Your duty as a juror is to decide guilty or not guilty based on the law presented. That's why the trial is bifurcated - the punishment isn't supposed to matter on guilty/innocence. Lawyers can't argue the amount of punishment to be assessed during the guilt/innocence phase of the trial. As for this guy, he killed two men. I'm surprised that some people are OK with that. What if the two men were 18 years old and in high school? Would it be OK then? I don't think you can condone the taking of human life in this situation.
Those two men shouldn't have robbed someone's home. Who cares how old they were. What would you do if 18 year olds broke into your house?
I can tell you what I'd do if they broke into my NEIGHBOR's house. Call the cops and wait. We're talking about two men being killed over $2,000. Were they good men? No, I don't think anyone's arguing that. But they certainly didn't deserve to die because of two thousand dollars. Especially when you find out they were unarmed, and probably running away from a guy with a shotgun. They posed no threat to him. He deserves jail time.
Depends on whether they were armed or posed an immediate risk to my family. It appears from the limited information that they weren't armed and were running away from the guy. And your hypothetical isn't relevant - here, it was his neighbor's house, and they'd already left that house. If I saw 2 guys running away from my neighbor's house, I would call the police... I wouldn't shoot them with a shotgun.
Yea. . .MESSAGE RECEIVED NEXT TIME KILL THE NEIGHBOR AND ANYONE ELSE THAT SEEMS TO LOOK AT YOUR CROSSED . . .CAUSE IT HAS TURN INTO A HIM OR ME SITUATION Yea. . I'm sure the neighborhood watches sleep better at night knowing that criminals now think they out to kill them Rocket River
I could care less what you think. For everyone else interested in my response, if you are on a jury you are supposed to report misconduct.
His duty was to answer the questions honestly, not to try to rig the outcome based on answers he may not have believed to be true.
"Common sense" as you see it here should be applied in the sentencing phase of a criminal trial. To find Joe Horn not guilty because of hatred or malice towards the victims is just plain wrong. This kind of selective justice perverts the system.
I'm pretty sure Horn clearly saw what was taking place when he made the decision he did. Horn probably didn't say to himself "hmmmm, I wonder if these thugs are robbing the house, I mean, I can't really tell if they are robbing the house, but since it looks like they are, I'm going to go ahead and shoot them." And SamCassell and LongTimeFan, Horn did not know at the time these thugs were not armed. I mean, what if they were armed? You can't assume they are not armed. I guess the lesson here is, don't even look like you are robbing a house, or something very bad could happen to you. I have zero remorse for robbers.
You'd be the last guy in this forum to speak regarding a lack of manners. You didn't have the decency to apologize for stooping as low as you did.
He was in his own house. He saw it happening in a house he knew wasn't occupied. He told the operator he was gonna go out and get them. The operator urged him not to over and over again. He ignored her. She told him there were already police in the area. He ignored that as well. He went out with a shotgun on the front lawn of his suburban neighborhood and put bullets in these guys' backs as they ran away. He wasn't threatened. He could have done just as he was told. He would have been completely out of danger. There was a policer officer in an unmarked car who pulled up as the burglars were coming out. He was afraid to get out of his car when he saw this guy carrying a shotgun coming out of his house. He prevented law enforcement from doing their job when they told him to stay put. He showed awful judgment. And I feel sorry for him that he has to live with those consequences for the rest of his life. These guys who were stealing from this home showed poor judgment, too. They shouldn't have been there. But I don't wish a fatal bullet in the back of someone simply because they stole some crap. We don't execute burglars in the United States. Not even in Texas.
Part of the problem here is the system. Everybody knows that burglars often see no jail time. Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that nothing would happen to the burglars. When I was in law school, my car was stolen. A week later, I got a call from HPD. My car had been involved in a high speed chase. They arrested the four occupants of the vehicle. My car was totalled. I was outraged when I later was told that NO CHARGES WERE BEING FILED. The system needs to change. All that being said, I think that shooting them is pretty damned extreme.
No...but it certainly comes up in jury selection. I was in the jury pool for a case involving the sexual assault of a minor child under the age of 14. I was told that the sentence is between 5 and 99 years TDC. I was asked if there are any circumstances where I could give 5 years.
Anyone who thinks this guy will ever see jail-time is deluding themselves. I saw a murder case last summer, where the defendant shot a unarmed drunk guy in the face, in parking lot of strip club, for saying nasty things to his stripper girlfriend. The defense? The drunk guy threw a beer bottle at the defendant. Defendant was the only witness to this mystery beer bottle, and the bottle was never found. Yet the jury hung on sentencing, half wanting to give the guy straight up probation because "it was self-defense." No Texas jury is going to send a 62 year old man to prison for shooting two illegal immigrants on his property, after they just robbed his neighbor, even if he did shoot them in the back. Not going to happen, never in a million years. In fact, I'd be surprised if the grand jury true-bills the case. Harris County grand juries are filled with retired, old white people just like Joe Horn, and they're all woodshedded already on shooting cases and self-defense just in case they have to deal with a case where a cop shoots somebody. In fact, the grand jurors usually do training on a weapon simulator so they know how quick someone has to react when pulling the trigger. The only way Horn gets indicted is if the prosecutor on the case REALLY wants it to go to trial and does a great job presenting the case to the grand jury.
