.
	Hold on.
	Okay.
	So Rumble takes 20% so you can feel better supporting a company that you might feel better supporting who supports free speech.
	I think that's enough.
	I think that's enough.
	What else am I missing?
	Oh, yes.
	If I don't get to your Super Chat and you're going to be miffed, don't give it.
	Don't like people feeling rooked, rift, shilled, whatever it is.
	And be polite, be courteous.
	It's YouTube.
	It's the internet.
	We know how it works.
	We're all full-grown adults.
	But try to keep it courteous.
	And just because you paid for Super Chat, if it's abusive...
	I may not bring it up.
	And if I do bring up a comment that is rude or abusive, chances are I did not read it before bringing it up or brought it up by accident.
	Okay, with that said, Mad Scientist.
	It's getting there.
	It's getting there.
	I'm going to have to maybe bring the dog upstairs.
	But with that said, everybody, Andrew Branca, Robert Barnes.
	Gentlemen, how goes the battle?
	Good, good.
	Andrew, can you say something so I can make sure I can hear you?
	Sorry, I had muted my mic, but I'm back.
	Technology is not my strength.
	Well, I won't embarrass you, but yeah, you made that clear last week during the Rittenhouse live streaming on Ricada.
	Everyone in the chat, let us know what the volume I need to adjust, and I think we're going to go definitely not with that view.
	What's wrong with me?
	Do we like this better, or do we go back to the original one?
	We'll go back to this.
	Andrew.
	Elevator pitch for anybody who doesn't yet know who you are before we delve into your childhood and then get to modern times.
	Who are you?
	What do you do?
	I'm a small-town lawyer in Colorado.
	I do use-of-force law, meaning when can you use force in defense of yourself, others, or property?
	That's all I do.
	I don't have a generalized criminal legal defense practice.
	I've been doing nothing but that area of the law going into this year's 30 years.
	Published the first edition of my book, The Law of Self-Defense.
	And our day-to-day work is not usually what we're doing now.
	We've had all these trials come in sequence.
	And occasionally I get sponsored by people who want to offer some money to help subsidize my ability to cover these trials at this intensity.
	But we cover every minute of every hearing of the trial in real time, do an end-of-day analysis.
	At the end of each day, follow through deliberations and finally verdict with some more what we call plain English analysis.
	The real value we try to add here, because the area of the law I work in is not rocket science, but the value we try to add is to translate all the legalese from criminal law and procedure into plain English so normal people can understand it.
	But when we're not doing these trials, normally we're doing legal consulting on other attorneys' cases who are lead counsel for their own clients who've been charged with some use of force criminal offense.
	We do a lot of education, both for, I guess, normal people, but also for lawyers.
	We do CLE in more than 30 states on use of force law.
	And of course, we have our own membership website where we have blogging and video and podcasting for our paying members.
	Membership is less than $10 a month for people who are particularly interested in that.
	So it's kind of a diversified basket of ways that we try to deliver what value we have out into the marketplace.
	We try to tell people, look, if you carry a gun, so you're hard to kill.
	That's why I carry a gun.
	I have my entire adult life.
	I know they may not do that much in Canada, but we have different circumstances here in the U.S. If you carry a gun, then you better know the law, the real law of self-defense.
	Unfortunately, there's a lot of people out there who know a lot of self-defense law, and it's mostly wrong.
	It's mostly mistaken.
	It's mostly Internet myths or things they were taught in some CCW class by somebody who didn't know what they were talking about either.
	And the most common thing I hear in cases I consult on is that the client can't believe they're getting prosecuted for self-defense.
	Because in their head, they genuinely believe what they did was within the legal boundaries.
	They just didn't know where the actual legal boundaries were.
	And self-defense law is extremely unforgiving.
	It's very binary.
	Either you qualify for self-defense, you have zero criminal liability, or you don't.
	And you have 100% criminal liability.
	So what you thought was self-defense is suddenly just a murder.
	And you're going to prison for the rest of your life without possibility of early release.
	So it pays to know where the legal boundaries are and get it right.
	And by the way, if you do that, we say, you know, know the law so you're hard to convict.
	You are hard to convict.
	If you're well within the legal boundaries, the prosecution, they know they have to disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.
	They know what their burden is.
	Most of the time, the defendant makes it easy for them because they break one of the requirements.
	And then it's an easy prosecution.
	But if you stayed well within the legal limits, unless it's a politically motivated event, you're unlikely to get prosecuted.
	And even in politically motivated cases, you're unlikely to get convicted.
	And we're going to get into how you get into the specialty of self-defense and the intricacies of self-defense given different state laws.
	But we'll get there in a bit, just starting from the very, very, very beginning.
	Are you from Colorado, born and raised?
	No, I've only been here four or five years, but my wife was born and raised here.
	So we met in Massachusetts when she was going to graduate school for MBA.
	I was living in Massachusetts, had been for, well, I spent a total of 25 years there.
	That's actually where I'm barred.
	So I'm a member of the bar in the Commonwealth.
	I'm not a member of the bar in Colorado.
	The reason I never switched is Colorado has a CLE requirement and Massachusetts doesn't.
	And I don't want to have to take CLE every year because the only topic I'm interested in is one I already have expertise in.
	So what am I going to learn from any CLE course?
	But no, so we met in Massachusetts, and then about four or five years ago, life circumstances were such that we could finally move out here, as we'd long planned.
	And now we live between Denver and Colorado Springs.
	Now, were you originally from Massachusetts?
	Because you don't have the Ka accent.
	New York.
	New York metro area.
	Queens, Long Island, Suffolk County.
	That's where I went to.
	Well, I went to college in upstate New York.
	I went to law school back down at Hofstra on Long Island.
	But immediately after graduating law school, I did something incredibly stupid, and I met a girl from Massachusetts, and I followed her there.
	So that proved to be an imprudent decision over the long term, but as circumstances happened, I ended up trapped in Massachusetts for the next 25 years.
	A lot like a prison sentence, actually.
	So undergrad, then you go to law school, or straight to law school and then straight to practice?
	No, high school, then college for five years.
	There were a lot of girls in college.
	And then after college, straight to law school and from law school, more or less straight into practice.
	But my first few years, I had a very diversified career.
	It was a combination of law and a variety of other things.
	What were some of those other things?
	Mostly life sciences consulting for the biotech industry.
	In Massachusetts.
	And I don't have a degree in science, but it turns out if you can talk well and reason well and present well, you can make a lot of money doing consulting in subjects you don't know that much about.
	So start off with the practice that you originally had or that you started off in Massachusetts.
	How long did you practice there for?
	And what did you specialize in?
	I'm going to move the dog upstairs.
	So field this one.
	I'll be back in one second.
	Sure.
	So I kind of moved in and out of different areas of the law.
	When I first passed the bar, I just hung up my shingle, got a little office with a suite of other lawyers, and we would just hand work back and forth, doing anything you could get, really, DWIs, house closings, the usual stuff that you can go to the bar and take courses in and overnight know how to do that kind of practice and make enough money to pay your rent.
	But I was only doing that maybe about a year before I started doing this life sciences consulting work, which was great.
	I loved it.
	A lot of international travel.
	It had legal aspects as well, mostly contractual stuff.
	But I wouldn't really call it.
	It was 80% not law work.
	And the law work was boring stuff.
	What did your parents do?
	Do you have any siblings?
	I do.
	Both my sisters married well.
	So that's what they did.
	My dad ran a family business that was a truck repair and sales shop.
	I used to, since I was 12 or 13 years old, I was working as a diesel mechanic there at the family business, all the way through high school and into college.
	So yeah, I mean, I'm really an old school diesel mechanic at heart, but that's a young man's kind of job, and I knew I didn't want to do that forever.
	That was really about it for the family.
	We just lived on Long Island, suburban neighborhood.
	It was nice.
	It was safe.
	Yeah, America in the 80s was pretty good.
	And so how long did you live in Massachusetts, ultimately?
	25 years.
	25 years, but mostly because I got married, and that didn't work out well for 13 years.
	And then I got divorced, but I had two kids in the marriage, and we had joint custody of the kids.
	And although the marriage was horrible, the divorce was amicable.
	And of course, I didn't want to leave without my kids and couldn't take them with me.
	So until they graduated high school, I was in Massachusetts.
	So that was the life event that finally, when they finally graduated, I could move out and move to Colorado.
	And by the way, they ended up following, both of them followed me to Colorado.
	So they both live within 30 minutes of me now.
	Did they go to college out there?
	They're not yet.
	One of my oldest, my son, is kind of special needs.
	He'll probably never go to college.
	My daughter...
	When she was in high school, she worked a lot of jobs as a waitress at hamburger shops and stuff like that.
	She'd come home and say, man, I'm working with a lot of people who went to college, and now they're working as a waitress in a hamburger shop, and they got $100,000 in student debt.
	She says, I don't want to do that.
	I said, well, I don't want you to do that either.
	When you're ready to go to college, you know what you want to do.
	Let me know.
	We'll make it happen.
	But don't go there just to waste your time and get brainwashed.
	So she's got a variety of jobs here in the Denver area while she's trying to figure out exactly what she wants to do with her life.
	But it's all potential.
	I mean, whenever she's ready to go, it's fine with me.
	I'm just going to read this one.
	Just wanted to say how beautiful, how brilliant, how wonderful you are.
	Wait, you're not Andrew.
	And by the way, this is not the Omicron.
	I just inhaled some of my own saliva because I've forgotten how to actually swallow at 42 years of age.
	So Andrew, your practice of law...
	By and large was what?
	Was it criminal defense before you got into this?
	It was everything.
	It was a basket.
	Young lawyer just passed a bar.
	I did everything.
	Did house closings, DWIs, assault cases, whatever.
	What led to self-defense?
	Well, I've been a lifelong member of the gun community.
	Since I was a kid, I was shooting small bore rifle competitively at state-level competition, so I was fairly good.
	And then when I became an adult, turned 21, I could buy handguns.
	I got heavily into pistol competitions.
	In fact, I have some awards on the wall behind me here, the more colorful ones.
	And I'd go to these pistol matches, and everyone knew I was a lawyer, although they didn't know that if you're a lawyer for three years, you don't actually know anything.
	But they'd say, Andrew, you're a lawyer.
	When are we allowed to shoot people?
	And I'd be like, oh, my God, I don't know.
	And I had a concealed carry permit even in Massachusetts.
	So I'm one of these guys walking around with a gun, and I don't really know what the rules are.
	Because they don't teach us this in law school.
	I don't know how it was.
	For you guys, but in three years of law school, we spent maybe a few minutes on self-defense justification in first-year criminal law.
	That was it.
	Barely scratches the surface.
	And there weren't a lot of resources available afterwards for lawyers, and definitely not for laypeople.
	I mean, not good stuff, not stuff based on actual law.
	And Massachusetts, they don't codify their self-defense law.
	It's all case law, except for their castle doctrine.
	They have a statute for that.
	Which, of course, then they constrain to a ridiculous extent.
	But to learn self-defense law in Massachusetts, I had to go read dozens and dozens and dozens of appellate court decisions, which I did.
	But if you ever spend time in the Northeast, those states are small.
	I mean, Massachusetts, you drive half an hour in any direction.
	Now I'm shooting a match in New Hampshire or Vermont or Rhode Island or Connecticut.
	And so people are asking me the same questions there.
	And of course, it's a different state, different set of laws.
	So I said, well, I may as well learn those two.
	So I went back to the library, did primary research, and what I discovered was self-defense law doesn't vary very much across the 50 states.
	I mean, after I did New England, I said, wow, this looks, I see a pattern.
	Let me look at all the other states.
	And it doesn't vary much.
	Of course, they all have their own statutes and court decisions and jury instructions, but the underlying legal principles are essentially the same in all 50 states, and that's because it's very old law, very well-established law.
	We adopted it as a new nation from...
	One nation's law, English common law.
	And they had adopted it through thousands of years from the old Greeks and Romans.
	Some will call it natural law, right?
	Even animals know that they have a privilege to defend themselves from attack and will.
	You don't need a human being to tell you to do that.
	So when I discovered that...
	The principles were fundamentally the same across all 50 states.
	That's when I wrote the first edition of my book, which covered all 50 states.
	People read that book, and then I started getting calls from various lawyer organizations to teach CLE, so I started traveling around the country doing that.
	Then I started getting calls from gun shops and gun organizations saying, hey, can you teach this stuff to non-lawyers?
	And I didn't see any reason why not.
	Again, it's not rocket science, folks.
	This stuff is not that complicated.
	So I started doing that for many years.
	I was traveling 40, 45 weeks a year.
	Weekends a year teaching this stuff.
	And even before COVID, three, four years before COVID, I said, well, that's enough of that.
	And basically, we do everything online now in this online world.
	We still sell DVDs.
	I can't believe people buy DVDs.
	I don't even own a DVD player.
	But we put our courses on DVD.
	We have a separate course for all 50 states.
	We have what we call our core course that covers the basic principles.
	We offer it online streamed.
	And, of course, now we do our membership.
	So just about every day we do a podcast or a video or a blog post, usually all three.
	And so most of our contact now with our market is virtual, like I guess it is for a lot of people.
	In the context of your practice, did you defend self-defense a lot or was it sort of, I'd say, academically acquired and then applied as a...
	Yeah, I always tell people I'm best thought of as an academic.
	So I did trial work early in my career.
	It wasn't much of trial.
	I mean, it was joke-level stuff, you know, little common criminal court stuff.
	But I haven't done trial work in 20 years, so I'm not a trial attorney.
	I don't hold myself out like that.
	If someone came to me and wanted to retain me for trial work, I wouldn't take the job.
	I wouldn't consider myself competent to do that.
	There's a lot that goes into even a self-defense trial other than use of force law.
	There's tons of stuff.
	And all that other stuff can make or break the case all by itself.
	So my expertise is very, very narrowly defined.
	So I never have a client directly, someone who's been charged as a client.
	All my clients are other attorneys.
	They're the lead counsel on their cases, and I provide consulting services in this narrow niche of use of force law.
	By the way, it turns out that's great, guys.
	If any lawyers are out there watching, it's pretty nice to have a law practice with no clients.
