Castle Doctrine Research Articles

Public perceptions of castle doctrine and stand your ground cases

AbstractIntroductionStand your ground (SYG) and castle doctrine (CD) laws are presently growing throughout the United States. The present study aims to better understand public perceptions of SYG and CD cases and demographic factors that influence judicial decision making.MethodsParticipants were 204 adults who were randomly assigned one of four vignettes that depicted a CD or SYG scenario and varied by defendant demographics. After reading the vignette, participants completed a questionnaire assessing whether they believed the defendant was guilty of the murder and whether the homicide was justified.ResultsResults indicated participants were more likely to assign a guilty verdict to the SYG scenario, compared to the CD scenario. Additionally, participants assigned to the SYG vignette believed the male defendant was more justified in killing the victim, compared to participants assigned the female defendant.ConclusionResults from this study reveal how potential jurors may harbor sex/gender bias in determining justifiable homicide in stand your ground cases.

Unhomeliness—Afterlife and Testimony

ABSTRACT The article considers the unhomeliness of blackness by interrogating aspects of the controversial 2019 Dallas Country District Court case in which Judge Tammy Kemp ruled the jury to consider the state’s “ castle doctrine” and “mistake of fact” in the trial of Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, who claimed to shoot Botham Jean, an unarmed black man in his own apartment, by mistake. In doing so, the article places together the notion of afterlife as conceptualized separately by Walter Benjamin and Saidiya Hartman to raise the role of testimony as a fundamentally anti-black structural dilemma rooted beyond legal theory and notions of evidence.

The Effect of Self-Defense Laws on Firearm Use Among Criminal Offenders

Criminal violence frequently increases within jurisdictions following the implementation of self-defense laws. One explanation for this finding is a firearm amplification effect, whereby criminal offenders increasingly use firearms as a direct response to the amplified threat engendered by citizens. Using longitudinal data drawn from the National Incident-Based Reporting System for 95 cities situated in 15 states, we investigate whether the passing of a stand your ground or castle doctrine law amplifies the likelihood of gun use by criminal offenders. Results from a panel analysis show a marked rise in gun use among criminal offenders following the imposition of both types of self-defense laws. These findings furnish empirical support for the firearm amplification thesis.

Are Tents a “Home”? Extending Section 8 Privacy Rights for the Precariously Housed

The home, for most of us, is an obvious zone to assert privacy and property rights. This is not the case for those whose control of residential space is precarious. Our article focuses on privacy rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for those living in tents and, specifically, the judicial rejection of the tent as a home garnering legal protection under section 8. We focus on a 2018 case from British Columbia, R v. Picard, the only judicial decision that we could locate that has explored this question. In holding that the tent is not a home, Picard draws from the venerable castle doctrine—the legal principle that cements enhanced legal protection for the home. Drawing from legal geography, we argue that the castle doctrine is grounded in a particular legal-spatial imaginary, such that the home is represented in its ideal form as a privately owned detached dwelling. The connection between privacy rights and the home, as reflected in jurisprudence, is grounded in property rights that formally excluded all but white men in colonial North America and continues to be linked to systemic inequality. The exclusion of those living in tents and other forms of precarious housing from exercising enhanced privacy rights afforded to the home exacerbates existing inequalities, as the most vulnerable are unable to benefit from legal protections of the home. We conclude that the denial of tents as homes is legally flawed and should be reconsidered in future jurisprudence.

Cracking Self-Defense's Intractable 'Difficult Cases'

Cracking Self-Defense's Intractable 'Difficult Cases'

Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles

Reviewed by: Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles Andrew J. B. Fagal Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry. Patrick J. Charles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-63388-13-0. 539 pp., cloth, $28.00. In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court case finding that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to keep a handgun within the home, historians have produced a number of books, peer-reviewed articles, and law reviews reinvestigating the origins of the Second Amendment and the broader place of firearms in American history. Patrick J. Charles's Armed in America joins this recent trend by providing an intellectual history of gun rights in the American imagination from the colonial period to today. In detailing the changing history of how Americans thought about firearms, and their role in society, Charles makes several important contributions to this ongoing discussion. First, Charles gives historians and legal scholars a broad understanding of how thinking about firearms changed over time in American society. In this, he agrees with most other historians of the Second Amendment, who understand it as protecting a right that was associated with militia service and not "armed preparatory carriage" or the "castle doctrine." Second, and most notably for the significance of his book, Charles makes an important historiographical intervention by locating the emergence of modern gun rights theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of gun rights and gun regulation have argued that the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment was a recent invention, which largely dated to the 1960s and then, oddly enough, was most forcefully articulated in the public sphere by members of the Black Power movement. According to this account, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was a group that for most of its history was primarily interested promoting gun safety and target shooting. It was only Harlan Carter's 1977 "Cleveland Revolt" that turned the organization into a political advocacy group. With this new emphasis, the group was in favor of "law abiding citizens" carrying arms (concealed or otherwise) for their own protection. By the 1980s, a number of prominent law school professors agreed that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to use arms for self-defense. Thus, from a confluence of interest group organization and legal academic reasoning, our current "golden age" of gun rights was born. Not exactly, Charles conclusively demonstrates. The actual emergence of gun rights tied to self-defense was located in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early on, the NRA, and a competing organization, the United States Revolver Association (USRA), organized against Progressive Era legislation designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. New York State's Sullivan Act (1911), which requires the issuance of a license to own a handgun, was met with active opposition by the NRA and the USRA. These groups argued, in what would [End Page 309] become a standard rallying cry, that the act's passage would only serve to prevent law-abiding citizens from bearing arms. Once guns were "banned," only criminals would have guns. This rhetorical strategy of firearms organizations was only refined during the 1930s when the Roosevelt administration sought additional firearms regulations. Following the Kennedy and King assassinations of the 1960s, the NRA again mobilized to prevent additional firearms laws. Although unsuccessful in their ultimate goal of preventing passage in the 1930s and 1960s, the group was successful in limiting the effects of these laws. If intellectual history should show people thinking, and not just thought, then Armed in America is quite uneven. Compare Charles's excellent discussion of Timothy Pickering, and his late-eighteenth-century ideas of what a well-regulated militia ought to be, with the depiction of the emergence of modern gun rights ideology in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. We can clearly see the importance of the militia for republican political systems in Pickering's thinking. What we do not get as good a glimpse into is the thought process behind the early proponents of...

RETRACTED: The Impact of the Castle Doctrine on Crime Rates in Texas: Policy Recommendations and Public Health Implications.

An amendment to the Castle Doctrine was implemented in Texas in 2007. The amendment allows the residents of Texas no obligation to retreat prior to using a weapon for protecting oneself, one's belongings, and/or one's property. The objective of the study is to examine whether the Castle Doctrine had an impact on individual crime rates, consolidated violent and consolidated property crime rates, and the overall combined crime rate as the dependent variables. The econometric method of analysis employed in this study is an interrupted time series regression with the line of interruption separating pre-/postimplementation periods marked in the year 2007 for time frames 1998-2006 (preimplementation years) and 2007-2016 (postimplementation years). The independent variables were time, the implementation of the Castle Doctrine-the intervention, and time after the intervention-the postimplementation intervention. Findings of the study indicated an increase in the individual crime rates of murders and rapes and a simultaneous decrease in individual rates of property crimes. Moreover, the analysis detected a decrease in the consolidated violent crime rate of 0.03% (95% confidence interval [CI: -0.012, 0.010]; p = .285) and a decrease in the consolidated property crime rate of 1.81% (95% CI [-0.104, 0.118]; p = .391). Conclusively, a decrease in the overall combined crime rate of 2.31% (95% CI [-0.116, 0.207]; p = .362) was detected over the analyzed time frame. The findings of the study denoted a decrease in the property crime rate that prospectively connects to the likelihood of the deterrence effect, which may imply that perpetrators may have been discouraged to invade properties due to notion of encountering armed homeowners.

THE CONCEPT OF SELF-DEFENSE IN AMERICAN AND POLISH LEGAL SYSTEMS – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

The article is devoted to the issue of self-defense in Polish and American law . Currently, there are attempts to widen the scope of necessary self-protection in Polish legislation and to implement provisions which allow for using greater degree of force by a person attacked at home . The justification of the draft refers to the American law which is more developed in the context of the defense of habitation . Thus, the article provides an analysis of existing legal solutions in American criminal law concerning e .g . the legal definition of self-defense, the use of deadly force, the duty to retreat, the castle doctrine and the provisions which expand this doctrine in comparison with the parallel legal solutions existing in Poland .

Are Alternative Sources of Official Crime Data Interchangeable? A Note on Inter-Agency Consistency

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the decision to use one source of official data in lieu of another affects the assessment of social policy on crime. Specifically, we examine the effect of the implementation of stand your ground legislation on state and municipal compilations of residential and non-residential burglaries known to the police within a large, Midwestern city. The interrupted time series analyses of the state agency data reveal that the castle doctrine legislation led to a temporary decline in residential burglaries, but had no effect on non-residential burglaries. In contrast, our analyses of the city agency data indicate that this legislative initiative had no effect on residential burglaries, but did generate a permanent, monthly increase in the number of non-residential burglaries. The implications of these findings for the use of official crime statistics are discussed.

