The homeowner who fatally shot a 20-year-old University of South Carolina student who tried to enter the wrong home on the street he lived on Saturday morning will not face charges because the incident was deemed “a justifiable homicide” under state law, Columbia police announced Wednesday.
Police said the identity of the homeowner who fired the gunshot that killed Nicholas Donofrio shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday will not be released because the police department and the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office determined his actions were justified under the state’s controversial “castle doctrine” law, which holds that people can act in self-defense towards “intruders and attackers without fear of prosecution or civil action for acting in defense of themselves and others.”
I can’t tell, did they announce at all or just fired the moment he broke the window??
Surely this could have been avoided by asking questions first…. What the fuck
Idk man, I’m liberal as hell and even I have problems with that line of logic. Man’s smashing up their house, putting myself in the invadees shoes I’d be worried about warning the home invader(s) and making them use their weapons.
I’m not saying I think everything is fine and dandy in this situation, mfs are using guns way to much in America. But since the occupants had a gun for self defense AND their home was being broken into, I find it hard to blame them for defending themselves.
Same, progressive who believes people have the right to defend their house once someone is clearly trying to force their way in.
I’m uncomfortable with that loophole only because of you’ll recall, several years back a black lady knocked on a stranger’s for because her car broke down in front of that house and got ventilated without discussion.
That’s wack as shit, and I have to wonder how police would determine a frame-up if that particular trashbag had broken the window to make it seem like the lady was breaking in.
Only solution that comes to mind is a ring-like device which only records to local storage.
Absolutely, I think there should be certain objective things that have to happen before “fearing for your life” is a valid defence.
Someone breaking your window after trying to enter forcefully through your door is where I start thinking it’s okay to use a deadly weapon to defend yourself.
Someone knocking on your door (regardless of the time of day) is not a reasonable situation to fear for your life, at least to the extent where you attack the person.
I don’t know the specific case you’re talking about, but that isn’t actually the law, that is a failure of our justice system, the shooter could have gotten convicted for that (based off your description I should add, if I’m missing details that would exhonerate the homeowner, like an outside gate already having been breached, then that’s another matter). In my area, you are required to have signs of forced entry before you can defend yourself in this manner, and if someone shot through the door my DA would certainly try the case, but then the jury can decide if “guilty or not guilty,” and that’s how you end up with both false convictions and “false releases” like the one you mentioned. Unfortunately however I’m unaware of a more fair system than the one we have, but I’m open to ideas.
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I mean I’m not in the camp of thinking the homeowners were necessarily in the wrong, but have you seriously never heard of someone breaking their own window to get back into their own property when they were locked out? Also, yea it is possible to communicate with a blackout drunk person, or at least try to warn them.
I dont know the whole situation, but if they didn’t make any effort to communicate or warn the guy before they shot him, I do think that’s cold hearted. If they did try to communicate and were ignored, then I think they didn’t do anything wrong.
Legally speaking they are obviously in the clear. I just dont know if this was acceptable from a moral perspective to me without knowing the full details yet.
I’m upvoting you simply because I think you’re debating in good faith and even though I don’t agree with you, I think you’re adding something real to the conversation.
While I do think the situation would likely have ended better if the homeowner had tried to engage the invader in reasonable conversation before pulling the trigger, I don’t think he should be legally required to do so. Remember: it was the home invader’s actions that caused this whole situation. People keep winging about the homeowner’s responsibility to take action to *protect *the invader of his home, but no one is acknowledging that the invader could have prevented all of this by simply not invading the home. People who behave this way have problems, but they’re virtually always not the people they are harming with their actions. They need help, surely, but they also need to be isolated from the general population and punished for the harm they do to others.
And for those who chime in to object to the fact that I said people should be punished for their crimes, just know that I’m all for prison reforms that make prisons safer and help people begin new lives after they’ve served their time, but that I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING DEMAND they serve their fucking time. I have no use for people that can’t wrap their pathetic brains around the notion that crime and punishment are inextricably linked. It’s not about vengeance. The entire reason we have a justice system is so that we can punish criminals in a more objective, humane way than victims can with their tendency towards revenge rather than justice.
I completely agree with you that there should be no legal requirement to warn an intruder before utilizing self defense. I just feel that its nuanced, and in this particular case, if I was the homeowner I would be screaming my head off warning the intruder that they are about to die in not such a polite way. I just would feel morally obligated to do everything I could to divert the situation, and I would hope most others would do the same before making the decision to end a life.
Could have been avoided? Maybe. But at some point the onus is on the person breaking into your house to…idk, not do that? Like there’s a spectrum between what you can do, what you should do and what you have to do and asking some questions first is certainly something you can do. Maybe even something you should do, but protecting your family from someone who is breaking into your house is something you have to do. This isn’t Ralph Yarl who got popped twice for standing on the porch, or those girls who were still in the car and backing out of someone’s driveway when they got clipped. Dude tried to break into the house by kicking the door in, that didn’t work, so he tried a different way of breaking into the house which would have worked had he been left to it.
I’m usually pretty firmly against preemptive violence as self defense but this seems rather cut and dry to me. I would have done the exact same thing the homeowner did here, and I think that it’s doubly good that the homeowner wasn’t charged.