	Well, and so do you get called in as an expert, or do you do back sort of...
	Usually it's back office stuff.
	I've never had to testify in court as an expert.
	And frankly, I'm not sure why I would, because it wouldn't make sense to me.
	My expertise is the law.
	So usually my work product is an expert report and some phone calls with the lawyer client.
	The expert report's usually a couple hundred pages long, very comprehensive, as you might imagine.
	We're most effective at law self-defense when we're brought in very early, before the prosecutors made an absolute decision to go to trial.
	The lead counsel can present him with this analysis and say, look, this is what it's looking like if we go to trial.
	Do you really want to do this?
	Because prosecutors don't like to take cases to trial that look like they're going to be really hard.
	They have so many easy cases to prosecute that they may as well take those to trial.
	So usually we have an almost 100% success rate in either getting charges dismissed or at least having the client put into a diversion program so if they keep their nose clean, the charges end up going away.
	We do occasionally get brought in late in the trial.
	In fact, just about a year ago, we had a murder case dismissed two weeks before he was going to trial, based on our analysis, which I was shocked at.
	I mean, I told that client, listen, they've been prosecuting your client for two years.
	They're not going to quit now.
	But they did.
	So that was great.
	It was a young woman who had killed somebody, defended herself over a one-night stand, a guy she'd never met before that night.
	And he died, and she got charged with murder.
	She was 20 years old, looking at spending the rest of her life in a cage.
	And we got her life back, so that was great.
	But I always recommend people, if you're going to bring us on board, bring us on board early, because there comes a point when the prosecutor, you know, if he's been engaged for a year and a half or something, everyone in his office knows he's been working on the case, and he's kind of politically committed to moving forward with it, and it's very difficult to derail that train when it has so much momentum.
	But anyway, I don't know why anyone would call me as an expert witness, because my expertise is the law, and once you're in court, the judge is the expert in the law.
	You know, then the lawyers, and they argue whatever they think their perceptions of the legal provisions are, and the judge decides which one he thinks is right.
	But it would be odd to me for those three people to bring in an expert to testify in the witness stand to actually provide testimony in the law itself.
	So that's never happened.
	I mean, I guess I would do it if somebody asked me, but I don't know why they would.
	Yeah, I mean, usually judges are experts in the law, unless, of course, it's the Ahmaud Arbery case.
	And then the judge is playing, you know, practice pilot.
	Law?
	What law?
	I'll just read it and let you guess what it is.
	I guess I should clarify.
	They think they're experts in the law.
	And therefore, they tend to be resistant to bringing in an outside expert on that issue.
	No doubt.
	Now, what was the first self-defense case, Piper, that you covered, that you commented on and followed in detail?
	The biggest one people would know off the top of their heads would be George Zimmerman.
	And that was a weird circumstance because I was writing, you know, I had a little tiny website, an old website, you know, like HTML, you know, before we had all this WordPress stuff.
	And I would write my little things there for a few thousand people to look at, I guess.
	And I came across this website called Legal Insurrection.
	It's run out of Cornell Law School by Professor William Jacobson.
	And he does a lot of political and some legal posts, and he had some content there in the Zimmerman trial.
	And I started commenting in the comments saying, no, no, no, you got this all wrong.
	You don't understand how any of this works, basically, of course, in more polite language than that.
	And he actually reached out to me.
	He says, well, it sounds like you know what you're talking about.
	Why don't you cover this trial for us?
	And I did.
	And, of course, the whole trial just exploded in the public consciousness.
	And I'm sure it helped his website a great deal and got me a lot of exposure.
	And that's when we really kind of redoubled our efforts to make this really our soul.
	Andrew, okay, so your catch line is hilarious, and it's also double hilarious for a Canadian.
	Carry a gun so you're hard to kill.
	Know the law so you're hard to convict.
	It is like Dirty Harry-ish sounding to someone who's from Quebec, where you can't even officially own a firearm for the purposes of self-defense.
	You can own it for target practice, hunting, yada yada.
	You can use it for self-defense, but if people get the slightest whiff that you're following a firearm safety course for long arms for the purposes of self-defense, you will get turned down for your license afterwards.
	So your catch line is awesome.
	I get it.
	I mean, I worked for two years in Europe, in the Netherlands, where it's also quite difficult to get firearms.
	And they would ask me all the time, hey, you're an American.
	You must have guns, right?
	How many guns do you have?
	And I'd be like...
	I don't know.
	I'd have to think about it.
	I mean, I've been buying guns since I was a kid, you know, so there's quite a few.
	And I'd start counting on my fingers and then on my toes, and then I'd give them a rough number, and they'd be shocked.
	And I'd say, listen, if you're shocked at that, you should ask me how much ammunition I have.
	Well, so the question is this, though.
	I mean, you carry a gun in states where you're allowed to, but there are states that I presume have...
	Different laws for concealed carries.
	You're not allowed, period, carrying a gun in some states.
	Right.
	So, for example, I carried in Massachusetts the entire 25 years I was living there on my Massachusetts concealed carry permit, but you can only have that as a resident.
	So once I moved from Massachusetts, I lost that.
	If I go back to Massachusetts today, I can't carry a gun.
	My sister lives in New Jersey.
	I can't carry a gun there.
	My other sister lives in California.
	I can't carry a gun there.
	So there's a handful of states where they make it effectively impossible, especially for non-residents.
	But most states have a certain degree of reciprocity for the concealed carry permits.
	And frankly, that influences where I go.
	I mean, I don't go to a state where I can't carry unless it's for family reasons or it's a compelling work reason.
	If I'm traveling for pleasure, and I do a lot of traveling, my other hobby besides shooting is riding my motorcycle, and I ride it everywhere.
	I just don't go places where I can't bring a gun with me.
	I want to ask the obvious question, but...
	Is this just preference conditioning, or have you done things in the past that makes a lot of people want to dislike you?
	Well, you know, if you're on the internet, you get haters, right?
	You cover these high-profile cases.
	You get plenty of hate.
	People want to kill you.
	They want to kill your kids.
	They want to set your house on fire.
	Nobody ever shows up, you know, but of course, you can't count on that.
	But, you know, you go through life.
	There's a lot of violent crime in America.
	I mean, your chances of being a victim in a violent crime in America is not in your lifetime.
	It's not one in a million.
	It's like one in 60. So it's pretty darn good.
	Now, of course, if you have the means to try to optimize your life in such a way that you reduce that risk, right?
	You live in a good neighborhood and all this kind of stuff.
	You intentionally don't go to places.
	I mean, I've been in lots of circumstances where I suddenly found myself in a situation where I'm like, man, I'm really glad I have my gun.
	This is pretty sketchy.
	And then, of course, I immediately think, if I'm glad I have my gun, it's time to get out, right?
	This is not a good place to be if you think you need a gun to be here.
	So you kind of...
	Almost because you have the gun, you become more careful, or at least you should be more careful, more sensitive to risks in the environment, because the last thing you ever want to do is actually have to go to that gun.
	I mean, that's a nightmare, as we all see from these trials.
	Unfortunately, you know, a gun is very, very, very rarely the answer to whatever the problem is.
	But when it is the answer, it's usually the only answer.
	Nothing else will do.
	Were you surprised when you entered into this field that there were so few people in it?
	In other words, I understand from the market of economics of the law that there's not enough self-defense cases in any one jurisdiction for that to be someone's expertise in a way drug cases could be and things like that.
	But I was surprised that you're really the only one that I'm aware of.
	That really focuses on this area, and that's been true for decades.
	And I find that I was surprised by that, given how important self-defense rights and knowledge about self-defense rights is to constitutional liberty in America.
	Well, the difficulty is, you know, if you're a typical lawyer, as you say, you work out of your office, your clients come from some proximity to your office generally, there aren't enough self-defense cases within that proximity, at least with people who have money, to support.
	A law practice based on that.
	The only way to do it is to be working kind of on a 50-state level.
	The only way to do that is to know self-defense law in all 50 states.
	That's a lot of work.
	I mean, I've done it, but it didn't happen overnight.
	It took me a lot, a lot of work.
	And then once you have that, then you need the presence for people to be aware that you exist so work comes your way from 50 different states.
	I work out of my office here in Colorado, but nobody ever comes here.
	Nobody would ever know me here except for the internet.
	I mean, the internet makes all this possible, really.
	But unless someone is willing to do that, develop that 50-state expertise, maintain that kind of profile, I mean, listen, I wouldn't mind if there were competitors out there, but they're going to have to work awfully hard if they're going to work harder than me.
	It's the one thing that nobody appreciates of lawyers is they ask a lawyer a question and they say, well, you know the answer.
	I'm just asking you a question.
	Give it to me for free.
	And then they don't appreciate that you in particular, Andrew, because it's a very concrete example.
	To understand the law...
	To acquire that expertise is years of training.
	It's years of study.
	And it may come off quickly in the moment, but that's only because of the years of study and the years of expertise development.
	And it's always ongoing.
	I mean, it never ends because there's always different permutations of issues that come up.
	There's always variance.
	The fundamental principles are pretty solid.
	Self-defense law changes very rarely.
	Gun law, which is completely different.
	I don't do that at all.
	Gun law changes a lot.
	High degree of variance among the states, even within states.
	A state like New York has different gun laws for the five boroughs of New York City than it does for Nassau County, Suffolk County, Westchester, upstate New York.
	It's insane.
	So I don't do gun law at all.
	What kind of permits you need, I know enough of that stuff to do what I do as a guy who owns guns as a private citizen, but I don't claim any particular legal expertise there.
	Use of force law is relatively stable, but what gets complicated is not the principles of the law itself.
	They're pretty stable.
	What gets complicated is the human factor.
	The ways that people come up to mess that up, that gets complicated.
	People are extremely creative in how they'll turn something that could have been a lawful use of force into self-defense into something that looks sketchy enough that they're getting prosecuted for.
	And we should...
	Sorry, go ahead, Robert.
	Oh, have you been surprised at how self-defense has become, or at least the cases that concern them, become so politicized?
	You know, including, like, the Zimmerman case, a case that didn't have to be politicized, but arguably never would have been brought, but for its politicization.
	I was shocked when it happened with the Zimmerman trial, because I honestly thought, when I started looking to that trial, and the trial was really interesting on a lot of levels.
	One is the defense attorneys, Mark O'Mara and Don West, made the entire evidence file available on the internet, and normally you don't have access to that.
	I mean, again, another boon of the internet.
	And I went through, and it was a lot of evidence, and I went through all of it, and as I'm going through it, I'm looking for the evidence that's inconsistent with self-defense, that motivated the prosecutor on the legal merits to bring this case, and I can't find it.
	I can't find anything that's inconsistent with self-defense.
	And then the trial actually starts, and I'm waiting, you know, the case is presenting its witnesses and such, and I'm waiting for when they're going to get to the point where they're presenting anything, testimony, anything that's inconsistent with self-defense.
	And it never happened.
	I mean, there was nothing there at all.
	And as I looked into it further, kind of a meta look behind the scenes, I realized what was happening.
	The prosecutor who took that case, she was running for re-election.
	She was going to lose.
	She had a large part of her, I'll call it a district, I don't know what they call it in Florida where she was, but a large part of the district was African Americans.
	She had done a couple of very unpopular prosecutions of African Americans.
	There were marches in the street against her.
	When she was running for re-election, until she took on the Zimmerman case.
	Which, by the way, she had to move to a different judicial district to do that.
	But she took on the Zimmerman case, and suddenly there were marches for her.
	She was at the head of those marches.
	And she miraculously won re-election when she was doomed to lose.
	And I always hear people say, hey, Zimmerman won that trial.
	And he did.
	Acquittal, all charges, unanimous jury verdict.
	So the prosecutor must have lost, right?
	And I'm like, well, it depends on the value of lost, right?
	I mean, she lost a criminal trial.
	But she won re-election.
	What was the actual point?
	Because I don't think she believed she was going to get a conviction in that case.
	Certainly not on the legal merits.
	You never know when you're going to bamboozle a jury or they'll be terrified of the public reaction if they acquit.
	But that reaction was, it was loud then, but it was nothing like the scale we have today.
	I mean, guys like Benjamin Crump have become much more proficient at energizing those kinds of cases than they were 10 or 12 years ago.
	But I think the real point of that case had nothing to do with the legal merits.
	It had to do with her winning re-election.
	And in that sense, she won.
	All she had to do was destroy the life of George Zimmerman to do it.
	I remember there being tremendous political pressure for the conviction of Zimmerman at the time.
	But, and I realize now that I know nothing,'cause I think I still have in my memory a lot of the inaccuracies from fake narratives that were running at the time.
	Just wanna bring this one up.
	It says, "Please ask AB, presume that means Andrew Bronco, if you've seen the movie "The Trayvon Hoax".
	Very entertaining, shocking, has a beautiful Instagram model, a fraud exposed by surreptitiously gathered DNA, and Rachel." I haven't seen the movie.
	I haven't heard about it.
	But that case, I remember being the first one where the public was demanding a conviction.
	And then when it didn't happen, there was by no means the same outrage or media outrage.
	But there was still outrage nonetheless.
	Without getting into it...
	One dynamic that was different there was everyone just assumed he was going to get convicted.
	Because if all you knew was what the media told you, there was no way you could have an acquittal.
	This guy had racially profiled a 12-year-old black boy with iced tea and Skittles and killed him in cold blood because he wanted to be a cop.
	That was the narrative.
	And how could you possibly acquit anybody like this?
	And unless you watched the actual trial, you would have no idea that there was an opposing narrative.
	So when I say the energy was less, I don't mean that...
	Kind of propaganda wasn't being put out there.
	But no one was afraid it wasn't going to work.
	Everyone just assumed it was going to work.
	How could it come out any other way?
	Unless you watched the trial and saw the actual evidence and legal arguments.
	So when he got acquitted, the reaction was largely unbelievable shock.
	How could this have happened?
	How is it possible?
	And the lies, the propaganda was so effective.
	I teach occasionally at the FBI Academy at Quantico about these high-profile cases that are propagandized, where a false narrative is put out there that's effective, that convinces people, and then the public is outraged when there's an acquittal in these cases.
