Standing your ground at the Brass Ass

As the stand-your-ground laws that have been pushed by gun rights advocates have taken hold, and the traditional rule that a person has no duty to retreat from his home has moved and morphed into a doctrine that a person has no duty to retreat from a place where he has a lawful right to be, the original dissenters who said that this would cause problems have been proved right.

Brian Lemons: stood his ground by stabbing a dude in the back

The latest example comes from Kentucky.  At the outset, let me say this: this brief post is not going to be a legal treatise on the duty to retreat, on stand-your-ground laws in general, or Kentucky law in particular (I am not a Kentucky-licensed lawyer), .  It is going to be a brief commentary on the “I told you so” doctrine.  Let me also say this:  I don’t have a particular problem with stand-your-ground laws.  They are based on the legal premise that if a person is attacked (or his family is attacked – though this gets a little trickier), he has no duty to retreat.  He or she can fight back and defend himself or herself without fear of being prosecuted for that defense.

What a person can’t do, however, is start a fight, begin to lose, then use deadly force.  That’s a classic case for manslaughter.  A person also can’t talk trash, provoke someone, then shoot that person when the person they just provoked becomes somewhat aggressive.  The use of force also has to be proportionate. You can’t use deadly force to stand your ground against non-deadly aggression.

And that brings us to the Brass Ass.  A place apparently as classy as it sounds.  Rawstory reports that Brian Lemons admitted to stabbing Cory Kessnick in the back in 2008 during a brawl outside the strip-club in 2008, but cited the stand-your-ground law, claiming that he had no choice but to defend himself and his friends.  In 2012, an appellate court ruled that he had acted lawfully within Kentucky’s stand-your-ground law.  There was one dissenter, who noted helpfully, and obviously, that “Lemons was not defending his ‘castle’ but was a participant in a ‘brawl’ outside a night club,” wrote appeals Judge Kelly Thompson. “Lemons had no defensive stab wounds and only Lemons’s version of the facts supported his defense theory.”

The Kentucky Supreme Court, while not ruling on the merits of stabbing someone in the back outside of a strip club called the Brass Ass in a drunken brawl (as an alleged act of self-defense, while standing your ground), said that the court of appeals applied the wrong standard of review.  Which is sort of a legal punt.

There will hopefully be a time in the very near future where women who are attacked by their husbands or boyfriends can fire warning shots and not be prosecuted for attempted murder, because they are “standing their ground” while at the same time, people who start brawls and then start losing them and then use deadly force to defend themselves in the fight they started (here’s looking at you George Zimmerman – assuming everything you said was true) are charged with manslaughter and convicted of it, and those who engage in brawls at the Brass Ass get to defend themselves, but don’t get to stab people in the back and claim they are standing their ground. 

When stand-your-ground laws were being pushed so heavily by the NRA, many in the legal community said that they weren’t needed and that traditional self-defense law was plain enough. All they would do was create confusion.  And, they have.

What started off as the Castle Doctrine, where your home was sacred and you didn’t have to retreat from it, apparently morphed to the point that the Brass Ass was hallowed ground in Kentucky.  Which might not be far off in Kentucky.

Houston is in the midst of a hair-weave theft epidemic

Houston, we have a problem.  The problem is two-fold: first, we have women who don’t just embrace natural hair.  There is nothing wrong with natural hair, be it thick, somewhat kinky, or short.  I can understand the allure of a weave. It allows a great amount of creativity in a short amount of time.  You can literally change an entire look in about three to four hours, depending on how much horsing around is going on in the beauty shop and how overbooked the shop is.  As a man who shaves his head, I have obviously not gone that route.  I have instead taken the opposite route.

Victimized shop owner

But I am married to a wonderful (Black) woman, for whom weaves could theoretically be an option.  I am not insane, so I don’t say anything about her hair except how much I love it.  But I love natural hair better.  So, problem number one, in my eyes, Houston, is that we have an epidemic of weaves.

