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Debate continues on Missouri’s new ‘castle doctrine’ law

In Texas last month, a man spotted two burglars carrying items from his neighbor’s house. After calling police, he grabbed his shotgun and killed the burglars.

A debate still rages over whether that was legal under the state’s new “castle doctrine” law, which allows lethal force to defend one’s home.

A similar Missouri law enacted this year appears to allow killings like those, according to judges and lawyers. Advocates praise it as allowing innocent people to defend themselves against criminals. Opponents fear it could cause unnecessary deaths, such as killings of petty thieves.

Under a most basic reading, it allows carte blanche to kill anyone unlawfully entering a house or a car or committing a forcible felony, such as kidnapping, armed robbery, burglary, arson, assault, rape or sodomy.

Just how far can Missourians go? Shoot a drunk who staggers into your home? Probably. Kill the teen burglar who raises his arms in surrender? Possibly.

But a 13-member committee that is writing jury instructions for the new law accepts a less-broad interpretation, said Jackson County Judge Charles Atwell, the committee’s chairman.

He points out that the previous state law included a “reasonableness” standard, meaning you had to believe that you, or another person, was in serious danger before using deadly force. Because that phrase remains in the new law, juries should take it into account, Atwell said.

“That’s going to cause a fight,” counters area lawyer Kevin Jamison, who worked with the Western Missouri Shooters Alliance and the National Rifle Association to help pass the new law.

The NRA has helped spread such laws to Kansas and more than 15 other states in the last two years, though wording varies among states. The Kansas law contains a reasonableness standard.

Prosecutors say the eventual effect of Missouri’s new law will hinge on how those jury instructions turn out. The instructions are expected to be finished early next year, after which the Missouri Supreme Court will either accept them or order a rewrite. If lawmakers don’t like them, they might change the law again.

Already, the 2007 law helped prompt Jackson County prosecutors to drop a murder charge against a Kansas City man and accept an involuntary manslaughter plea instead.

Prosecutors also fear the law will make it more difficult to file and win cases against even hardened criminals, who may twist the law to help them kill others legally.

“Bad people are going to get away with murder because of this statute,” said assistant Jackson County prosecutor Bryan Krantz. “A lot of people are going to get away with murder.”

Killings at home

Kansas City homeowner Gennell Yates shot Devin McDonald to death on Sept. 26, 2006. The two men had argued earlier that day over a $5 bet.

Those involved disagree on how events unfolded.

Yates, 34, said that McDonald, 19, and a friend forced their way into his home and took a shotgun with them. But McDonald’s friend said Yates let them in and had the gun.

There was a struggle. McDonald was killed. His friend fled.

Though the shooting happened before the new law took effect, prosecutors decided that, to be safe, jurors would need to get an instruction on the new law. Because those instructions did not exist yet, the lawyers would have had to draft their own unauthorized version. Any conviction faced a high risk of being overturned, said Jackson County Prosecutor Jim Kanatzar.

The old self-defense wording of reasonableness also could apply, lawyers agreed. It comes with a complex instruction that jurors must find a person had a reasonable belief that he was in danger even if he really wasn’t.

Carie Allen, an assistant public defender, said the new law clearly was intended to “take out the mind reading” by jurors.

“If someone is in your house illegally, you can use deadly force — end of story,” she said.

Her client decided to take the manslaughter plea deal and five years in prison rather than risk a murder conviction and life in prison, she said. In another case involving a 2004 killing, Mitchell Robinson of Kansas City probably would not have been charged under the new law. But Atwell convicted him last year in a trial without a jury and sentenced him in March to nine years for manslaughter and armed criminal action.

Robinson shot Sean Kelliher to death in Robinson’s apartment in the 1000 block of West 39th Street. Kelliher, a recovering heroin addict, lived in an apartment two flights of stairs below. Angry when awakened by noise, he saw Robinson on a landing and chased him.

Robinson ran into his apartment and closed his door but left it unlocked. When Kelliher entered, Robinson shot him in the head with a shotgun.

Atwell found the killing did not meet the reasonable standard.

Earlier this year, advocates for the new law cited that case as reason to pass it. Because of the law, Robinson’s lawyer recently said he would ask Gov. Matt Blunt to pardon his client for the killing.

The big picture

In 2005, Florida lawmakers passed the first NRA-backed castle doctrine law. NRA leaders often cite it as a model.

It has a reasonableness standard. As in Missouri’s previous law, a person breaking into someone’s house is presumed to have the intent of a violent or forceful act. Therefore, deadly force can be used against the intruder.

Like Missouri’s new law, it also specifies that people have no duty to retreat when attacked. That was not an issue in Missouri, because no such duty previously existed. But in Florida, the “no duty to retreat” language also applied to street crimes.

Advocates called it the “Stand your ground” bill, but some prosecutors derided it as the “Shoot your Avon lady” law.

Two years later, the main effect is that Florida prosecutors often do not file charges when there is any evidence of self-defense, even in killings outside homes, said A. Russell Smith, president of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“You’re (also) getting many more cases where they (defendants) argue to the jury, ‘I thought he was attacking me,’ ” Smith said.

Opponents of the law predict that more Florida residents will die needlessly in more gunbattles as people refuse to back away in confrontations.

Ashley Varner, an NRA spokeswoman, said the castle laws send a needed message.

“Innocent victims of attack should be able to know the law is on their side,” she said.

Missouri’s debate

Sen. Jack Goodman, a Mount Vernon Republican and sponsor of the castle doctrine bill, declined to comment on the debate over the new law until he sees the finished jury instructions.

If there are problems, he said, the law can be changed in next year’s legislative session.

Leon Munday, a lawyer and administrator for the Jackson County public defenders office, said the instructions committee is twisting logic to force “reasonable” into a law it does not like.

The new law will cause problems for prosecutors, he said.

“That’s always a good thing, but still it appears to be somewhat dubious public policy,” he said. “I’m torn here.”

Cape Girardeau County Prosecutor Morley Swingle, who earlier this year spoke against passing the law, serves on the jury instruction committee. He and others say there was no need for the new law, because the state had a good castle law for years, well before the NRA began advocating for them.

In his county, the old law aptly protected a homeowner who shot a woman to death. At the time, area residents feared an at-large serial killer who broke into homes and bludgeoned people to death.

Someone kept slamming against the homeowner’s locked door. He warned the person to stop or be shot, but the banging continued. The homeowner fired through the door, killing the person outside. It turned out to be his neighbor.

She had returned home drunk and apparently tried to break into what she thought was her home. Her killer reasonably believed he was in danger, Swingle said.

Under the new law, what about the drunk who enters your house and passes out on the floor?

“Can you take your shotgun and shoot them in the head?” Swingle asked. “Clearly, there has to be some degree of reasonable.”

The new Missouri law goes further than Florida’s in attempting to allow carte blanche killings in cars and homes, said Robert Batey, a professor at Stetson University College of Law in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“I can see there is a need to reign this in,” he said, “but no one wants to look soft on crime.”

Texas justice?

It remains uncertain whether Joe Horn, the Texas man who killed two men burglarizing his neighbor’s house in November, will be charged. A grand jury is expected to decide.

According to news reports, Horn called police when he saw the burglars and told the dispatcher, “I’m not going to let them get away with this.”

“Property’s not worth killing someone over,” the dispatcher replied before hearing gunshots.

The action made Horn, 61, the center of a public debate on whether he should be jailed or considered a hero.

Horn’s lawyer and longtime friend repeatedly has said that Horn is filled with grief over what he did, regardless of what happens to him.

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