	And, of course, Zimmerman is a classic model of this, so I often use this as an example.
	And one of the lies around the Zimmerman case is that he was told by the police dispatcher not to get out of his car, and he got out anyway.
	Now, we know what the conversation was between him and the dispatcher because it's all recorded.
	We have the entirety of the recording.
	So we know everything that was said or not said in that recording.
	And in fact, the dispatcher never told him not to get out of his car.
	It's a complete fabrication.
	And I'll teach at the FBI Academy and got an audience there in their auditorium, very nice auditorium, two, three hundred special agents, senior law enforcement from around the country.
	And I'll ask him, how many people think George Zimmerman was told not to get out of his car, then did it anyway?
	Every hand goes up.
	Every single hand.
	And these are what an audience you would think would be sophisticated about this kind of stuff.
	And then I'll actually play them the 9-1-1 tape that proves demonstrably it never happened.
	And you know how many people in that audience are convinced?
	Maybe half.
	The other half, their faces just go completely blank, like they cannot emotionally absorb that this narrative was false, partly because they've heard it a thousand times.
	And partly because they've repeated it a thousand times.
	They themselves have become emotionally committed to this narrative.
	And it's very difficult for human beings to break that.
	You have to really have very little hubris and have a willingness to really question your own beliefs before you can kind of absorb that you've been told a lie and have been effectively telling a lie for years.
	It's Mark Twain's.
	It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them they've been fooled because they become emotionally invested and they feel stupid for having been fooled in the first place.
	I now will say that I know nothing of the Zimmerman case because when you said that and I saw it on another podcast, I was like, yeah, I would have answered yes.
	And I would still say, I mean, I'll go listen to the recordings, but I'll take your word for it, Andrew.
	But the question is going to be...
	For people who are firmly invested in the lie, they'll say, okay, so they didn't tell him not to get out of his car, but he still did it anyhow.
	He wanted to play cop.
	He wanted to play judge, jury, and executioner like Rittenhouse, and they'll still go ahead and believe the lie nonetheless.
	So here's what happens in these cases, is they don't tell one lie like that.
	They'll tell six lies.
	In fact, when I covered the case, I did a whole bunch of Mythbusters series.
	Mythbusters was still popular on TV.
	I don't even know if it's on the air anymore, but I did a whole bunch of Mythbusters, at least six lies that were just...
	Made up about the Zimmerman case.
	And if anybody's interested in that, by the way, we have them all archived at lawofselfdefense.com slash Zimmerman.
	It's free, open access.
	You don't have to pay me anything.
	Don't have to leave an email.
	We make it freely available out of public interest.
	But they'll have six of these major lies.
	And then when you go to challenge the lies, you'll start with the car one.
	And then you'll go to, and they'll say, all right, you've proven it.
	That's fine.
	But what about this other one?
	And you'll do that one too, and the third one, and the fourth one, and the fifth one, and the sixth one.
	And now you've clearly, demonstrably disproven all six.
	And you know what they do?
	They circle right back to the car one like you never talked about it in the first place.
	I mean, that's how effective this propaganda is.
	It's kind of a laundry list of excuses.
	And when you get to the bottom of the list, they just start back at the top of the list.
	If not that specific individual, then somebody else in the chat does it.
	And it's a never-ending circle.
	If people don't want to know the truth, it's impossible to convince them.
	Now, have you been surprised at the rise of, or what I would call the return of a style of lawyering that goes back to plays like Chicago as it was featured, but the Ben Crump politicization, grifter personality who weaponizes the political process and the legal process to line his own pockets?
	As a civil rights lawyer, I've seen the blowback and seen the consequences.
	More and more people distrust civil rights cases because of how badly damaged Ben Crump has inflicted on civil rights cases just by association in the If they think every client is a George Floyd...
	Their willingness to, in most jurisdictions, because most jurisdictions are not the liberal Twin Cities, is to be hostile to your client.
	I mean, I had a case where police officers treated a human being literally like a garbage bag.
	I mean, it was on video.
	Judges were vomiting at seeing what they saw.
	And yet when we got to the jury pool, we had to settle the case quickly.
	Because it was clear the jury was going to be hostile because they wouldn't believe any civil rights case anymore because of what...
	What's your sense of that?
	Have you seen that?
	And how much is what Ben Crump does damaging and harmful to civil rights in America?
	So I don't have your civil rights perspective.
	I've never done that kind of work.
	But what I see from the criminal defense end is that...
	I don't know if Benjamin Crump created this.
	I'm not sure we can credit him with that.
	But he certainly spotted the opportunity.
	And that is that...
	All the drivers around these cases are in one direction now.
	There's nothing but money and political capital to be made off these cases if you engage in political prosecutions, and there's no downside.
	So if all the incentives are in one direction, that is the direction that things will go.
	For guys like Benjamin Crump, they're getting $10 million apiece, just their third of whatever the settlement is.
	They're getting that.
	He never goes to trial.
	I mean, he never has to go.
	These are all settlements.
	27 million here, 25 million there.
	You're getting a third of that a few times a year.
	Pretty soon you're talking real money.
	And so other lawyers see this, too.
	So if they're willing to engage in the same grift, well, now you have multiple actors out there driving these cases.
	And, of course, then you have the political capital drivers for the prosecutors.
	You know, their name is in the press now.
	For months, right?
	You look at Binger.
	I mean, I look at Binger from an ethical perspective.
	I think the guy's a dirtbag.
	He's not a stupid lawyer, though.
	He knew how to work the legal levers in that courtroom.
	He certainly knew how to work that judge.
	And his community thinks he's a hero.
	I mean, either they win the case and they get the convictions and then they look like winners in the traditional sense, or they end up with acquittals, but they still fought the good fight.
	And they had their name in the newspaper.
	So, you know, he's a political actor, Binger, right?
	He ran for...
	Whatever local district attorney before or in a local adjacent jurisdiction.
	He didn't win that time, but it's not going to hurt his name recognition that he was in the papers for six weeks on this trial.
	And there's no incentive for him not to do it.
	There's no consequences for any of that nonsense they pulled.
	There's no consequences like the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case was Angela Corey.
	They effectively hid Brady evidence, exculpatory evidence from the defense there.
	Absolutely zero consequence.
	A common thing you see in many of these political prosecutions is because there's no legal merit to the case, they have to fabricate legal merit.
	And they'll do that in the charging document or the information or whatever they're using, and they'll make some outrageous inflammatory claim in that document.
	So that ramps up the political pressure.
	We've got to bring this case forward.
	It makes it so judges don't want to dismiss on a probable cause hearing because now we're dealing with a racist or a white supremacist or whatever, and you don't want to look like you're protecting one of those people, obviously.
	So they'll just make up nonsense in the criminal charge, criminal complaint, the information.
	And when you get to trial, that inflammatory claim is gone.
	It never exists.
	And that was the catalyst that drove this defendant into a courtroom.
	And it doesn't actually exist.
	It was all faked.
	And those documents are sworn under penalty of perjury.
	And nothing ever happens to those people.
	It drives me absolutely insane.
	And the effect is we have...
	You know, there are supposed to be thresholds, safety measures that a prosecutor has to get past before they can drag somebody into a criminal trial, like a probable cause hearing.
	We just don't have that, like a grand jury.
	I mean, we have them, but they're completely rubber stamps for the prosecutor.
	There's effectively no limit.
	If you do anything that could possibly be characterized as a violation of the criminal law, off the trial you go if they want you to go.
	And if they want you to go...
	It gets really expensive, really fast, easily hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there's never a 0% risk of conviction.
	I don't care how innocent you are.
	You're in front of a jury.
	I mean, if you don't believe me, just watch jury selection on any one of these trials that we cover and listen to some of those prospective jurors.
	They could be your jurors.
	You think they're going to make the smartest decision in the world?
	Maybe.
	But is there a 10% chance they don't?
	Yep.
	So every case I work and I say, listen, It's important to get the charges dismissed.
	We could argue this at trial, but I believe you're completely innocent.
	We put you in front of a jury.
	This is a 10% chance you get convicted, and then you're looking at 20 years or more.
	I talk a lot, guys.
	I apologize.
	I don't mean to.
	One of the ideas you've suggested that's now starting to catch on, Oklahoma State Senators proposing it, is Kyle's Law.
	Could you describe what the intent of that is and the need, the exigent need for it?
	Right.
	So in a lot of these politically motivated cases, they're bringing someone to trial where they know they have to disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.
	Now, the courts don't like it.
	Appellate courts don't like it when you assign a percentage number to what beyond a reasonable doubt means.
	But let's pretend it's 90%.
	It's a very high threshold.
	And then you see these cases brought, and the prosecutor, you know, if they fell a little bit short...
	85%, 80%, 75%, you'd say, okay, well, that's a matter of judgment.
	You know, you're not quite sure how the evidence is going to go at trial and how it will be perceived by the jury and so forth.
	But they have nothing.
	They have nothing that's inconsistent with self-defense.
	They're vastly short of 50% of the evidence.
	In other words, if we had real probable cause hearings, the case should have been tossed out at a probable cause.
	It's not more probable than not that this person committed this crime as charged.
	It should never have gotten a trial.
	So what Kyle's Law proposes is, all right, And there's a state that does part of this.
	So Washington State has a legal provision that says, hey, if it's a self-defense case and the jury decides, all right, we're going to acquit this guy, you can also give them a special verdict form.
	And on that verdict form, it says, hey, do you believe that the states failed to disprove self-defense by even 51%?
	You know, to get a conviction, it had to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
	It had to be 90%.
	Had they failed to achieve even 51%.
	If you believe they failed to meet even that low threshold, The state will reimburse that defendant for his legal and other expenses in that case.
	What I'm suggesting is every state should adopt that, but also, if that threshold is not met, the prosecutor should be held responsible, either for a malicious prosecution or personally responsible for some fraction of the monetary compensation to the defendant, because until the prosecutor, he doesn't care if money's coming out of the general fund.
	For somebody, it's still to his political advantage to bring these cases.
	Until they have skin in the game and they're held accountable for bringing these bullshit cases, these politically motivated cases, they're never going to stop.
	And unfortunately, there's no easy way to define what's politically motivated, right?
	You can't read someone's mind.
	So what I'm choosing is a more objective measure that the jury will decide, just like we have the jury decide beyond a reasonable doubt in every criminal case, by preponderance of the evidence in every civil case.
	We allow juries to do this.
	This is an accepted part of the process.
	They make the determination of whether self-defense was not even disproven by half.
	And if they come to that conclusion, the state pays, the prosecutor pays, they're held accountable.
	By the way, I would also hold accountable, there should be another special jury form, where these claims in the charging document, not proven by a preponderance of the evidence, and hold the person who swore to that charging document liable as well.
	That charging document could have ended up with that defendant going into a cage for the rest of their life.
	And they just get to lie on that.
	Like, pretend they have personal knowledge of this and sign it under oath.
	You know they don't have personal knowledge because you know it never happened.
	So they should be held accountable at all.
	I mean, frankly, I get a lot of messages from people, well, this shouldn't just be for self-defense cases.
	Folks, I make it for self-defense cases because that's what I'm involved in.
	That's my area of interest.
	Plus, I think if you make...
	Kind of model legislation or proposal too broad.
	There's too many avenues of attack on it.
	You never get anything done.
	So I like to have something that's narrowly focused.
	But the truth is what we really need in this country is an actual, effective, probable cause hearing where it's not just a rubber stamp for the prosecutor, where the prosecutor has to actually work to get a defendant into a criminal trial.
	And the reason we don't have that is because the criminal justice system serves largely the criminal justice system.
	And they don't want more work than they need to do.
	And they know that, frankly, most people going into the criminal justice system are criminals.
	So if you have a probable cause hearing, you're going to find probable cause for most of them.
	And so the attitude of the criminal justice system is, why bother doing all this work?
	You know we're going to find probable cause.
	We'll just rubber stamp it.
	Which, all right, from a moral sense, maybe it doesn't trouble people too much if the person would have had probable cause found anyway.
	But if you're an actually innocent person fed into that grinder, It would be pretty useful to have an actual probable cause threshold that has to be met before you're fed into that machine.
	The idea of holding the prosecutors personally responsible, I think that's too long of a long shot to even ask for in the first place.
	Everybody says that and I disagree.
	Well, even if you started with the state and at least made it politically inconvenient to pursue baseless cases in the first place.
	You know, taxpayers would pay for it, and then maybe in theory they would say, okay, well, we don't want to fund this or support this individual who's going to waste our taxpayer dollars unless they themselves think, yeah, it was the good fight to fight in the first place, so let's go ahead and pay a little additional taxes for malicious prosecution.
	You know, we give prosecutors almost absolute immunity for their conduct in their position, but it's not absolute absolute, right?
	Once every 20 or 30 years, a prosecutor's held accountable.
	So we have mechanisms to pierce that immunity.
	What I'm suggesting is that the barrier that needs to be pierced is too resilient now.
	I think it's a barrier that works well when you have honorable prosecutors.
	I mean, when I was a kid, I didn't see prosecutors like this.
	When I was a kid, I mean a young lawyer.
	All the prosecutors I knew were these old guys in the legal community.
	They'd been in that office forever.
	Hardly anyone ever ran against them because you didn't want to upset the legal community itself.
	When someone did run...
	It was a race that, I don't know, if 500 people voted, it would be amazing.
	They spent a few hundred or a few thousand dollars on the race.
	So these were almost completely apolitical races.
	And the people who held those jobs were respectable, old-school guys and gals who didn't engage in these kind of political prosecutions.
	And people like that, you can trust with that kind of discretion and that kind of immunity.
	But the trouble with power is you have to be worried about...
	Not the circumstance where you're giving it to someone you trust.
	You have to worry about what happens when that power gets acquired by someone you cannot trust anymore.
	Now they have that discretion and immunity, and they can do unbelievably horrific things with it.
	And if we're going to live in a world where we're just going to let somebody come in with half a million dollars of George Soros money and buy a prosecutor's office, I don't think we can afford to allow them that discretion and that immunity any longer, at least certainly not to the degree they have it now.
