Fascinating essay on Dick Cheney and Trayvon Martin. "We used to be a country in which we assumed people would not immediately shoot another human being but rather exercise caution, self-control and good judgment when they suspected danger might be at hand. Perhaps we expected too much and, on occasion, people who hesitated before shooting a possible assailant lost their lives. There are many kinds of tragedies. How, though, did we get to be a nation with laws that go to the opposite extreme—decrees that give you permission to shoot and kill someone else if you even vaguely suspect that he or she may wish to harm you and then walk away, presumed innocent, without arrest, detention, a trial or any other investigation, automatically protected from experiencing any kind of consequences? It did not happen overnight. That process began 12 years ago when, after the tragedy of 9/11, then-Vice President Dick Cheney developed and implemented a policy doctrine for dealing with potential terrorist threats called the “One Percent Doctrine.” It absolved us, as a nation, from the responsibility of having to retreat or prove anything in order to justify using force, including deadly force, if we had even a 1 percent degree of suspicion that we were under threat of attack." "Cheney’s radical One Percent Doctrine did not give birth to self-defense claims or the concept that it is your right to defend yourself in your own home or anywhere you have a legal right to be. What was new about Castle and Stand Your Ground laws spawned by his doctrine was that—once these became actual statutes—by citing them, you could avoid an arrest or a trial and, like Zimmerman, go home a free man after shooting and killing a 17-year-old boy, who was minding his own business while walking home from a convenience store, after you pursued him solely because you had some notion in your own head that people like him were up to no good and you had to do something about it … and about him."
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 15:58:18 +0000
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