Eastside Defender

Castle Doctrine Bill Committee Hearing 3-13-2008

I attended the Castle Doctrine committee hearing on March 13th at the Capital which left my mind in a shambles for the remainder of the day. Where do I begin? First the hearing started about 40 minutes late. My observation is that there are way too many career politicians in expensive suites, sitting in high-back leather chairs in our government if you were to ask me. No wonder we end up with special sessions, they can’t start a meeting on time. Our bill was dead last out of about 15 bills to be discussed and voted on.

Ironically one of the bills that did pass out of committee was, “Creating a gross misdemeanor for assaulting a utility employee or contractor”. I wanted to shout “Just tell them to run away like the rest of us are expected to do”. The story on this was that utility workers are being attacked at night while on the job. Kind of like pizza delivery guys but there was no bill to protect them for some reason. I guess they are not as important.

Since we started 40 minutes late, and had to vacate this room by a certain time we would be moved to a smaller room. When this happened they did move our bill to the front of the line but there would be way too many of us to be seated so many that had waited patiently in the previous room were told they must remain in the hall. I knew this was going to happen so I got to the new room early and found a good seat. To my surprise I happened to be sitting next to David Gross a lawyer involved in the writing of this bill as well as our current carry law, and next to him a representative from the NRA. Other than these two I was surrounded by angry people with tee shirts that said something about “citypeace.org”.

When the bill was called by the committee chair a young fellow behind me asked a young woman in front of me if this was the bill. She said, “Yes, this is the bill that will let gang-bangers kill us”. Wait a minute Nellie; I must have missed that part of the bill. I better check it over real fast. Since I actually had a copy of the bill, and they did not, I scanned it quickly. “Let’s see, gang-bangers being allowed to kill innocent citizens of the North Side, no I don’t see anything like that in the bill”. Where on earth could these people be getting their information?

Tony Cornish, our bills author, and David Gross, were first to speak and gave a concise account of what the bill was about. No frills, no emotional witnesses to give testimony, they simply laid out what the bills is about and asked for questions.

If you don’t know, this bill is about extending the rules of Castle Doctrine to beyond a person’s home. Castle Doctrine is derived from English Common Law and designates ones place of residence where one enjoys protection from illegal trespass and violent attack. Once this same citizen leaves his home and is in his car or anywhere he or she has a legal right to be, doing any legal activity, they MUST, among other things, if attacked consider retreat and actually retreat if they can do so safely. No other rules pertaining to what legally constitutes self-defense are changed in any way by the passage of this bill.

Imagine yourself sitting at a stop light in your car when suddenly the passenger door opens and in jumps a man holding a knife and shouts “drive”. In a nano-second you must judge if you can jump out of the car and run. Oh but wait a minute, you forgot that your 2 year old is in the car seat in the back so you can’t leave. Now you can defend yourself but by then it is too late. You missed your window of opportunity trying to decide if the law was with ya, or against ya.

This new bill corrects this.
It simply says, “Degree of force; retreat. An individual using defensive action under
2.21circumstances described in subdivision 2 may stand the individual's ground in any place
2.22where the individual has a legal right to be, and may use all force and means, including
2.23deadly force, that the individual believes is required to succeed in defense. The individual
2.24may meet force with superior force, so long as the individual's objective is defense.
2.25The individual is not required to retreat, and may continue defensive actions against an
2.26assailant until the assailant is no longer an imminent threat.”

It further grants immunity from prosecution for defending your life in this manner. Remember, no other rules of self-defense have changed. You cannot simply shoot someone and expect to use this law as a defense. This seems pretty clear and reasonable to me and didn’t require a lot of additional testimony.

That to my dismay was not to be for the three-ring circus was truly about to begin. I was unable get everyone’s name and organization but they started with a lawyer representing state prosecutors who said this would make it impossible for them to put bad people in jail. If that were true he is not much of a lawyer if you ask me. The bad people are the ones attacking the innocent citizen who chose to defend themselves while meeting all other self-defense criteria rather than run away.

Next we were treated to the one man spectacle known as Scott Knight Chief of the Chaska police department. This guy has more gold stars than General David Petraeus. He must think a lot of himself and is very impressed with how he looks in uniform. When he was through with his short testimony, which basically said he was against the bill but didn’t really explain why he pointed to another officer to come up.

This officer was a lieutenant from the Minneapolis police gang unit and he told us about how they took 700 illegal guns off the street last year. I looked over at a guy from the NRA and mouthed, “WHAT THE H-E-DOUBLE-HOCKEY-STICKS HAS THAT GOT TO DO WITH THIS BILL”? He rolled his eyes and shook his head in reply. Now I am glad they have taken illegal guns off the street but that had nothing to do with Castle Doctrine.

My head is really beginning to hurt by now but there was a lot more to come. These two were followed, or was it preceded by; I can’t remember which because by now, to quote the movie Blazing Saddles, “My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets…,” oh you get the idea. Anyway a representative of the Minnesota Peace and Police Officer’s Association spoke. I remember this fellow from the days when we were trying to pass the MPPA, (funny how they have the same initials isn’t it?). I remember how he spewed a lot of irrelevant and just plain false testimony back then. He even tried to pass off a biased and factually inaccurate survey as the voice of his organization. In reality the results showed nothing of the sort, but that is a topic for another day.

Finally we were entertained by some angry lady that played the race card, actually said it was “for the children”, and ran over about 5 minutes when she said she would be done in under a minute. The DFL chairperson didn’t seem to care. (Now that’s hard to believe isn’t it?)

To show they were fair they decided to give Tony and David a little more time and the chairperson joked, “after all he has a gun”. Tony Cornish is chief of police of Lake Crystal Minnesota and I believe a carry permit holder as well, but of course not many people know this. Some woman in front of me started hopping up and down in her seat flapping her arms like someone doing the chicken dance at a Bar Mitzvah while she asked everyone around her, “Does he have a gun? Why does he have a gun? Can he have a gun?” (I so wanted to tell her to be quiet and sit down because I and most of the people around her have a gun, but I managed to keep my mouth shut.)

Finally some opposition committee members actually had questions for Tony and David, or so I thought. The first one called upon rambled on for several minutes saying while he appreciated Tony’s efforts he would not vote for the bill. HE DID NOT ASK A SINGLE QUESTION THAT I RECALL, he apparently just wanted to hear himself talk. The second member talked about how he had a black belt in martial arts and even beat a student of Chuck Norris in competition once. I wanted to tell him that the rest of us don’t know martial arts and don’t have the time or inclination to learn so just pass this bill and we can all feel as safe as he does.

Finally, at last, a vote was called for. We actually did better than I expected as we tied in the count. The tie keeps it in committee unfortunately and I heard that one Democrat that was suppose to vote for us was conveniently absent because she had to be at another committee meeting, but boy were we close this time. To say the least I was worn out from all the mind numbing stupidity I witnessed that day as I headed home to put a cold towel over my eyes. Let’s hope for better luck next year.