	And by the way, it's very easy to avoid.
	Don't bring a use of force case to trial unless you can demonstrate that you have 51% of the evidence.
	You can even do it like a reverse self-defense immunity hearing, right?
	Where instead of the defendant requesting a pre-trial hearing on self-defense immunity where he has to show 51% of the evidence, the prosecutor could protect himself from the consequences of Kai's law by...
	Requesting a pretrial immunity, a Kyle's Law hearing, where he could show pretrial he's got 51% of the evidence, and then no matter what the jury does, he maintains his immunity, he doesn't have any personal liability.
	But if he can't do 51%, he's got no business dragging someone into a trial where he's going to be held to the standard of 90%.
	Can you explain to people, a lot of people are not aware that a lot of states have these pretrial self-defense hearings that allow you to assert your rights in ways that avoid the risk of a trial in the first place.
	Could you describe what that is for people and how it's beneficial to self-defense rights?
	Sure.
	So normally...
	Absent what I'm calling a self-defense immunity hearing, normally if the prosecutor wants you to go to trial, you're going to trial.
	And if your defense is legal defense, you're going to argue it in front of a jury.
	And the trouble with that approach is, again, the cost can be absolutely tremendous.
	Many of the cases I work on, the death cases, the murder-manslaughter cases, the defendant, it's easy to burn through $200,000 before you get to trial, especially if there's a lot of experts involved.
	They're very expensive.
	The lawyers are very expensive.
	Everything is very expensive.
	And by the way, you need those experts because the state has them.
	The state has all these experts for free on their side.
	So unless you can bring in your own experts to contest what they're saying, the jury is only hearing one side of the story.
	And anytime you hear only one side of the story, it always sounds like a compelling story.
	So you will spend what you have to spend to raise.
	The difference between a $200,000 legal defense and a $20,000 legal defense is almost impossible.
	To characterize.
	So they get very expensive.
	And again, there's never a zero risk of conviction.
	So we put you in jail.
	If that's the only form where you can actually raise the legal defense of self-defense, it's going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and a 10% chance of going to prison for the rest of your life.
	What self-defense immunity hearings do is effectively provide a low-cost, time-efficient...
	Low-risk way to come to that same determination of whether or not this was lawful self-defense, and you do it in a pre-trial hearing.
	There's no jury, so there's no jury to emotionally drive.
	It's only in front of the judge who, in theory, ought to be kind of a legal technician is one way to think about it.
	And it's kind of like a mini-trial.
	So the prosecution presents their evidence of...
	Inconsistent with self-defense, why it's not self-defense.
	You present your evidence in support of self-defense.
	And in most states, it's like a civil threshold, preponderance of the evidence.
	If you can show a judge by 51% that it was self-defense, he can grant you immunity from prosecution, sometimes also from civil suit.
	That varies from state to state.
	But all of this is happening in a pretrial hearing.
	So instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it might be a few thousand dollars.
	And there's no jury.
	It happens in the course of weeks.
	The 12 or 14 months between an event and when the criminal trial actually happens.
	So you can achieve, if you have anything that resembles a legitimate self-defense case, in other words, anything that looks like one of these political prosecutions where there's actually nothing inconsistent with self-defense, you can go to this pretrial hearing, spend a few thousand dollars in a few weeks, and get the thing adjudicated as self-defense, be immunized from prosecution or civil suit.
	I think they're fantastic.
	They're often mistakenly called stand your ground hearings.
	Folks, there's no such thing as a stand your ground hearing.
	If stand your ground is a law, everybody qualifies.
	That's it.
	You don't need a hearing for that.
	The trouble is Florida adopted stand your ground as a statute and self-defense immunity hearings at the same time.
	Two different bills, but they adopted them at the same time.
	And unfortunately, the media in particular, but even judges, lawyers, they use the phrase stand your ground to refer to both these things.
	To distinguish, stand your ground merely means if you...
	Would have had a generalized legal duty to retreat before you can defend yourself.
	You're relieved of that duty to retreat.
	Period.
	That's it.
	That's all standing ground means.
	These hearings I'm talking about, if you hear it called a standing ground hearing, be assured what they're actually talking about is a self-defense immunity hearing.
	And I love these things because they take...
	Absent a self-defense immunity hearing, there's nothing you can do to stop a prosecutor from costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars and a good chance of going to prison for the rest of your life.
	Self-defense immunity hearings give you that escape valve.
	Actually, a concept I've always been very interested in because we just don't have similar concepts in Canada, the stand your ground versus duty to retreat.
	I said duty, but explain to this.
	I can't hear it.
	Family Guy has ruined duty for me.
	Explain the distinction.
	Which states have the standard ground?
	Which states have the duty to retreat?
	And what does the duty to retreat actually involve, practically speaking, by way of how far do you have to retreat before you can say, I can no longer retreat and now I can use lethal force?
	Sure.
	So, of course, one of the big lies told around the Zimmerman trial was this was all a standard ground case because Florida had adopted standard ground a few years earlier.
	Characterize stand your ground as some kind of license to kill, as some kind of alternative justification for the use of force.
	So basically, there's up to five conditions that have to be met before you can use force in self-defense.
	You have to be the non-aggressor in the fight.
	The threat you're defending against has to be either immediately about to occur or actually happening.
	You have to use no more force than necessary, so no deadly force unless you're facing a deadly force threat.
	You might have a legal duty to retreat.
	That's what we'll come down to.
	And your conduct has to be subjectively and objectively reasonable.
	That's it for self-defense, folks.
	There's not 500 conditions.
	There's not 50 conditions.
	There's only five and only up to five.
	What the majority of states have done is taken away that element of avoidance.
	So the majority of states are stand-your-ground states.
	And what they're basically saying when they take away avoidance, they're saying if you meet those other conditions, you're still raising a self-defense defense.
	If you meet those other conditions, you're the non-aggressor.
	You're facing an imminent threat.
	You're not using excessive force.
	Your conduct is otherwise reasonable.
	We're not going to put you in a cage for the rest of your life just because a prosecutor convinced someone that you might have been able to escape if you had run away.
	That's the only difference between stand-your-ground states and duty-to-retreat states is that element of avoidance, that fourth element.
	There are only 11 states that impose that element.
	So if you watch the Zimmerman trial, you would think Florida was some kind of radical outlier as a stand-your-ground state.
	It's the norm.
	39 states are stand-your-ground states.
	Now, if I had to take a guess as to which ones are the duty to retreat, I'm going to go with New York, California.
	California is a stand-your-ground state.
	California is a stand-your-ground state.
	Now, what often trips people up, especially journalists, and if I make it sound like I'm disparaging journalists, it's only because I am.
	But often what journalists will do is they're like...
	They'll assign some intern or something.
	Hey, go look at the statutes of all 50 states.
	That's your project for the week.
	Find us all the states that have a Stand Your Ground statute.
	And they'll typically find 17 or 18 or 19 of those.
	But that's only half the Stand Your Ground states.
	The other Stand Your Ground states are Stand Your Ground by case law, by court decision.
	California is a Stand Your Ground state.
	The jury instruction 505 for self-defense has it right in there.
	There is no legal duty to retreat.
	In fact, it says...
	Not only is there no legal duty to retreat under California law, they permit you to pursue your attacker if necessary to secure your safety.
	That's a pretty aggressive stand-your-ground law.
	But it's not in statute form.
	It's in court decisions going back to the 1800s.
	So you look for a stand-your-ground statute in California, you won't find it.
	But don't conclude from that that it's not a stand-your-ground state.
	It certainly is.
	So the states, I don't remember the 11 off my head, but they're typically, you know, the New England states, so Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, those are all duty to retreat states, and there's a handful of others.
	So those states basically say, even of all those other four conditions are met, you're the innocent victim of an imminent deadly force attack, and you're conducting yourself in an otherwise reasonable way.
	We reserve the right to put you in a cage for the rest of your life if we believe you might have been able to run away safely.
	But I should also point out the stand-your-ground states come in two flavors.
	What I call soft stand-your-ground and hard stand-your-ground.
	There's about six hard stand-your-ground states, maybe seven now.
	Texas is one, Washington State, Colorado.
	I don't have them all memorized.
	But the hard stand-your-ground states really take this element of avoidance off the table.
	They literally tell the jury, the finder of fact, you are not allowed to consider the possibility of retreat in determining whether or not self-defense was reasonable.
	They're the hard stand-to-ground states.
	All the other stand-to-ground states, the large majority, 30-something, are what I call soft stand-to-ground states.
	So they say, and Wisconsin is this way, we just saw in the Rittenhouse case, it'll say right there in the jury instructions, there is no legal duty to retreat.
	So you don't lose self-defense automatically because you fail to take advantage of an avenue of retreat.
	But the jury is allowed to consider the possibility of retreat.
	In terms of the overall reasonableness of your decision to use force.
	So they can't attack, the prosecutor can't attack your self-defense claim for your failure to retreat per se, but they can attack it kind of in a backdoor way through that element of reasonableness by saying, hey, while there was a safe avenue of retreat, you're not required to take it, but a reasonable person would have, and therefore your failure to do that makes your conduct unreasonable, and therefore they can attack your claim of self-defense on that element.
	If I may, what are the hard states?
	The hard...
	I don't have...
	I'd have to start pulling up PowerPoint slides.
	No, no.
	But you know what?
	Can I do a plug here?
	This would be a great opportunity for a plug.
	Please.
	About every two years, we do what we call our Law Self-Defense Advanced Class.
	It's a full-day class that we teach over Zoom.
	We teach it live.
	It's not a recording.
	So there's plenty of opportunity for Q&A.
	We cover all this.
	So we tell you what the hard stand your ground states are.
	It covers all 50 states.
	So we tell you which one your state is.
	Are you due to the retreat?
	Are you soft stand your ground?
	Are you hard stand your ground?
	We tell you all that.
	One day, this is the equivalent of a law school seminar.
	Eight hours of instruction on self-defense law.
	And we only do it once every couple of years because I don't like to sit at a computer for eight hours solid talking into a Zoom screen.
	But we have one coming up on January 8th.
	This January 8th, 2020, I guess it's 2022.
	Good God.
	But because we do allow live Q&A, I can't like have 200 people in it.
	So we have to restrict the number of seats.
	If anyone is interested, we just announced the date a few days ago.
	So there may still be seats available.
	If you're watching, you can see it on my screen there.
	Lawofselfdefense.com slash advanced if you want to learn more about that.
	And that's the same course we teach lawyers, folks.
	Lawyers and judges come to our CLE classes.
	It's exactly the same content, except we teach it in plain English so your brain doesn't go crazy halfway through the day.
	I guess the only reason I'm asking the question is, is Texas a hard...
	It is, yep.
	Okay.
	And Robert, does this bring us into the discussion?
	Because we all know...
	So I've been told this in Texas.
	I've read the statute, but I don't know that much.
	I'm not an expert in Texas self-defense by any stretch.
	But it appears that if somebody uses force to go on your porch, it's considered part of your home, and it's then presumed reasonable.
	I probably shouldn't laugh, but I kind of find some of these laws in Texas a little interesting.
	But it's presumed reasonable for you to use deadly force.
	If they either use force to go into your home, and I guess apparently a porch is considered part of your habitation under the law of Texas.
	So if they use force to go on your porch or use force to get you off your porch, that you're allowed to, well, it's not allowed.
	I would say it's presumed reasonable any deadly force you use.
	Is Texas law that?
	I think Texas is the only state that has such a law, but is that accurate?
	I mean, if you look at the black letter of the law, you can make that argument.
	I wouldn't want to be making that argument because I don't think a jury will buy it.
	You know, the very core of, especially, let's assume we're talking about deadly force self-defense because who cares about the rest?
	You've killed somebody, right?
	When you've killed somebody, what a jury does not want to hear is that you have some kind of very...
	Detailed algorithm where you checked all the boxes and you stretched everything to infinity so you had some technical justification to kill another human being absent an actual apparent necessity of doing that.
	The core of self-defense is always necessity.
	You killed that other human being because it was necessary.
	If you're going to try to sell to a jury that you did it because you met some technical checklist that did not involve the necessity of taking a human life, that's going to be a tough sell.
	So all these laws that Texas has, other states have too, they create special legal presumptions for your home.
	It's because when there's necessity, they want to facilitate the ability of the homeowner to demonstrate that to the jury.
	But then you have these weird outlier cases.
	Like, we're supposed to believe in this Chad Reed case.
	That him shoving the guy off the porch was dispossessing him of his home.
	I'm sorry, but if two guys are going, as Nick Ricada says, nipple rubbing on each other, and there's a single shove, and the guy gets off the porch, I don't think he's dispossessed of his home.
	What the statute is obviously thinking of is someone's dragging you out of the four walls of your home.
	It's a kidnapping type of effort.
	That's not what's happening here when there's a shove.
	It's the same thing where people say, well, there was a burglary.
	He tried to take the guy's gun.
	Well, first of all...
	I don't really think he was trying to take the guy's gun.
	But again, a single shove is not an ongoing burglary effort.
	And you have to look at the moment when the shots were fired.
	The moment the shots were fired, he shot an unarmed man 10 feet away who was not at the moment threatening anybody.
	He may have been acting badly before, but he wasn't doing anything when you shot him.
	Now, if Chad Reed had taken one step towards him, I would have said it was a good shoot.
	Because then there's actual evidence from which you can infer he's continuing an ongoing attack.
	But what I saw was Kyle Carruth shoot a guy who was standing still on a porch 10 feet away, unarmed, not threatening anybody in that moment.
	Andrew, I'm going to bring this up just because, I mean, JM, if this was an accidental, if you meant to put in $39.99 and you want a refund for this, YouTube doesn't give refunds, but if this was a mistake, I will...
	Email me, david at vivafry.com.
	If it wasn't a mistake and you meant to put in 3,999, I'm joking.
	But seriously, thank you very much.
	Beautiful hair, I'm jealous.
	Don't you dare cut it.
	Well, I think that's all the motivation I needed.
	Thank you very much, Jay.
	But Andrew, before we get into the, we're going to get into it.
	Everyone has heard about it now and you've done a few law podcasts discussing it.
