Controversial grand jury decision

[Lissa]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/03/30/texas.ma...r.ap/index.html

This story has been all over several forums I frequent and was curious about the Lounge's feelings about it.

Cliff Notes: Husband comes home, sees wife and another guy fooling around in a truck, wife cries rape falsely, and husband kills fleeing lover.

I think it's "fairly" obvious that the wife should be charged since she intentionally created a false situation which led to the death of an innocent man, but I am mildly startled by the number of people happy that the husband got off with no penalties. The husband discharged a firearm in a residential area, endangering the residents of their neighborhood and his own wife, and couldn't be bothered to take the instant required to assess the situation before he started blasting away. I understand that legally an individual's emotional and mental state can lead to diminished responsibility (obviously if you think your wife is being raped, you're certainly in a heightened emotional state), but it just seems as though this ruling comes much, much to close to promoting the ideology of "shoot first, ask questions later."

I am a proponent of the right to bear arms but I strongly feel that with the right to own and use a gun for self-defense and protection comes the responsibility to use the weapon like you're not an 8-year old. If the alleged rapist gets out of the truck and charges you with a knife, by all means defend yourself. If the alleged rapist tries to flee the scene in his truck try to get a clear look at his face, get the license plate/make/model, make sure your wife is okay, and call the police for #$%&s sake.

The Grand Jury's job is to determine if the government has enough evidence to take the case to trial. Evidently the GJ thought that there was not enough evidence to proceed with a Jury trial. I've served on a US GJ and I can remember one case were we had to tell the DEA that they didn't have enough evidence to connect the accused with the car filled with drugs because the officers trying to apprehend the accused did not know if the person driving the car was male or female (the accused was female) and when they found the accused, after the car had been rolled over, the accused was not with the car (was several hundred yards away, almost a quarter mile) and was unhurt, so they could not connect the accused to the vehicle and thus had no real evidence to show that the accused was the driver, so we had to vote down the indictment (it would have lost anyway as the accused's lawyers would have seen the same hole we did).