A
juror interview that ABC News aired last night sheds light on
the disagreement that blocked a verdict on the murder charge
against Michael Dunn and the reasoning that produced guilty
verdicts on three attempted murder charges. Valerie, a home care
nurse administrator also known as Juror No. 4, said that in the
initial poll she and nine other jurors wanted to find Dunn guilty,
apparently of first-degree murder, in the shooting of 17-year-old
Jordan Davis following an argument over loud music at a
Jacksonville gas station in November 2012. Two jurors believed Dunn
had acted in self-defense, or at least that it was reasonable to
believe he had. After 30 hours of deliberations over four days, the
vote was 9 to 3 in favor of conviction, meaning an additional juror
was persuaded that the prosecution had failed to prove its case on
the murder charge.
Those three jurors need not have been convinced that Dunn was
telling the truth—merely that his story was plausible, since the
prosecution had the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt
that Dunn did not act in self-defense. Furthermore,
the three holdouts need not have thought Davis actually had a
shotgun, as Dunn claimed. It would have been enough for them to
think that Dunn, given the circumstances, could have reasonably
believed Davis had a shotgun that he intended to use. As I point
out in my
column today, that is the sort of question faced by jurors
across the country, regardless of whether their state imposes a
duty to retreat on people who are attacked in public places.
When ABC’s Byron Pitts asked Valerie why she and the other
jurors in the majority were convinced of Dunn’s guilt, she replied,
“To me, it was unnecessary.” From the excerpts shown on
Nightline, it is not clear what Valerie meant by
it. If she meant the shooting was unnecessary to prevent
death or serious injury, she was zeroing in on the right question.
But some of her other comments suggest she meant that Dunn, even
assuming his account of the shooting is accurate, could have
cut short the confrontation with Davis, thereby avoiding any need
for violence:
Pitts: Why were you and the others so convinced
that Dunn was guilty?Valerie: We all believed that there was another
way out, another option….Pitts: You think Michael Dunn had
options.Valerie: Oh, yes, sir.
Pitts: What were his options?
Valerie: Roll your window up. Ignore the
taunting. Put your car in reverse. Back up to the front of the
store. Move a parking spot over. That’s my feeling.
It may well be true that Dunn “had options” in this sense, but
that is not the relevant question in determining whether the
shooting was justified. If the argument Dunn could have avoided
culminated in a credible death threat from an armed teenager, Dunn
at that point (by his account) had no option but to
fire his gun in self-defense. If Davis was the one who transformed
a heated argument into a violent clash in which Dunn reasonably
feared for his life, the shooting was legally justified even if
Dunn could have defused the situation before then by swallowing his
pride and retreating. And just to be clear: That sort of retreat is
not what is at issue when we talk about the right to “stand your
ground,” which kicks in only after you are attacked. Even
in states that require people in the latter situation to retreat
(assuming they can do so safely), people are under no obligation to
avoid merely verbal arguments.
As to why the jurors agreed that Dunn was guilty of attempted
second-degree murder when he fired at the Dodge Durango in which
Davis was riding, Valerie said they all concluded that Dunn, having
already shot and killed Davis, crossed a line when he continued to
shoot at the SUV as it pulled out of the gas station, thereby
endangering the lives of the three other teenagers who were in the
vehicle. “We had a lot of discussion on [Dunn] getting out of the
car,” she said, “and the threat is now gone, and yet your intent is
still to go ahead and pursue this vehicle.”
As I’ve said before, Dunn’s story is awfully fishy, but I am not
sure he was driven purely by anger, as the prosecution suggested.
More likely he was genuinely afraid (which might have made him
angry), but that does not mean his fear was reasonable. It seems
quite unlikely that Davis was armed, since no one but Dunn reported
seeing a gun, the teenagers did not return fire, the police did not
find any weapons, Dunn never mentioned a gun to his girlfriend, and
the only evidence on that score is Dunn’s self-serving testimony.
Maybe Dunn sincerely thought Davis was armed. But
again, that does not mean Dunn’s belief was reasonable.
In short, I could easily see convicting Dunn of manslaughter,
which requires neither premeditation (an element of first-degree
murder) nor “a depraved mind regardless of human life” (an element
of second-degree murder), although his actions arguably indicated
the latter. The manslaughter option was available to the
jurors, but t is not clear from the interview with Valerie whether
it was discussed.
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