Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 13 2018 01:03pm)

And the standard for both legal and ethical self-defense is how a reasonable person would judge the threat in the same situation with the same limited perception and human reaction time.
The standard is not whether a person is actually a threat with perfect knowledge of the situation, its whether it was a reasonable belief of imminent serious bodily harm.

If someone is in a standoff with the police and pulls out a replica gun and points it at them, the police were never actually in any threat- the gun is fake. But they can't know that in the moment they need to shoot or 'get shot'.

Quote (JohnMiller92 @ Aug 13 2018 03:20pm)

And a person retreating does not equate to imminent serious bodily harm.

Try again

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 13 2018 01:22pm)

And no reasonable person can be judged on the splitsecond difference between someone advancing on them after attacking them while there's on the ground, and backing up as they draw their gun.
We hold people to the standards of reasonable human beings, not superhumans or someone who just huffed an inhaler's worth of slo-mo from Dredd.

Quote (JohnMiller92 @ Aug 13 2018 03:24pm)

Sure they can. Otherwise, it could have been 20 seconds since the shove, and without surveillance footage, Michael "could have" said it was split second decision. And be scot-free. That's not right, no?

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 13 2018 02:04pm)

And it would be up to the jury to decide whether they believe his story. That's exactly what happened in the Trayvon Martin shooting.
He said it was a split second as he got jumped and couldn't get away, the jurors believed him.

He could claim he's the queen of shiva, that's what a jury is there to determine.
In this case, no jury is necessary to make that determination, because the facts already prove it.

Quote (JohnMiller92 @ Aug 13 2018 04:10pm)

The facts prove you are wrong though. He was retreating, thus no longer a threat.

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 13 2018 02:57pm)

sounds to me like you're trying to judge the guy's threat based on a 1.5-2 second span from the view of a camera with the benefit of hindsight and frame-by-frame analysis instead of the point of view of a reasonable actor who has been bodily knocked to the ground and rights himself to see his attacker advancing towards him.

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 13 2018 03:03pm)

And the standard for both legal and ethical self-defense is how a reasonable person would judge the threat in the same situation with the same limited perception and human reaction time.
The standard is not whether a person is actually a threat with perfect knowledge of the situation, its whether it was a reasonable belief of imminent serious bodily harm.

If someone is in a standoff with the police and pulls out a replica gun and points it at them, the police were never actually in any threat- the gun is fake. But they can't know that in the moment they need to shoot or 'get shot'.

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 13 2018 03:22pm)

And no reasonable person can be judged on the splitsecond difference between someone advancing on them after attacking them while there's on the ground, and backing up as they draw their gun.
We hold people to the standards of reasonable human beings, not superhumans or someone who just huffed an inhaler's worth of slo-mo from Dredd.

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 13 2018 02:19pm)

I've already covered that. If I'm going to repeat myself, I'm going to do it in low effort style;

Quote (Goomshill @ Aug 13 2018 04:15pm)

that's not even what 'Stand Your Ground' means.
Stand Your Ground vs Duty To Retreat is a distinction in different states about whether you must attempt to retreat from a confrontation when given the chance for a self-defense claim to be valid. If you could reasonably anticipate that a situation would lead to imminent violence (or already has), then in a duty to retreat state you must attempt to flee the scene if you can do so, and doing so doesn't imperil your own life / lives of others. In a duty to retreat state, then even if your use of force was justifiable in response to a threat, the fact you didn't retreat when given the opportunity can be used to convict you. In a stand your ground state, you can remain at a dangerous scene even if you know it could lead to you using deadly force to defend yourself.

In this case, its completely irrelevant. There was no violent confrontation until the moment the guy blindsided him. It was an unprovoked, unexpected assault. There was no opportunity to retreat, ergo there could not have been a duty to retreat even if that was the law in florida.
if the black guy came out of the bodega and began shouting at the white guy and threatening him loudly without actually attacking him, and instead of walking away the white guy decided to stand his ground, and was then attacked by the black guy and shot him in self-defense, then stand your ground vs duty to retreat would apply. But that didn't happen in this case, the guy just walked out of the bodega and shoved him out of the blue from the white guy's side where he wasn't even looking.