	The people were saying in Ahmaud Arbery.
	Equivocating what occurred in Ahmaud Arbery to, well, if the guy's breaking into your house, do you just have to call cops and wait?
	And that's why I have very big problems with the analogy because breaking into somebody's home versus being a burglar on the street are two fundamentally different things because the law has always treated breaking and entering or entering a domicile, even if it's not breaking a window, as different than being in a public area.
	I think there's all kinds of ways in which treating the porch As if it were inside the four walls of your home would be perfectly reasonable.
	Like someone stealing stuff off your front porch, right?
	You'd want to treat that as if they were treating it off your home.
	But when it comes to taking a human life, to argue that shoving someone in anger off a porch and then standing there is the same as dragging a child out of their bedroom window, I just don't find those comparable.
	Now, I mean, listen, we also have to keep in mind there's the black letter law.
	There's how you argue to a jury, and there's the political decision-making of whether a trial would be brought in the first place.
	I don't know the politics in Lubbock, Texas.
	It may be that these circumstances fit the political model that applies there where it would never be prosecuted.
	I can't answer that question for you.
	That's a political decision.
	That's not a legal decision.
	But I know what it's like to have to argue these cases to a jury, and juries are going to take this as a hard sell.
	Well, I think the point you're making is that there's the law, what I call the legal narrative, the political narrative, and then I call it the moral narrative.
	And that most juries are really deciding the moral narrative.
	If you've killed someone, the jury wants to know, did this have to happen?
	If it had to happen, all right, lawful self-defense, I would defend myself too.
	I would want my family and kids, everybody, innocent victim of attack, if they have to defend themselves, do it.
	But if the jury's looking at it and says, you know what?
	I don't know.
	He's got this kind of burglary story he's telling or dispossessed from the home story.
	All I see is a guy getting knocked off a porch a step, not even falling to the ground, right?
	Keeping his feet.
	And then 10 feet away, he raises a muzzle and shoots him dead.
	That didn't look to me like a shooting that had to happen.
	Ultimately, it's what a jury wants to know.
	Do you believe that necessity...
	Is really the most important factor from a jury moral narrative perspective.
	That when you're looking at a case as to either persuade a prosecutor why he will lose it in front of a jury or trying to advise counsel how to present it to a jury, that in the end of the day, it's moral necessity that's the most important aspect of self-defense.
	Yeah, I mean, moral necessity and physical necessity, I mean, they go hand in hand.
	But, you know, the defense wants to be able to look at the jury at closing or...
	If they put their client on the witness stand, look at the jury and look them in the eye and say, listen, I'm terribly sorry this person's dead.
	I wish it had never happened.
	But I had no other choice.
	That's the core of the self-defense argument.
	You get your client up there and you say, well, you know, I didn't have to shoot him, but he technically met this criteria for dispossession of a home.
	I mean, maybe the jury will go with you, but it's not the position I would want to be in.
	Now, if there was a backstory of, like, in that case, the person being, say, an abuser or something, some other dynamic, to what degree, like, sometimes people confuse the burning...
	Small changes in facts change everything.
	Exactly.
	If Chad Reed, if I was holding that carbine, having knocked off the porch, and Chad Reed even moved his weight forward, I would have shot him.
	Okay?
	Not even a step.
	Just a shift in weight forward, I would have shot him.
	If he was known to habitually carry a firearm on his person, well, that's different.
	Now I have reason to think he's not unarmed.
	He's got a gun.
	If he has a reputation for sustained beatings of people, like, by the way, Trayvon Martin had, that the prosecution withheld from the defense, the way that Trayvon Martin attacked Zimmerman in particular was a method he talked about in his own text messages about how he would attack people.
	Punch him quick in the face, mount him, pound and ground him.
	So this was a modus operandi, if you will.
	So if you know that about the other party, all those things could change the legal analysis tremendously.
	But of course, anytime we comment on these cases, we're limited to whatever evidence is presented to us.
	And the evidence presented to me was those two videos, right, from the two angles, one from the truck, one from the house.
	And I see a lot of people look at those videos and say, well, that looks like lawful self-defense to me, and it just doesn't at all to me.
	Now, there's additional information.
	Unfortunately, a lot of the additional information, frankly, is irrelevant, but it gets people emotionally involved.
	The child custody issue, these are apparently all bad people.
	I don't really care about any of that.
	Well, ancillary or incidental, in the same way that Rosenbaum being the P word and Huber being a repeat domestic abuser and Grosskreutz being a felon or a criminal, whatever, not a felon, but a criminal who had his concealed carry weapon permit revoked, irrelevant to the acts of that evening, but maybe relevant to framing and understanding the behavior of that evening.
	But before we even get there, one thing, and maybe, Robert, you're going to be more at ease to answer the question than Andrew.
	One argument just to get rid of.
	Hypothetically, the kid was even in Kyle Carruthers' house, which he wasn't, and they knew it, which is relevant for the dispute.
	Hypothetically, he was even there.
	Kyle says, get off my porch.
	I have your kid in my house.
	I had guardianship of this kid up until 3.15, and I'm keeping him until 7 o 'clock.
	Is it kidnapping?
	Is it felony kidnapping that could then justify the idea that Chad...
	Was then justified in escalating if people think he did escalate, even if he didn't, but assuming he did.
	You could try to argue it was provocation.
	Technically speaking, the provocation argument only comes into play if you have an otherwise lawful act of self-defense and you're trying to attack that.
	Under provocation.
	It's an alternative attack on self-defense, other than the five elements I talked about.
	Because if you provoked it, you've lost the privilege of self-defense, regardless of what the other elements might be, generally speaking.
	I'm going to get a thousand comments now.
	We're going to nitpick at the law because I'm not covering everything in a casual conversation.
	But provocation is only relevant if you otherwise had a lawful case of self-defense, and now you need to attack it a different way through that provocation.
	But if you don't believe it was lawful self-defense in the first place, you don't need to go to provocation.
	It's pointless.
	So I haven't gone to provocation because I don't see it.
	Shooting a man standing still, 10 feet away, unarmed, not advancing on anybody, that just doesn't look like self-defense to me.
	Well, I'm going to get there, Andrew, because it's not that I disagree with you.
	I actually view it differently, but just for everyone saying that...
	I think an analytical mistake a lot of people are making is that they're starting at the beginning of this confrontation and trying to work their way all the way through.
	And I think that involves a lot of wasted effort.
	I think it's much smarter to look at the actual use of force.
	And then move your way backwards.
	Because it's like, I always advise when you have a self-defense case, the first thing I would tell the jury to do is, listen, you have all these criminal charges, all these elements, there's 36 pages of stuff you have to look at.
	There's lesser included.
	I mean, it's a nightmare.
	It's all legalese to a jury.
	Why don't you start with self-defense?
	It's pretty clean.
	And if you find self-defense, you get to go home by lunch.
	And you're done.
	So I would start at the end of this, look at, does that look like self-defense to you and move back from there?
	Because if the answer is no, Then all the prior stuff doesn't matter.
	Well, and here's the thing, and it's an interesting way of viewing it, because your criticism is people are looking at it from way from the beginning, trying to read stuff into it.
	There's all this noise that gets built into the system that doesn't really matter to the moment the shots are fired.
	True, but the flip side is, Andrew, is that if you only look at it in the last freeze frame, I'll even take Rittenhouse, if you only take one freeze frame screenshot, it looks a heck of a lot different than if you take the...
	minute leading up to it.
	But they're not comparable events.
	So Ray has to shoot someone standing still 10 feet away.
	In fact, he did not shoot those people.
	Now, here's my only issue with the context of Kyle Carruthers.
	First of all, it's another one of those morally reprehensible but potentially legally explicable situations or justifiable, and I hate them because people just need to calm the hell down and not escalate.
	But the freeze frame is 10 feet apart.
	Fires two shots.
	Split, split.
	You back it up a second, it's a man who was just told to leave at gunpoint, then confronts the man holding the gun on his property, on his porch, whatever that's called, setting aside whether or not any kids are in the house, because by that point in the dispute, it may be a factual dispute.
	I think they know that the kid is not in the house because the mother said, I'll take you to the kid.
	So he knows the kid's not in the house, so there's no felony.
	Kidnapping.
	First of all, you'd have to believe all these statements, which may not be realistic.
	Even if they said it, that doesn't mean it's true.
	Actually, fair enough.
	So the mother might be lying, the kid's in the house, trying to F with Chad.
	Maybe it's a lie for good purpose.
	Maybe she's just trying to get these guys away from each other, get one of them to go someplace else, and then you're not going to...
	Have a dead person, right?
	So it could be a lie.
	It could be the truth.
	It could be a lie for bad reason.
	It could be a lie for good reason.
	That's part of what I talk about about all this noise.
	I mean, at the point they're nipple rubbing, as Nick would put it, and it looks like there's going to be a struggle for the gun.
	If the shot had been fired in that moment, I think he'd have a good case for self-defense.
	A reasonable argument that he reasonably perceived this guy was going to fight him for his gun.
	He apparently reaches for the gun.
	He looks right down at the gun, moves his hand to the gun.
	That looks like a reach to me.
	I think that would have been lawful.
	But when the circumstances change in a substantive way, such that there's no longer an immediate, imminent, apparent deadly force threat, the window of eminence has closed.
	Your privilege to use deadly force has stopped.
	And that can happen in a second, folks.
	Just like it can happen if someone obviously drops the gun they were holding.
	You're not still allowed to shoot them because they had a gun a second ago if you know they don't have the gun now.
	And that comes to, like, disarming the home intruder.
	The person drops the gun, raises their hand, bang, bang.
	You were intruding two seconds or you had a gun, and I could have done it then, but you're no longer the threat.
	You hear a lot of that kind of argument here.
	He would have been privileged to shoot him on the porch, so why isn't he privileged to shoot him a second later?
	Well, because a second later, he's ten feet away.
	The guy's not advancing on him.
	The guy doesn't have a gun.
	He has the muzzle on him.
	He needs two-tenths of a second to fire a shot if he makes that decision.
	If Chad Reed makes any motion to come off that porch to him, he lights him up.
	And it's lawful.
	But if Chadry doesn't do that, what's the evidence of the eminent deadly force threat in that moment?
	I just don't see it.
	So this may be where you hedge your bets and you do it properly and well because someone will say, look, I see his knee moving forward slightly after he just reached for the gun, after he threw him off the porch using his gun.
	I see the knee moving forward.
	So whoever wants to see that eminent threat, based on your own explanation here, can find it.
	I guess it's just the overall context.
	It's like, at the point where you are now separated by 10 feet from someone who has tried to grab your gun, if not at least twice, at the very least once, after being told to leave, is, you know, you have exactly what...
	What I would suggest is people are...
	What I see is a lot of people who are desperately wishing for the circumstances to exist where they could kill someone.
	If they were in Chad Reed's position.
	And it's the exact opposite of what you should be looking for.
	You should be looking for every opportunity not to fire that shot.
	Not for every opportunity to fire the shot.
	Now, if his body weight comes forward, he takes a step, he does anything like that, a foot coming up?
	I'm sorry.
	We're supposed to believe that he couldn't tell he was suddenly 10 feet away from this guy because it happened in a second.
	But he was able to discern a slight movement of the foot and interpret that as some kind of aggressive advance.
	I don't buy it.
	You know, my understanding of it is like the tort class that I had in law school with my Native American professor.
	And the premise involved this Indian who wanted to dance with this other guy's girlfriend.
	And it led to a sequence of events, and we were supposed to break apart what's battery, what's assault, what's not.
	And he kept asking what was the lesson, and none of us were apparently getting it right.
	And he said, it's simple.
	If an Indian has to dance with your girlfriend, you say yes.
	It sort of reminded me of the, you know, all I've been told in Texas is stay off other people's porches because apparently you can get shot if they do it.
	I agree that from a moral narrative perspective, the video evidence doesn't make it look necessary for him to pull the trigger at the time he pulled the trigger.
	A lot of people are putting a lot of weight on this being Texas, right?
	But there are liberal parts of Texas, right?
	Oh, yes.
	Let's just change the races of the people.
	What if the victim here was black?
	Would that be a completely different case then?
	You think the Texas governor might assign an Austin prosecutor to that district to take over that case, just like they did with the Ahmaud Arbery case?
	And then it doesn't matter that you're in Lubbock, Texas anymore.
	Oh, right.
	How much do you think social media, TV, video footage is going to...
	Because you look at this kind of case, and it would be a he said, she said case, typically.
	In other words, if there's no video cameras, he could have said he was grabbing the gun at the time and then you try to do a forensic evidence breakdown.
	Was that true?
	Was that not true?
	Was it a half a second off?
	That's how you do it.
	But it seems like video is changing more and more of this.
	The more we have cameras everywhere, the more ordinary people using cameras for every interaction.
	I think it's different, really.
	I mean, it's just like another layer of evidence we didn't have before.
	But of course...
	You know, video's open to interpretation, too.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	And especially if people have been propagandized, you can show them a piece of video, and half the room that saw, you know, propaganda A will see one thing in that video.
	And the other half of the room that's been exposed to 14 months of propaganda B will look at that same damn video and see the exact opposite.
	I mean, we saw that with the fuzzy image with Rittenhouse, right?
	Oh, he's pointing the gun this way.
	Oh, he's pointing the gun that way.
	I mean, people will see...
	What they want to see in a lot of this imagery.
	So, I mean, I'm always of the opinion that if it's a good guy case of self-defense, more evidence is good for you.
	It will help you.
	I mean, a funny thing in the Zimmerman trial was there was no video at all.
	But at one point, the police said, you know, they keep calling Zimmerman to come back to the police station to be questioned again.
	And George, I love you, but like an idiot, he kept going back to the police.
	No lawyer, talking to the cops.
	Because he had dreams of being a prosecutor himself, maybe a cop himself.
	Of course, he thought he was a good guy, right?
	And he was a good guy.
	Neighborhood watch, only shot to protect himself.
	And the cops sit him down for the, I don't know, the 5th, 6th, 7th time.
	And they go, George, listen, we got a problem with your self-defense story because...
	Listen, we found a camera that recorded what happened.
