A suburban Detroit man who said he fatally shot an unarmed woman on his porch out of fear prompted by early morning pounding on his doors faces up to life in prison after jurors rejected his claim of self-defense.
Theodore Wafer was convicted Thursday of second-degree murder after a nine-day trial that centered on whether the 55-year-old had a reasonable and honest belief that his safety was in peril.
If you remember the case it was concerning an intoxicated young black woman who came to Wafer's door looking for help after wrecking her car. However help is not what she received.
Wafer opened the front door and shot McBride in the face, firing through a screen door while she stood on the other side. He first suggested to police that it was an accident but later admitted to intentionally pulling the trigger.
Apparently in America's gun culture one fires their weapon first, before one ascertains whether or not a threat even exists.
This is a win for the good guys.
Hopefully it might convince a future gun nut to hold his fire and help a fellow human being rather than to splatter their brains all over his front porch.
ALEC is slipping. They didn't get STAND YOUR GROUND and enough GOP judges in place quick enough.Of course he was in danger. There was a strange unarmed woman on his porch! He was just exerting his 2nd amendment right to shoot on sight.
ReplyDeleteOT: This Snowden interview is awesome, you should read the whole thing Gryphen.
ReplyDeleteIt may be that by seizing all of the records for private activities, by watching everywhere we go, by watching everything we do, by monitoring every person we need, by analysing every word we say, by waiting and passing judgment over every association we make and every person we love, that we could uncover a terrorist plot or we could discover more criminals. But is that the kind of society we want to live in? That is the definition of a security state.
Do we want to live in a controlled society or do we want to live in a free society? That’s the fundamental question we’re being faced with.
Criticisms about his links with Russia
The fact that I didn’t bring any classified material with me to Russia means that even if this is a Gulag state, my fingers are being broken every night and I’m being beaten with chains, there’s nothing for them to gain. So I think those fears are overblown. What people don’t understand about the intelligence community is it’s not that we have a finite list of sources and methods, we go on the shelf, we take something off, we use it for spying then we put it back on the shelf. And if that’s destroyed it’s a permanent hole, we’ll never get it back.
[The] intelligence community in the United States and any intelligence agency is much more analogous to a factory that creates … methods of gathering intelligence. If I happen to know something amazing about an intelligence program and I were beaten or tortured or somehow compromised into giving up this information, it would only be valid for a tiny period. And since the governments that I did work for knew what I had access to, they’d be able to shut those programs down. They would be able to detect a compromise.
The intelligence community knows that I’m not working for any foreign government at all. They anonymously stated to the Washington Post that I’m not an agent of any foreign power, they don’t have a warrant out on that basis. And that’s because if I were providing information that I know, that’s in my head, to some foreign government, the US intelligence community would be able to detect that. They would see changes in the type of information that’s going through it. They would see sources go dark that were previously productive. They would see new sources of disinformation appearing in these channels and that hasn’t happened.
[It] just looks bad being in Russia. So the first thing to understand is that I never sought to be [in] Russia. I never actively sought out protection here. The state department stranded me in Russia as I was transiting through on my way to Latin America. But I would say, if my reputation is harmed by being here, there or any other place that’s okay because it’s not about me.
My reputation is not worth anything … What matters are how people feel about these issues, regardless of your opinion of me. What matters are your rights and how they’re being infringed.
More:
ReplyDeleteI’ve been totally open about the fact that I disapprove of the majority of the recent laws in Russia on internet censorship and surveillance. I think it’s entirely inappropriate for any government in any country to insert itself into the regulation of a free press.
We don’t want government officials making decisions about we, as a public, what we can and cannot know, what we can and cannot print and how we can and cannot live and I stand by that.
[On Edward Lucas who calls him a “useful idiot”] Yeah. He’s crazy. He’s not credible at all. … We’ve got a new director of the National Security Agency, Michael Rogers, who just came in. He has full access to all classified information. He has full access to the details of the investigation into me.
He has concluded and stated publicly, I believe to both press and to Congress, that I am probably not a Russian spy. There’s no evidence for it at all.
If the government had the tiniest indication, the tiniest shred of evidence that, not even that I was working for the Russian government, that I was associating with the Russian government, it would be on the front page of the New York Times by lunch time.
There are always going to be conspiracy theories. People are always going to cast aspersions on people regardless of their activities if they’re in a place under a government that’s unpopular. I understand that because I myself disapprove of many of the policies of the Russian government. But it’s fundamentally irresponsible and journalistically dishonest to accuse someone of working for a foreign government as an agent of foreign power when there’s no evidence at all to support it. And I’m not going to respond to every single conspiracy theory that these crackpots online cook up.
Ultimately it just doesn’t make sense. If I was a Russian spy I would have flown from Hawaii to Moscow. Why would I have gone to Hong Kong? Why did he go to India [part of Lucas conspiracy theory]? There’s a whole thing that I went there unauthorised. It’s bullshit, I was on official visits, working at the US embassy. You know, it’s not like they didn’t know I was there … and the six-day course afterwards – it wasn’t a security course, it was a programming course, but it doesn’t matter.
"This is a win for the good guys"
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly right. Carrying a firearm and Stand your ground doesn't mean using the gun should be your first resort.
It should always be your last.
My father carried a concealed weapon, legally. He was a biker, and a gunsmith. He always said that a real man is ready to get his ass kicked in a fair fight and never draw his gun.
ReplyDelete@ anon 3:02 PM
DeleteYour father sounds like a very wise man.
There's nothing worse than a scared chicken with a gun.
ReplyDeleteFINALLY they got one right! I hope this jerk rots in misery. He was safe inside his home, he opened the door and shot her in the face, then shot through the door after she fell, you know, for good measure.
ReplyDeletejust call the police and wait it out. seriously
ReplyDelete