Use of Force and Home Safety: An Impact Assessment of Oklahoma’s Stand Your Ground Law

ABSTRACTSubsequent to Florida’s enactment of the first castle doctrine law in 2005, no less than 22 additional states have passed some sort of legislation that allows civilians to use deadly force to protect their property from violent and nonviolent offenders. Given the pervasiveness of these legislative acts, it becomes increasing important to find out whether or not they achieve their manifest goal of reducing the amount of crime within a jurisdiction. Toward this end, we employ interrupted time series modeling techniques to assess the impact of Oklahoma’s Stand Your Ground Law on the number of residential and non-residential burglaries. The findings indicate that while the legislative initiative achieved its manifest goal of reducing the number of residential burglaries, it simultaneously had the unintended consequence of increasing the number of non-residential burglaries.

No Ground on Which to Stand: Revise Stand Your Ground Laws So Survivors of Domestic Violence are No Longer Incarcerated for Defending Their Lives

No Ground on Which to Stand: Revise Stand Your Ground Laws So Survivors of Domestic Violence are No Longer Incarcerated for Defending Their Lives

Returning to the Roots of the Castle Doctrine: Why Recent Stand Your Ground Laws are in Line with the Natural Law

As dusk befalls a warm September evening, Carefree Carrie walks down the street on her way home. Glimpsing a shady figure ahead, she cautiously crosses the street and keeps walking. The figure runs towards her waving something in her face exclaiming, money or your life! Perceiving a gun waved in her face and fearing for her life, Carrie throws down her purse and starts to run away. The masked figure chases after her and tackles her to the ground. Struggling to her feet, Carrie once again sees her assailant's gun flashing in the air. Carrie pulls out her concealed weapon and shoots her attacker, bringing him to the ground. At trial, Carrie will claim that she acted in self-defense. Was Carrie's act sufficient for self-defense? Does her intent matter at all? What about the fact that she fired the first shot? Determining whether Carrie's conduct was justifiable as self-defense first requires an understanding of the law itself, from its historical background to its contemporary statutory language, as well as how the courts have interpreted and applied self-defense as a justification. Part I of this note will address how the right of self-defense resonates throughout history from ancient days up to the modern era and finds its origins in the great pillars of Western civilization. After these early precursors to the self-defense doctrine, a grasp of the development of self-defense laws in English common law is relevant to understanding American self-defense laws since English common law heavily influenced American laws. Once the historical foundation for American self-defense is established, Part II analyzes the early American self-defense laws and the philosophical evolution from the Second Amendment to modern self-defense laws, which will demonstrate the state of self-defense in America today. Specifically, the State v. Zimmerman case demonstrates a modern application of self-defense. Ultimately, while American self-defense laws in their text are currently in line with natural law, public policy and recent cases such as State v. Dunn demonstrate that there is a growing possibility and opportunity for judicial interpretation more loosely and generally than, perhaps, the original natural law approach truly warrants. Current public policy concerns demonstrate that the courts may be applying the self-defense laws far more broadly and subjectively than the actual law permits. If this continues, such application may draw the legal understanding of the Stand Your Ground statutes beyond the scope of natural law. After understanding the current state of self-defense in America, Part III presents a look at the Catholic perspective of the doctrine of self-defense that demonstrates the validity of an adherence to the natural law approach. This view of self-defense focuses on the principle of double-effect that protects the innocent person attacked with the possible, yet regrettable, effect of such protection causing the death of the aggressor. Given the relative newness of the modern self-defense laws, the natural law viewpoint warrants a valid interpretation of the statutory language in order to maintain the true meaning behind the self-defense statutes recently enacted.

An Ethical Analysis of the Second Amendment: The Right to Pack Heat at Work

AbstractWe examine the issues concerning the legality and ethicality of the Second Amendment right to bear arms balanced by the employer's duty to provide a safe workplace for its employees. Two court rulings highlight this balancing act: McDonald et al. v. City of Chicago et al. and District of Columbia v. Heller. “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle Doctrine” laws in the recent Trayvon Martin shooting on February 26, 2012 are also applicable. Various ethical frameworks examine the firearms debate by viewing the Second Amendment from three perspectives. These include a pro‐gun perspective drawing upon libertarianism and fundamental rights; a moderate gun perspective drawing upon consequentialism and stakeholder theory; and finally, an anti‐gun perspective drawing upon a Public Health Ethics and peace ethics approach. We explore the issue of gun control from a business perspective as employers face ethical decisions in responding to legislation that allows guns in the workplace and/or in employer parking lots while still being responsible to provide a safe workplace for their employees. We make recommendations regarding how companies should manage by proactively avoiding legal challenges to employees' rights to own and carry guns into the workplace. This includes emphasis on enhanced security, Human Resource policies and monitoring rapidly changing laws.