	We know exactly how it went down.
	And George said, thank God.
	Because he knew that the only thing that video could possibly show was his narrative of the story.
	So I think for good guy cases of self-defense, the video is almost always going to help.
	And there's nothing we can do about it anyway.
	I mean, there's cameras everywhere.
	Just look at the Ahmaud Arbery case.
	There's cameras on all those homes, right?
	One guy's got a camera and an owl.
	All kinds of stuff.
	Even looking at the Kyle Carruthers case, there's at the very least two, possibly three, and maybe I don't know if there's a fourth surveillance footage, but there's multiple angles.
	But first of all, talking about looking at the same screen and seeing two different things, even following the chat, does anybody hear the foot stomping upstairs?
	Because there's apparently some very angry kid up there.
	Even reading the chat, Andrew, I think I would say it's even split.
	People don't agree with you and people do agree with you.
	Just, by the way, if we can do that, first thing before you put the, let's put A for Andrew and B for Barnes.
	Who do you think's take historically on other channels as the right one at this point?
	But before you do that, hit the thumbs up because there's no thumbs down anymore.
	I mean, one thing that always amazes me is how emotionally invested people get in these positions because there are, I mean, I see them too.
	They message me on my YouTube channel and everywhere, you know.
	They are pissed that I'm taking this position.
	As if I'm not a guy who's carried a gun every day for personal protection his whole life.
	As if I'm not a Second Amendment absolutist.
	I think all gun laws, all of them, apply to law-abiding American citizens who are mentally sound or facially unconstitutional.
	Everything.
	Fully automatic, small arms, suppressors, everything.
	It's all unconstitutional.
	But I have to call these use of force cases as I see them.
	And by the way, folks, I don't get personally attached to legal analysis.
	The fact that you're mad at me about it doesn't...
	I don't care.
	I'm a professional.
	This is what I do for a living.
	I have an ex-wife who is much meaner than any of you are.
	Trust me.
	I'll just say one thing.
	I'm the Canadian.
	People call me the liberal, the anti-gun nut.
	This Texas shooting is one of those rare situations where I say everyone could have de-escalated the situation in a heartbeat.
	But if I come out on my porch...
	And I have a gun and I say leave and the person comes and tries to take the gun from me not once but twice and I'm separated by 6 feet to 10 feet if by nothing else other than that individual throwing me away from him while trying to grab the gun.
	It's disgusting and maybe he was looking for his excuse and Chad gave it to him.
	But he told to leave, grabs the gun not once but possibly twice and then the only thing that I'm supposed to say is...
	In my two-tenths of a second, is he coming back at me for a third time to try to grab the gun?
	After telling me, by the way, and actually segue before I forget, you better use that mother effer, because if I get it, I'm going to use it on you.
	What is the weight?
	And if he had shot him then, I'd call it a good shoot.
	But we're only talking about six seconds?
	I mean, five seconds maybe.
	The circumstances change.
	There's no way he didn't know he was ten feet away from that guy when he fired the shot.
	That's not what happened.
	It's not like he shoved them a foot and they were still in close proximity and, you know, you could argue a reasonable person might perceive the gun was still within his reach.
	That would be a completely different scenario.
	There was no way he could reach that gun to try to take it from him where he was standing when he was shot.
	Yeah, but so then you're saying, I mean, and I'm not saying he was in the, to personalize it, but then the argument is that He would have to wait 10 feet for him to make a movement so that he could then, you know, because it's two-tenths of a second.
	Well, he doesn't have to wait 10 feet.
	He has to wait to see.
	He has to meet the conditions for the use of deadly force in self-defense.
	He has to see an imminent unavoidable, well, not in Texas unavoidable, but an imminent threat of deadly bodily harm.
	And the guy standing still on a porch 10 feet away who's unarmed is not that.
	So you need to see something more.
	You need to check those boxes before you're privileged to shoot that guy dead.
	This is what I meant to bring up.
	Would the police have shot him?
	People always ask that, but you're asking a political question there.
	You're not asking a legal question there.
	Maybe the police would have shot him and they would have been prosecuted.
	I mean, the police prosecuted all the time now.
	That's true.
	I mean, that's true.
	I would have said ordinarily they would have shot and they would have not been prosecuted, but now they shoot a fleeing suspect.
	Again, I would suggest to people that they can kind of broaden their minds on this if they just imagine that the guy who was shot was black.
	And think about what the argument would be.
	But my argument there would be then you're politicizing it where I think, yeah, that would be prosecuted, but not for justifiable means.
	No, no, no.
	I don't mean that it would be a political prosecution.
	I'm just saying that a lot of people who are Their minds would be more open to the prospect that it was not legitimate self-defense.
	Not that I'm saying it should or would encourage a political prosecution.
	I'm just saying, I think a lot of people are assuming it's not, it is self-defense for very arbitrary reasons like this be Texas.
	And you're on my porch and I told you to get off and therefore I can shoot you dead.
	That's not how it works.
	And the Texas thing, I'm not harping on the Texas thing because I think that plays on a lot of stereotypes that I don't like.
	And Nell, hell nah, sorry, who says he was not standing still.
	This is where, Andrew, I think you're hedging your bets very meticulously and methodically.
	If evidence comes out that he was, in fact, moving forward within that 10 feet, Andrew says, justified.
	So we get a third camera angle that shows his weight coming forward, changes everything.
	Because then you actually have evidence of an imminent ongoing threat.
	He's coming back again for the gun.
	He moves his weight forward.
	You can empty that rifle to him in a second and a half.
	I mean, you're able to protect yourself if that happens.
	You're not increasing your risk by pausing to see if it will happen.
	Let me just field this.
	Chat is racist.
	Is that what you want?
	A fuzzy creature.
	First of all, I don't know that the chat is racist.
	I think you should probably know that it's not what I would ever want, but you also know that I don't censor the chat.
	I don't block people, and I don't delete comments.
	Hey, how about this?
	Chat's racist because one side of the political spectrum is trying to sabotage the chat.
	I don't know what you're saying, but don't even suggest that...
	That's what I want because that actually angers me.
	And by the way, I would say it's not even just advancing on Kyle Carruth that would do it.
	If Chad Reed turned to go to the front door of the home, I would call it the same thing.
	Then he's apparently attempting to enter the home where there are other people that presume there were at least one person in the home that needs defending, right?
	But a guy who's literally standing still, I don't see it.
	So the real Bambunga, and I will not vet for, I know the real Bambunga, somewhat on a more personal level, but only through the interwebs, says, I'm saying this as a soldier who has shot more than one person and hate that I had to.
	Objects in iron sights are further than they appear.
	Please read this to Mr. Branca if you have the time, Viva.
	Done.
	Robert, you look like you had something to say two seconds ago.
	Yeah, the next thing I wanted to transition into is sometimes there's overlap and confusion.
	Between self-defense and then diminished capacity or duress or necessity, things like the burning bed syndrome.
	Colloquially, people will think certain domestic violence cases, that those are true self-defense cases.
	Sometimes they are.
	Sometimes there's a different area of law that better suits those circumstances.
	Could you describe what some of those differences are in that kind of context?
	Yeah, and it's a good point because it could apply here.
	I can't remember.
	I think I blogged about it a little bit, but there's a couple of legal doctrines.
	So I often say self-defense is very binary.
	Either you qualify or you don't.
	100% legal liability or 0% legal liability.
	There is kind of an exception to that in a couple circumstances.
	One is...
	Under a doctrine that's called battered spouse syndrome.
	So we have a lot of these cases where a battered spouse kills, I'll call it the husband, almost always the husband, and she kills him under circumstances that simply do not meet the conditions for self-defense.
	Often the guy is drunk, passed out, and man, when women get mad, they let you know.
	They'll pour gasoline on him and set him on fire.
	They'll stab him with a giant steak knife while he's passed out there.
	However bad this guy is, he was not presenting as an eminent deadly force threat at the moment she lit him on fire while he was passed out on the couch.
	So you go to court and the woman says, well, you know, I did it in self-defense.
	And in her head, she's thinking of self-defense in some unusual way, but you can understand it, right?
	She's continually, maybe for years, been physically, emotionally abused by this guy.
	It feels like self-defense.
	But the traditional self-defense model doesn't fit that circumstance.
	What the courts say, essentially, is, look, we're going to look at this not from the perspective of a normal, reasonable, and prudent person.
	We're going to look at it from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person who's been subject to years of abuse by this guy.
	To her, did she see things?
	Like, for example, was the threat imminent not in the sense that it was immediately about to occur, which is how we normally define it, but in the sense that it was otherwise unavoidable?
	If you didn't act.
	And a law school exam type question that illustrated this might be, imagine that you're kidnapped, you wake up, and you're locked in a basement dungeon, right?
	And your kidnapper comes to you, and every day he brings you a plate of food.
	He says, I'm not killing you today, but I'm going to kill you on the seventh day.
	The seventh day, I'm coming to kill you.
	Well, in one sense, you could argue that for the first six days, there's no imminent deadly force threat, right?
	He's not going to kill you yet.
	But the death is unavoidable unless you act before the seventh day.
	So you'd be privileged to use force before then.
	With the battered spouse syndrome situations, the argument would be, well, look, he's not attacking her now.
	He's passed out on the couch.
	But she knows from a decade of experience when he gets off that couch, he's going to beat her to the point of putting her in the hospital because that's what happens every time.
	So he's not an imminent threat in the moment, but he's an imminent threat in the sense that it's otherwise unavoidable.
	Now, strictly speaking, I guess she could leave the house and There are other ways to avoid it, but emotionally for her, maybe there's kids in the house, maybe she doesn't have any money, who knows.
	So the courts recognize this, but it's not really a legal defense.
	It's a mitigation.
	So what would have been a murder conviction becomes a manslaughter conviction instead.
	So it's not a perfect defense like self-defense.
	Another version of this is what they call imperfect self-defense.
	And that might apply in this case in Texas.
	Under imperfect self-defense, basically you have...
	You almost have self-defense, except your perception of one of the elements was unreasonable.
	So you perceived a deadly force threat, but an objective person would not have perceived a deadly force threat.
	There's one single defect in your claim of self-defense.
	Unfortunately, a defect in self-defense means you don't have self-defense, so you don't have perfect self-defense anymore.
	But if you unreasonably used excessive force, used deadly force, for example, or unreasonably perceived a deadly force threat, and that's the only defect in your claim of self-defense, You can argue imperfect self-defense, but again, it's not an acquittal.
	It's a mitigation.
	So it would mitigate murder to manslaughter.
	So I think here, one of the arguments that a Kyle Carruth would have for mitigating murder to manslaughter would be imperfect self-defense.
	Look, I perceived when he was on the porch, he was a deadly force threat.
	Maybe an objective person would not have.
	Maybe Andrew Branca would not have.
	I did.
	Maybe my...
	Perception was defective and that it was not objectively reasonable.
	Please don't convict me of murder.
	Just convict me of manslaughter.
	And another avenue of manslaughter for him is, you know, manslaughter is really a murder that was, voluntary manslaughter, is a murder that was committed under circumstances of what we call adequate provocation.
	Hot blood.
	So it's not a cold-blooded killing.
	There's some circumstances that led to hot blood.
	And often that's a physical, a non-deadly initial fight.
	That then escalates the deadly force.
	I would certainly argue if I was Kyle Karras' defense lawyer that, hey, he had adequate provocation from that struggle for the gun up there in the moments before the shots were fired.
	Maybe at the moment the shots were fired, it wasn't lawful self-defense, but it shouldn't be murder.
	It should be whatever murder would be mitigated down to manslaughter on the grounds of adequate provocation.
	Now, speaking of, have you ever looked at any films?
	Or TV shows and looked at any sort of episodes and said and broken it down as to this is self-defense.
	This isn't anything like that.
	Have you seen True Romance, Andrew?
	What's that?
	Have you seen True Romance?
	No, I don't know that I have seen True Romance.
	I've done this a lot.
	There's the Tom Cruise movie where he's the hitman.
	Collateral.
	There's the briefcase scene there, right?
	Yes.
	He's standing there with his hands up, whips his gun out, shoots everybody up.
	And so every shot he fires is lawful self-defense because they threatened him with a gun.
	Until he picks up his briefcase and he's walking away and he fires a last departing shot into that guy on the ground as he's walking away, who's presumably no longer a deadly force threat.
	I guess he could be off frame, he's reaching for a gun or something like that.
	I used to do that quite a bit, but people get really angry when you point out that that's not lawful self-defense, but they love the scene so much in the movie that they're passionate about it.
	So I mostly don't do that anymore.
	Well, you've got to see True Romance because it's with Christopher, not Christopher Walken's in it, but Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Samuel Jackson, Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, everybody written by Quentin Tarantino.
	But there's this scene where Clarence Whirly, who's played by Christian Slater, goes to the pimp who is played by Gary Oldman.
	And his name is Drexel.
	And he wants to free the prostitute from the pimp.
	And he shows up with a gun.
	Concealed gun.
	I presume it was not lawful, but it doesn't matter.
	And he says, I'm taking my woman back from you.
	And he knows that it's going to...
	I guess he doesn't know because it didn't have to escalate there.
	But it gets provoked into a fight where Clarence Rolli's beaten and pulls out his gun and shoots the guy.
	Is it a child?
	In the genitals.
	It's the greatest scene ever in any movie.
	So you have to watch the movie.
	It's fantastic.
	My heart was, you know, through the roof.
	But the idea is if you go into a situation where you might need your gun, is that provocation?
	It wasn't really so much of a question as just, you know, you have to watch the movie, Andrew.
	Well, we have a real-life example of that right now, right?
	There's a case that people have been sending my way, but I've been too busy with these trials.
	A woman killed a guy and says basically it was sexual trafficking or he was her pimp or I don't know.
	I haven't had time to look at the case.
	You see those claims with some frequency.
	You never really know what's going on, right?
	It can be hard to tell.
	I mean, because now a killing has occurred.
	Someone's lawyered up, whether it's a public defender or otherwise.
	And of course, they're going to craft something that looks like some kind of legal defense.
	I mean, that's the lawyer's job.