Problem number two is that we have an epidemic of thieves stealing weaves from weave shops.  KHOU has reported that there is a veritable weave crime spree as two men wearing bandanas are breaking into weave shops in a somewhat creative way. They have apparently been watching Mission Impossible. They break into the store next door to the weave store, then bust through the drywall between the stores (these aren’t banks, and this isn’t Ocean’s 11, 12 or 13), but they do lay low to avoid tripping the weave store’s alarms.  This is breaking news: weave stores in Houston apparently have laser and motion alarm sensors. Then they grab as much weave as they can and flee.  It has happened repeatedly. It is a crime wave.  It is a weave wave

Which leads to the third problem Houston has, which is apparently related to the second problem, there is apparently an underground market for stolen weaves.  Because if you steal anything other than cash, you have to fence it.  You’ve got to sell it to a third party that doesn’t care if it’s stolen. At flea markets or out of a truck or to someone who wants it on the down-low from their connection.  And apparently folks in Houston are as cool with getting their weave like this as folks in New York are getting their purses this way. 

Seriously, who buys bootleg hair-weave? Probably the same people who buy bootleg butt-injections. 

 Stop it, Houston. Go natural.  And if you’ve got to go with the weave and get a multi-colored bouffant that you can’t wait to grow yourself, get it legit.

Photo credit: Houston Chronicle

Arkansas Police Reports are Descriptive: Woman “Tripping Balls” Streaks Naked Down Street

Police reports serve a useful purpose.  They inform the prosecutor of the conduct that is to be charged.  They inform the judge and defendant (and occasionally the grand jury) of what the police said happened, so that the defendant can know, exactly, what they have to deny. They let the defense know if the complained of conduct fits the elements of the criminal code. 

Melissa Valencia, after coming down

Most police reports are pretty stodgy affairs that read like recipes for cornbread.  However, occasionally there comes along an officer more prone to Jack Kerouac-like prose who clearly is in the wrong profession.  Who was either led astray as a young man, or has a crime novel in him somewhere.  Someone who is destined to become the next James Ellroy with tight, clipped prose who can describe an entire scene in a few words that his junior high teacher probably described as a fragment, but that the world now knows is a sentence, a fully formed thought – damn the subject, verb, article constraints.

Fayetteville, Arkansas has just such an officer who was likely waiting for some time to get his chance to shine.  Or Fayetteville is just that kind of town where this kind of thing happens all the time and a police officer who is moonlighting in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas (or moonlighting on the police force) happens to write an epic report. 

Melissa Valencia, 21, provided the police an opportunity for some Ellroy-esque prose in their police report when she was reported to be intoxicated, naked and thrashing around a parking lot.  Police tried to pin her down as she hid behind a pole, unsuccessfully because she’s bigger than a pole. And, because she was naked and frankly pretty cute. 

Then there are police dash-cams which protect officers from civil rights lawsuits, and some would say save the public from police misconduct by making sure that all arrests are videotaped. They also successfully tape naked suspects running across parking lots while police chase them trying to pin them down.

When it was all over and the officer had to sum up the experience on paper because you can’t just present the dash-cam to the grand jury (you do, but you also have to present a report for a charging instrument), the officer correctly noted that she was “tripping balls.”

Yep, that about sums it up: Valencia was tripping balls. Cause plus effect neatly stated. Though, unfortunately for her, not a defense, as temporary insanity due to voluntarily taking an intoxicant is not a legal defense.  Valencia, after being wrestled to the ground, covered with a blanket, and handcuffed and taken to the hospital, was cooperative – having come down from her high.

She faces charges of “public intoxication, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest” and possibly public nudity, though that’s not mentioned in the article, and maybe in Fayetteville, that kind of thing is not frowned upon if you’re cute and 21 years old. The charges could have been boiled down to the officer’s original statement. She could have been charged with “tripping balls.”

Story and picture link: New York Daily News