The Fearon Corollary: Private Property Rights as War

This Article models private property rights as a conflict resolution mechanism and shows that for the Coase Theorem to be consistent on its own terms, private property rights must generate the Pareto-optimal allocation of scarce resources among all feasible conflict resolution mechanisms. This conclusion is termed the Fearon Corollary. Equating the imposition of private property rights to conflict/war, the following question is considered: if pre-conflict common ownership is socially-optimal, under what conditions will disputing parties fail to bargain around the conflict? In addition to the explanations identified by Professor Fearon, the present article offers an additional behavioral explanation evidenced in the institution of private property rights itself, and, in particular, in state “Castle Doctrine” laws that permit the use of lethal force in defense of real property. To promote the socially-optimal shared use of contested scarce resources, a role for the courts is suggested where de facto common property rights are established by rendering private property rights random or unclear — judicial behavior that stands in sharp contrast to the commonly understood normative implications of the Coase Theorem. This uncertainty weakens private property rights, reducing the expected spoils of costly conflict, and, in turn, creates an incentive for disputing parties to cooperate in the form of negotiated settlement agreements. In this way, less secure claims to private property promote social cooperation.

Take Your Guns to Town: Expanding the Scope of the Second Amendment Beyond the Home

In Heller and McDonald, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects a fundamental, individual right to and arms, and self-defense is the core of the right. Yet the scope of the right outside of the home remains undecided. Recently, the Seventh Circuit and the Supreme Court of Illinois held that the Second Amendment does protect rights outside of the home, while other lower courts have held the opposite. To protect the fundamental right to and arms, courts should apply strict scrutiny to firearms regulations with differing applications based on the state interest. This level of scrutiny should apply regardless of whether the regulation applies inside or outside the home. The text of the Second Amendment protects two distinct rights — keep and bear arms. Keeping arms refers to keeping weapons in the house; bearing arms refers to carrying those arms for self-defense. In regard to self-defense, states have consistently granted substantial self-defense rights outside of the home, but even more inside the home through the Castle Doctrine. More recently, many states have extended Castle-Doctrine-type protections outside of the home. These Stand Your Ground laws offer even more protections for citizens who use a firearm for self-defense in public.Drawing parallels between the First and Fourth Amendments supports an expanded scope for the Second Amendment. Both the First and Fourth Amendments provide substantial protections in public, but are at their apex inside the home. Under the First Amendment, states can regulate obscenity in public but cannot criminalize mere possession of such materials inside the home. Similarly with the Fourth Amendment, the home remains the pinnacle of privacy protections. Yet substantial protections exist outside the home. For example, luggage in public cannot be opened under mere probable cause.The Second Amendment substantially protects the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense, and offers even greater protections while inside the home. The application of strict scrutiny would vary based on the state’s ability to articulate a compelling state interest based on a particular public safety concern. While the Second Amendment does not protect the right to carry a bazooka in public, at the bare minimum it protects the right to carry a handgun outside the home in case of danger.

Whistleblowing in Organizations: A Logit analysis of Litigated Cases

We examine the issues concerning the legality and ethicality of the Second Amendment right to bear arms balanced by the employer’s duty to provide a safe workplace for its employees. Two court rulings highlight this balancing act: McDonald et al. v. City of Chicago et al. and District of Columbia v. Heller. “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle Doctrine” laws in the recent Trayvon Martin shooting on February 26, 2012 are also applicable. Various ethical frameworks examine the firearms debate by viewing the Second Amendment from three perspectives. These include a pro-gun perspective drawing upon libertarianism and fundamental rights; a moderate gun perspective drawing upon consequentialism and stakeholder theory; and finally, an anti-gun perspective drawing upon a Public Health Ethics and peace ethics approach. We explore the issue of gun control from a business perspective as employers face ethical decisions William M. Martin is an Associate Professor of Management, DePaul University, Chicago, IL. E-mail: martym@depaul.edu. Helen LaVan is a Professor of Management, DePaul University, Chicago, IL. E-mail: hlavan@depaul.edu. Yvette P. Lopez is an Assistant Professor of Management, DePaul University, Chicago, IL. E-mail: ylopez9@depaul.edu. Charles E. Naquin is an Associate Professor of Management, DePaul University, Chicago, IL. E-mail: cnaquin @depaul.edu. Marsha Katz is a Professor Emeritus of Management, Governors State University, University Park, IL. E-mail: marshakatz@ameritech.net bs_bs_banner Business and Society Review 119:1 1–36 © 2014 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK. in responding to legislation that allows guns in the workplace and/or in employer parking lots while still being responsible to provide a safe workplace for their employees. We make recommendations regarding how companies should manage by proactively avoiding legal challenges to employees’ rights to own and carry guns into the workplace. This includes emphasis on enhanced security, Human Resource policies and monitoring rapidly changing laws.