	A lot of times, in my opinion, these cases are...
	I mean, listen, it's horrible.
	Who wants to defend a pimp?
	I don't want to defend a pimp.
	But a lot of times, it's a mutually destructive relationship.
	Everyone's horrible to everyone else.
	There's drugs and all kinds of stuff involved.
	And finally, somebody shoots somebody and kills them.
	And if it's the woman, she'll invariably claim that it was this kind of circumstance going on.
	And it's not like you can document it after the fact, right?
	I mean, there's no video.
	It's all he said, she said.
	None of their friends are going to come testify in court, so you don't really know what's going on.
	It was like with the Marissa Alexander case in Florida.
	That was one of the cases, by the way.
	Prosecutor Angela Corey was going to lose her election over.
	Marissa Alexander was a black woman who was married or engaged, I forget now, to a gentleman, and they had an argument.
	And in the house, and she went out to her car in the garage, got a gun, came back into the house.
	And if you listen to her media, they'll say, well, all she did was fire a shot into the air, as if she fired into the ceiling.
	In fact, the bullet hole on the police photos is right next to this guy's head.
	I mean, that was not a warning shot.
	That was a miss.
	And he was standing there with his two little kids.
	So she tried to shoot him in the face.
	And missed, is what happened.
	And they say, well, they recovered the bullet in the ceiling, and it's true.
	It went into the ceiling of the next room after it went through the wall next to his head.
	But of course, the propagandists don't tell you that part of it.
	But of course, immediately she argued this was some kind of abusive relationship.
	She was defending herself against spousal abuse.
	And all the actual evidence was completely contrary.
	They were having an argument, but he was literally standing still with his two little kids next to him.
	When she got pissed and fired that shot, he called the cops.
	She didn't call the cops.
	She fled the scene and had to be arrested elsewhere.
	So you have to be very careful about these narratives.
	That's why, I mean, one of the reasons it's expensive for me to consult on a case is because I look at every single piece of evidence available in that case, and that can sometimes be hundreds, maybe a thousand photos of the crime scene.
	Because little differences, in fact, can have enormous differences in outcome.
	And one source you absolutely cannot trust is whatever is reported in the media.
	That's always BS.
	Andrew, I'll read this one because I think a couple of other people have asked it.
	Andrew Branca, if a guy grabs your gun and slings you off the porch, is that not assault?
	If so, that is a burglary under Texas Law 9.42.
	Deadly force in defense of property 2A can be used.
	I know you've addressed it, but we're here now.
	This is the problem, though.
	When he fired the shot, that was not happening.
	That had happened.
	But it was not happening when he fired the shot.
	If you fire the shot while that's happening, that's one circumstance.
	If the circumstances have changed, it's not happening anymore.
	You don't get to shoot a burglary no longer in progress.
	So when these bad acts happen that by themselves in the moment would privilege the use of deadly defensive force, it's not a...
	Never-ending license to kill that person, even if circumstances change, and there's no longer an actual eminent deadly force threat.
	What's the word?
	You use it for the window of opportunity?
	You call it the...
	Eminence.
	The window of imminence.
	So here's the question.
	Concretely speaking, what have been some cases where the window of imminence has shut within two seconds, within one second, within...
	Ten seconds.
	Because in the Kyle Carruthers shooting...
	The time is not actually the critical factor here.
	It's the distance.
	So if he had shoved him back only a foot, I don't think that would have changed anything.
	He's still within reach of the rifle.
	It still would reasonably appear as an ongoing attack.
	It's the distance that removed the imminence.
	Because someone who's unarmed, doesn't have a projectile weapon, has to close that distance before they can cause you harm.
	Now, in terms of the Arbery case, were you surprised that the court sort of played Pontius Pilate and dodged the issue, or was that kind of expected given the politics that surrounded the case?
	You know, I don't know this judge.
	I've never heard of him before.
	You always have high hopes.
	But the more I saw of him, the more wishy-washy he looked.
	Didn't want to make clear, definite rulings, much like Schroeder.
	Always wanted to put things off.
	Always wanted to soft play it.
	And the very fact, I think it's outrageous that we begin a criminal trial without having these jury instructions finalized.
	Because the jury instructions, in effect, for folks who don't know, the jury instructions is what the jury's going to get at the end, right?
	But you're always arguing to the end, right?
	You're arguing to fit the jury instructions.
	And if you don't know what they are, it would be like...
	Being told, hey, we're going to play a version of football, but we're not going to mark the field.
	So we're not going to tell you how you get a first down.
	We're not going to tell you how to score a touchdown.
	It's a big green area.
	And then at the end, when you're all done, then we'll mark the field and you get to find out how you did.
	When you don't have the jury instructions defined at the start, you don't know what the legal battlefield actually looks like.
	And there's no reason for that to happen.
	Like in this case right now, with Kimberly Potter, the judge just today, They're having good fortune.
	Godspeed in jury selection.
	They got nine jurors selected now in two days.
	So that's pretty good.
	So they may finish, who knows, maybe tomorrow.
	And they were going to start the trial next Wednesday.
	And she's now telling the council, telling the parties, hey, maybe we could actually start like a day or two early.
	But I do still need a day to finalize the jury instructions.
	Well, listen, if you're at the point where you need one more day to finalize the jury instructions, you could have done that last week.
	There's no reason you're still having that conversation today.
	You could have put off the trial until January.
	No one's going to die if you do that.
	But at least everybody...
	Because I want to know the jury instructions when I'm doing jury selection.
	Because how the jury instructions are defined may determine what issues I'm concerned a juror might latch onto when they finally get those jury instructions.
	So I think it's outrageous that we even begin jury selection.
	And this jury instruction, just like the one in Rittenhouse...
	It's critically important.
	The whole issue is whether or not clearly Potter made a mistake.
	Clearly she did not intend to shoot this guy.
	She's not charged with an intentional shooting.
	She thought she had a taser.
	She pulled her gun.
	She made a mistake.
	The question is, what's the culpability for that mistake?
	Was it a genuine accident?
	No legal liability?
	Was it mere negligence?
	Civil liability?
	Was it recklessness?
	Criminal liability?
	That's the question.
	But recklessness normally requires...
	That you knew you were creating a risk and you deliberately ignored that risk.
	It's like getting drunk and then going driving.
	But you knew you were doing it.
	The prosecution is actually arguing for a jury instruction where you don't have to know you were creating the risk, which is not the traditional definition of reckless.
	And that's the only way they can win this case because there's no evidence that she knew she was pulling her gun.
	In fact, all the evidence is contrary to that.
	Two things.
	I mean, without getting too deep into the weeds of Potter, we'll get into that in a second, I had asked the question in Rittenhouse.
	It's like, dude, why have they not given the jury instructions beforehand, not just for the reasons you said, Andrew, but so that when you're listening to evidence, you know how to digest it based on what you're supposed to be looking for.
	And some people were saying, well, they don't know what charges they're ultimately going to go with by the end of the trial, and they don't want to...
	Or they do give a variation of the final...
	Jury instructions at the opening.
	Well, they read the jury instructions in Rittenhouse.
	My recollection is they read the jury instructions to the jury at the start.
	Okay.
	A few of the key ones.
	They left out the ones that they hadn't decided yet.
	That's the problem.
	So they read all the jury instructions about which there was no dispute, but then he wouldn't read the jury instruction on the gun possession and he wouldn't read.
	He just told them, well, we'll tell you about that later.
	And the curfew one, right?
	And then they ended up dropping the curfew and ended up dropping the gun charge so the jury didn't need to be instructed on those.
	But, you know, this should all be done beforehand.
	I mean, I agree.
	In fact, I mean, my view is that jury instructions should be read at the very beginning of a trial, all the key, at least the key ones, about what's in controversy.
	You don't necessarily have to read the jury instructions about what to do with your notes at the end of the case.
	No, and I wouldn't do the lesser included either, because the lesser included are kind of captured in the higher offense, you know.
	But in the Rittenhouse case, the gun possession was critical because it could go to the provocation issue and strip him completely of self-defense.
	Because it would be an unlawful act and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that would qualify as provocation, and there would be no self-defense argument.
	So that wasn't an inconsequential, open-ended, undefined jury instruction.
	That could have been the whole case right there.
	And there was no reason for it, because any plain reading of that statute, it clearly did not apply to Kyle, and to the extent it was ambiguous, under the doctrine of lenity, you give the benefit of the doubt to the defendant, not to the state that drafted the ambiguous statute.
	I'm going to pretend that that was my next question.
	Explain what the doctrine of lenity is.
	Basically, it says, if a statute is ambiguous, it's unclear whether it should be defined, applied in favor of the state or in favor of the defendant, you apply it in favor of the defendant because the state wrote the damn thing.
	If the state wrote it ambiguous, you can't hold that against the...
	Prospective defendant.
	The state has to be held responsible for drafting a statute that's clear and unambiguous.
	If they blow that, that's on them.
	It gets interpreted against them.
	Just like when you draft a contract.
	If you wrote the contract and there's an ambiguous term in it, that's interpreted against you, not the other party, because you're the person who chose the words to put in there.
	Now, do you have any thoughts in terms of, my view is the Second Amendment.
	It protects the right of self-defense, not just the right to bear arms.
	The point of the right to bear arms is for the right of self-defense.
	The Supreme Court has used language like that in Heller.
	Some other courts have used it.
	I want to start expanding it and seeing it apply in how self-defense's laws are interpreted in individual states.
	I started it with one case.
	We only got part of the way through it, ultimately.
	But what are your thoughts on that?
	Robert, can you give me a concrete example of what you have in mind?
	Sure.
	So, for example, in other words, if a state decided that a self-defense – let's say a state decided no self-defense.
	We're going to take away your right to self-defense.
	You don't have a right to self-defense.
	If you shot somebody, it's murder, period.
	Self-defense is not a defense.
	I think that would violate the Second Amendment.
	They're doing versions of it.
	Like in Oregon, they're reinterpreting certain evidentiary rules that effectively, dramatically limit your ability to introduce evidence in support of self-defense.
	So that was an illustration or application of it.
	But basically, that's what it comes down to the core.
	Can a state just define, write self-defense out of its statutes or common law?
	Or does the Second Amendment say, no, they can't?
	Right.
	So to the extent those things happen, I think you have a very robust argument.
	Because as you say, I mean, the Supreme Court has said that self-defense is entwined in the Second Amendment.
	They're inseparable entities.
	I'd love to see that thing from Oregon that you just mentioned, because of the evidentiary change, because that can make a huge difference, obviously.
	And I don't think I've seen that before.
	So when you get offline, if you could email that to me, I'd appreciate that.
	The truth is, in the United States, self-defense law is pretty darn good.
	It's pretty robust.
	If what you did at all resembles self-defense, you're probably in pretty good shape.
	Where we get in trouble is how prosecutors apply that.
	Because you could be in pretty good shape, almost guaranteed an acquittal, George Zimmerman, and they still destroy your life.
	So the real problem I see is not the self-defense law per se.
	I think it's pretty robust, to tell you the truth.
	Even the states that have a duty to retreat, which I think is...
	I would certainly not vote for it.
	I mean, I would vote for Stand Your Ground if I had the option.
	But folks, the practical truth is, if you can safely retreat before you have to kill someone, it's in your own interest to do that.
	The best way to win a gunfight is to be someplace else.
	It's not to be there to be in the gunfight.
	So I tell everybody, I don't care if you're in a Stand Your Ground state or not.
	If you actually have a safe avenue retreat, get the hell out.
	That's the most prudent decision you can make.
	I was going to say, you could have your absolute Duty to retreat.
	If you have any way out beyond taking a life, I know people are going to think I'm promoting this.
	I'm not promoting this, but I'm just thinking that's a viable alternative.
	Well, they do that in Europe.
	They do it in Canada, too.
	Except even in Canada, by the way, even if you have unlawful possession of a firearm or, as far as I understand it, any other form of defense, which is unlawful pepper spray, taser, whatever, if you use it in lawful self-defense...
	You'll be safe of murder, but you might be guilty of unlawful possession of a restricted weapon or whatever.
	Well, that's true in America, too.
	So it's not at all uncommon for, you know, for example, a felon in possession, what we call here in the U.S., if you're a felon, you can't be lawfully in possession of a gun, even if the state otherwise has no restrictions on firearms.
	And so you might, and by the way, lots of criminals do this.
	I mean, they're felons, but they're engaged in enterprises where they're frequently targets of, you know.
	Robbery.
	I mean, they're drug dealers, right?
	They have drugs and money.
	What's not to like?
	I mean, as a target of a robbery.
	So they'll often have guns and be attacked and use the guns to defend themselves.
	And the act of self-defense can be perfectly lawful and they'll be acquitted of shooting that person.
	But the possession of the gun is a completely different criminal offense.
	Yeah, in fact, that happened recently in a case where they were acquitted of all the use of the gun in self-defense, but the fact they were a felon in possession meant they were looking at a good amount of time anyway.
	But one of the other myths that they've propagated in the Rittenhouse case especially is that self-defense is somehow white privilege and things of this nature.
	Yeah, especially staying your ground, by the way.
	It could be more opposite.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, in my experience, one, disproportionately Mexican-Americans and African-Americans.
	I mean, I don't even want to make it race or ethnic specific, but if you grew up in a poor Italian neighborhood or poor Irish neighborhood or any place, the poorer the neighborhood, the more likely there is to be physical confrontation, wealthy people.
	Find other distractions and physical confrontation.
	And the more likely you are to be in a physical confrontation, the more you need self-defense to justify your use of defensive force against that.
	And by far the most common claims of self-defense are by poorer segments of the American demographic because they're living in these violent communities.
	If they had the money to get out, they would have gotten out of the violent community.
	So it's insane.
	And I see these like...
	They'll list like 200 Stand Your Ground cases and they'll do some analysis and say, well, it's overwhelmingly white people.
	I'm like, all right, well, first of all, that's not Stand Your Ground.
	That's not Stand Your Ground.
	They don't even know what Stand Your Ground is.
	I mean, they don't define it in any legally sensible way.
	They just threw a bunch of cases at the wall.
