The Castle Doctrine

Wow. In the notorious Dallas case in which a police officer shot and killed a man for the crime of sitting in his own home, on his own couch, eating ice cream ... and since then has defended her action on the grounds that she thought it was her home and that he was one of those dangerous seated ice-cream eating intruders who are popping up everywhere these days ...

in THAT case, the judge instructed the jury that it could consider the Castle doctrine in possible mitigation of the homicide.

Wouldn't one think the Castle doctrine (the notion that, be it ever so humble, one's home is one's castle) would work AGAINST her? After all, it was not her castle.

Truly bizarre. "Blue lives matter" and hardly any other lives do. Your castle is your castle until someone in blue decides it is hers.

That is the takeaway.

Well, at any rate, I cynically thought that was the takeaway until the jury actually came in with a conviction on murder. Apparently, the Castle thing had the effect I intuitively would expect, not the subjectivity-in-blue effect that the Judge had suggested.

Score one for the jury system.

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