Any Which Way But Loose: Interpretive Strategies and Attitudes Toward Violence in the Evolution of the Anglo-American 'Retreat Rule'

This note elaborates upon this difference of opinion as it relates to the issue of and self-defense. Of the two perspectives, I am more in agreement with Professor Horowitz. The law could profitably use finer distinctions, and the line between justification and excuse would be far more useful if it were clearer. To explore the issues raised by the question of retreat, this note will examine the evolution of the rule, from its origins in the medieval common law of England through contemporary applications of it and its twin in the decisions of American courts. For the sake of focus, the inquiry will center purely on the issue of the duty to Equally important questions -- such as the possibility of an exception to the duty when a person is attacked in his or her dwelling, and the extremely controversial co-tenant exception to this castle doctrine -- will of necessity be slighted in the present inquiry.Part II will discuss the historical roots of the rule as formulated in the common law of England. Part III will show how the rule was modified in the United States during the nineteenth century, drawing on leading cases to illustrate the roots of the American rule of no retreat. Part IV will particularize the interpretive strategies American courts have evolved in their application of the new American jurisprudence, then illustrate these strategies by analyzing selected cases in three court systems: the United States Supreme Court, which adopted the no retreat rule in 1895 but has been ambivalent in its subsequent applications of the rule; Alabama, which adopted the rule from the common law in 1847 and has remained officially faithful to it ever since, elaborating upon its meaning in an unusually rich jurisprudence; and Illinois, which in 1902 followed the lead of the Supreme Court in adopting the American rule of no retreat and has consistently been counted as a no retreat jurisdiction ever since. The conclusion will tentatively suggest specific reforms to contemporary jurisprudence of and self-defense.

Does Strengthening Self-Defense Law Deter Crime or Escalate Violence?: Evidence from Expansions to Castle Doctrine

From 2000 to 2010, more than 20 states passed so-called Castle Doctrine or stand your ground laws. These laws expand the legal justification for the use of lethal force in self-defense, thereby lowering the expected cost of using lethal force and increasing the expected cost of committing violent crime. This paper exploits the within-state variation in self-defense law to examine their effect on homicides and violent crime. Results indicate the laws do not deter burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault. In contrast, they lead to a statistically significant 8 percent net increase in the number of reported murders and nonnegligent manslaughters.

The Deterrent Effect of the Castle Doctrine Law on Burglary in Texas

From 2005 through 2008, 23 states across the nation have enacted laws generally referred to as “castle doctrine” laws or “stand your ground” laws. A castle doctrine law gives a homeowner the legal right to use force (even deadly force) to defend himself or herself and the family against an intruder. No study, however, has been conducted to evaluate its deterrent effects. The State of Texas enacted its castle doctrine law on September 1, 2007, and the subsequent Joe Horn shooting incident in Houston in November, 2007, served to publicize the Texas law to a great extent. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the deterrent effect of the Texas castle doctrine law and the subsequent Horn shooting on burglary in the two largest cities in Texas, Houston and Dallas. Daily data of residential and business burglary, over the period from January 1, 2007, to August 31, 2008, were obtained from the Houston Police Department and the Dallas Police Department. Interrupted time-series designs were employed in the study to analyze the intervention effects. The findings reported suggest a place-conditioned deterrent effect of the law and the Horn shooting; both residential and business burglaries were reduced significantly after the shooting incident in Houston, but not in Dallas.

Do Castle Doctrine Laws Impact Violent Crime?

Cheng Cheng and Mark Hoekstra, both of the Texas A&M University Economics Department, recently published a paper entitled “Does Strengthening Self-Defense Law Deter Crime or Escalate Violence? Evidence from Castle Doctrine.” They concluded that Castle Doctrine enhancements to self-defense law had no deterrent effect on burglary, robbery and aggravated assault, and increased murder. However, there are a number of errors, assumptions, and miscalculations in their research that justify revisiting the question of whether or not Castle Doctrine laws have any impact on crime.