The homeowner who fatally shot a 20-year-old University of South Carolina student who tried to enter the wrong home on the street he lived on Saturday morning will not face charges because the incident was deemed “a justifiable homicide” under state law, Columbia police announced Wednesday.
Police said the identity of the homeowner who fired the gunshot that killed Nicholas Donofrio shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday will not be released because the police department and the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office determined his actions were justified under the state’s controversial “castle doctrine” law, which holds that people can act in self-defense towards “intruders and attackers without fear of prosecution or civil action for acting in defense of themselves and others.”
Thank you for recognizing. It sounds complicated but it’s really not, and I think you do like it, without fully realizing it.
To your point, you can jump to reasonable conclusions without having to be a mind reader.
On finding an alert intruder, you give clear commands. Should be able to be pretty sure of their intent pretty quickly after that.
Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do, and you get murdered in your sleep, very rare though. One thought there is to outsource the job of issuing commands and waking you up to a burglary alarm. If you wake up to a stranger who is not warded off by a blaring alarm, that tells you a lot about what they’re doing.
If I roll out of bed to the sounds of someone banging on my door, trying my doorknob, then breaking a window to get in - I’m probably going to believe that shots will start flying through the door in my direction if I confront them at that point, and/or that they intend to harm me or my family, not that they will politely go away if I ask them to, especially in the fog of having just awakened.
I’m not a gun owner, but if I had one, I doubt I’d consider a warning in that case. Without the escalation to smashing my window I’m likely to handle it differently.
Same thing happens in the middle of the day while I’m wide awake, maybe I interpret it differently. Maybe.
I agree that deadly force isn’t appropriate to protect property. I don’t agree that protecting property is what was likely going through this person’s head.