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.