	And when you actually look at the genuine self-defense Stand Your Ground cases, overwhelmingly the majority is people from poorer demographics.
	So this is favorable to them.
	All these people arguing against Stand Your Ground, you're going to put a lot more young black men in prison if they don't have Stand Your Ground to fall back on because they're the ones getting attacked.
	And as you say, listen, when you're poorer, the poorer you are, the more pride matters, right?
	And you don't want to back down.
	You can't afford, actually, to back down socially, culturally, in your community and be perceived as weak because it will only get you more attacks.
	So they feel a really compelling need not to be perceived as someone who backs down from fights.
	That's the person who most desperately needs to stand your ground.
	I brought up a few chats.
	Grandma always said, I think this is from Waterboy, if I'm not mistaken.
	He who runs away lives to fight another day.
	True.
	That's true for me, because I live in a safe neighborhood, and if I go to downtown Denver and some...
	Let's call it a drug addict.
	It costs me, and I can run away.
	I'll never see that person again in my life.
	But if I live in a poor community, and folks, I have lived in poor communities.
	I have worked in poor communities.
	When I was a diesel mechanic, it was in Harlem, New York, before it was nice.
	It looked like Berlin in the aftermath of World War II when I worked there.
	That's how old Andrew is, by the way.
	If you live or work, you're buried in that kind of environment.
	You can't just run away because that guy is there tomorrow.
	It's more like dealing with a bully at school, except the bully might kill you.
	So it's a very different situation.
	For me, it's easy to run away from a bad actor because they don't live in my neighborhood and I'll never see him again.
	But if they live in your neighborhood, it's a completely different life experience.
	Andrew, I'm going to bring this one up.
	I'm not sure if this is a disguised plug, but Andrew, CCW Insurance.
	Any recommendations?
	Do any of them vet their counsel?
	Concealed carry weapon insurance.
	What is that?
	So, right up front, full disclosure, I do a lot of work with one of those companies.
	I don't work for them.
	I'm not paid a salary by them or anything like that, but they're the one I like the most.
	I'm personally a member.
	That one is CCW Safe.
	I can do a plug for them, lawofselfdefense.com slash CCWsafe for folks who are interested in that.
	So the way these, I'll call them self-defense insurance companies because that's what everybody calls them.
	They are not insurance companies.
	They are not selling you insurance.
	They are not registered with the insurance authorities in your state.
	They typically have insurance themselves.
	They have reinsurance.
	If they have to make a payout to a member, they get compensated by their insurance company.
	But they're not selling you insurance.
	But the way they typically work is...
	They say, hey, if you're involved in a use-of-force event, you have legal expenses, we'll cover your legal expenses.
	Usually there's a civil and criminal side of things.
	The civil, it's, I don't know, whatever, a million dollars, whatever they do.
	The criminal, some of them have limits, like we cap out at $250,000, which, by the way, folks, is not nearly enough.
	If you've killed someone in self-defense, you'll burn through that before you get to trial.
	Others have higher limits or no limits.
	CCW Safe, the one I like, one of the reasons I like them is because they have no limit.
	They'll pay for your trial.
	They'll pay for your appeal.
	They'll pay for your retrial if there's a hung jury.
	There's no cap on how much they'll spend for your legal defense.
	In terms of the question, do they vet your lawyer?
	So most of these organizations will tell you because a big problem the general public has is how do they pick a lawyer?
	There's no good way for a normal citizen to pick a lawyer because there's no vetting.
	I mean, you go on the internet, you find somebody.
	You don't know if they're any good or not.
	So if you're involved in it, and by the way, it makes a huge difference.
	I mean, Robert will tell you, I'm sure it's the same in Canada.
	There is, like any other skilled profession, there is a huge spectrum of talent and ability in the legal profession.
	There's some world-class characters.
	Most everybody, 90% is in that.
	You know, one standard deviation from the norm.
	And then there's a lot of people at the bottom end of the spectrum, too.
	These are not the same.
	So just because someone's a lawyer doesn't mean they're a good lawyer.
	So how do you pick?
	It's a concern that a lot of people have.
	And a lot of these organizations will say, hey, if you're involved in an event, we'll assign you a lawyer.
	We'll give you a lawyer.
	Well, at least we have a list of lawyers.
	First of all, if they tell you they're going to give you your lawyer, I would run for the hills.
	If my life is at stake, I'm not taking a lawyer picked by somebody else.
	Their entire incentive is to give me the lowest-priced lawyer they can find if they're paying for that person.
	I need to have confidence that my lawyer is fighting for my life, not that he was picked by somebody else.
	But even when they have a list of lawyers, so I've worked with a number of these organizations.
	They invite you.
	When you're me, they invite you to meetings and councils and stuff, and they'll say, so, Andrew, here's our list of lawyers that we recommend to people.
	I'm like...
	Awesome.
	You know, one thing I've really struggled with is I get requests all the time for, can you recommend a good lawyer here, a good lawyer there?
	And I personally know a lot of lawyers, but I don't know lawyers everywhere.
	I would love for there to be a resource I could point people to to find a good lawyer where they've been vetted.
	How do you vet these lawyers?
	They don't.
	They don't.
	This one company, and I won't name them, but they said, well, we just basically, they went on the internet.
	They found lawyer names.
	I said, well, do you even call the bar and make sure they're in good standing?
	And they were like, that's a thing?
	I was like, well, not only is it a thing, it's about the lowest level thing you could do.
	I mean, you could do horrible things as a lawyer and not have your license to practice suspended.
	When they did that, the guy sitting next to me at that council meeting, they had to kick him out because he had been...
	His license to practice has been suspended, and they never bothered to look.
	So generally, they don't do any vetting at all, probably because it's hard for them to figure out, too.
	Another reason I like CCW Safe is because they call him their National Trial Counsel.
	He's Don West.
	He's one of the George Zimmerman attorneys.
	And having watched every minute of that defense, I think that was about as perfect a criminal defense as I've ever seen in my life.
	I think those guys did a great job.
	And what they do at CCW Safe is they'll...
	They'll have a list of lawyers, too.
	But if you want your own lawyer, you can pick that person.
	All they have to do is talk with Don West.
	And if Don West confirms the guy's not an idiot, well, then they'll cover that lawyer, too.
	I have to say, I trust that model because I trust Don West.
	So if CCW Safe no longer had Don West and somebody else was making the choice, I would question that model as well.
	But as long as they have him, I'm very confident in that approach.
	If Don West says your criminal defense lawyer sounds like he knows what he's talking about, to him, you have a high degree of confidence that that person is actually a good criminal defense attorney.
	Yeah, I've wanted Don and some other people associated with him to help with a particular case, but luckily the outcome turned out okay anyway, despite maybe what was not the most inspiring defense ever witnessed.
	That was horrible.
	That was horrible.
	It's so interesting, actually, just from my perspective, that you can have a case where you have a really good legal defense and you end up with a bunch of convictions going to jail forever.
	And you can have a really weak legal defense and still get an acquittal.
	And the message for me is that it's really the facts that matter.
	You know, folks, I often hear people tell me that, hey, you know, I don't really need to know this self-defense law stuff.
	If I get in a jam, I'll hire a lawyer.
	That's what lawyers are for.
	Man, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but your lawyer is stuck with whatever facts you give him.
	And if you give him bad facts, it's going to be a very, very difficult case.
	The most brilliant lawyer is not going to save you from a screwed-up case of self-defense.
	No, they'll just save you from the way you frame the facts that they give to you.
	I mean, they'll bill you.
	They'll take your money.
	But they can help you.
	They can help you.
	They don't get to invent new facts.
	But if you have good facts, even a mediocre legal team, like we saw in the recent case, can result in acquittals.
	Even if they're blundering around, if the facts are strong enough, you can get an acquittal.
	Andrew, I mean, I guess we try to keep it to two hours, but we could go on for a long time.
	We've done the Carruthers.
	We've glossed over Ahmaud Arbery.
	Say it again?
	It's Carruth, right?
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	I'm saying Carruthers.
	I do it all the time.
	I type it.
	I don't know why.
	I don't even know a Carruthers.
	But every time I blog, I'm like, wait, that's too long.
	Okay, sorry.
	It's Kyle versus Chad.
	We did the Kyle versus Chad.
	We've briefly gone over Ahmaud Arbery.
	I mean, I guess in a nutshell, what were your issues with the jury instructions?
	Because I understand it's a nuanced legal issue as to the ambiguity of the self-defense laws that existed at the time, sorry, citizen's arrest laws that existed at the time that were since repealed.
	So I guess in a nutshell, what were the laws, what was repealed, and what was the ambiguity that the judge effectively left to the interpretation of the jury?
	So it's amazing how much confusion there is about this because it's a two-sentence statute.
	You don't see a lot of two-sentence statutes that are pivotal in the case, but it's probably because it's an old statute and we're wordier now than we used to be.
	But the two-sentence statute has the first sentence applies to misdemeanors and felonies that do not involve flight.
	Okay?
	And it says you have to have immediate knowledge or presence.
	In other words, you effectively have to have 100% certainty that you're arresting the right person.
	And that's, by the way, the way it applies to cops, too.
	Normally, if a cop wants to arrest somebody for a misdemeanor, he has to have personal knowledge of what happened.
	The second sentence applies to felonies with flight.
	So a felon in flight.
	And there it says, basically, you need probable cause.
	My position is you have to read those two separately because there are different circumstances.
	One is misdemeanor in felony, absent flight.
	The second is misdemeanor, sorry, felony with flight.
	If you read them together as if there was just like a comma or something between them, how that reads technically is, all right, for a misdemeanor and a felony without flight, you need 100% certainty, but then you also need probable cause, 51% certainty as well.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	Once you have, you wouldn't need, the second sentence would serve no purpose at all.
	And a fundamental rule of statutory interpretation is you don't presume that a major portion of a statute...
	is there for no reason.
	Presumably, it's there for a reason or it wouldn't exist.
	The only reasonable reading of that statute is for misdemeanor and felony without flight, you need 100% knowledge.
	But for felony with flight, you need merely probable cause to make that arrest.
	Now, what the judge did is, listen, if the judge had said, read them together, All right, I would have thought he was wrong.
	I think that's the wrong position.
	But at least he would have done his job as a judge.
	He would have told the jury, this is how the law is to be understood.
	Or if he had read it my way, I would have thought he was right.
	And he would have, again, done his job, told the jury, this is how the law is supposed to be read.
	But he didn't do any of that.
	He just read the literal words without clarifying how they were supposed to be applied, leaving it to the jury to decide.
	What the meaning of the law was.
	And the jury is not the finder of law.
	The jury is the finder of fact.
	They're supposed to determine what facts are proven or disproven, however they want.
	No one can tell them how to do that.
	That's entirely their prerogative.
	But when it comes to how the law is to be applied to those facts, that's the judge's job.
	And he didn't do that.
	He left that ambiguous.
	And I find that contemptible.
	And if it's not reversed on those grounds...
	Which it might not be, by the way.
	I mean, I always say appeals are for losers.
	Also, I mean, too much politics in this even for a court of appeals, I would imagine.
	What's the circuit for this district?
	I don't know the local legal system well enough to do that.
	But, you know, appellate courts take the cases they want to take.
	I mean, if they don't want to take this case, in theory, you have a fundamental privilege to the mid-level appellate courts.
	But they'll just issue a one-sentence denial.
	Affirmation of the conviction of they don't want to deal with the actual merits of the case.
	And of course, you have no privilege, no right to appeal to the state's highest course outside of death penalty cases.
	Which, by the way, might be one of the reasons it's not.
	Yeah, it's a good Georgia Court of Appeals.
	The Georgia Supreme Court on paper would be good, but the verdict should be reversed.
	But the question is whether or not they have the political courage to enforce the law or are they going to reward the Pontius Pilate routine that this judge did due to the political controversy surrounding the case.
	But I got to hop off here.
	Andrew, I have your book.
	I've been following you since the Zimmerman case all the way back.
	But you tell everybody all your sources and all the places where they can find your information and where they get the book, which is great, covers all 50 states, and where they can follow you in general.
	I'm so bad at this kind of stuff, but I'm in a bunch of places.
	My website is lawofselfdefense.com.
	That's easy enough.
	Of course, we're on YouTube, which is, I guess, YouTube.
	Law of Self-Defense.
	Law of Self-Defense.
	You'll find it on YouTube.
	Sorry.
	Yeah, just Google it.
	A bunch of stuff will pop.
	I'm sorry, folks.
	I don't really know how this internet stuff works.
	And I'll facilitate it.
	All of the links will be in the pinned comment.
	And don't leave yet.
	We'll all say our proper goodbyes.
	I would encourage people to look for me on Locals because YouTube is a B-I-T-C-H in terms of every video I put on there.
	I do legal analysis, right?
	That's all I do.
	Every video I put on there is demonetized, which I presume means...
	No one's being made aware of it.
	Again, I don't know how that works, but at least Locals doesn't do that to me.
	I'm in all these places, but if I could move off YouTube, I'd be very happy to do that.
	Oh, did I just blow up your video on YouTube?
	Sorry.
	No, no.
	We've been demonetized since 10 minutes in.
	I checked.
	I don't really care about that.
	Andrew, you might have brought that demonetization here.
	But I'll put the links in the pinned comment.
	Robert, Andrew, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, the poll.
	Whose take is better?
	Bronco versus Barnes?
	I think it was 56 to 44 or 54 to 46. It's 50-50.
	So that's how split the...
	Uh, Carruth cases out of Lubbock, Texas.
	And I, I'm on, I'm on the fence.
	I, you know, I'm on the fence.
	I just say, you know, I know what I think if I am in either of their shoes, I wouldn't do something in one of their shoes and I would expect someone to do something different in the other shoe.
	So, with that said, people, thank you all.
	Share this around.
	Clip highlights.
	Share them on social media.
	Andrew?
	You are a wealth of information, as is Barnes, but I've gotten so used to Barnes, I take Barnes for granted.
	The encyclopedias that we have had tonight.
	We have two encyclopedias and one bookmark, and I'm the bookmark.
	So everyone in the chat, thank you very much for the support.
	Thank you for tuning in.
	Robert, Andrew, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.

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