A father who allegedly shot an innocent bystander while attempting to protect his daughter from a group of girls that followed her home was responding to an attack and therefore immune from prosecution under the state’s stand-your-ground law, according to the South Carolina Court of Appeals.
“If there was ever a time that you had a right to defend yourself in your home, this was it,” said Chief Appellate Defender Robert Dudek of Columbia, who represented the father, Shannon Scott.
Scott killed 17-year-old Darrell Niles, who was driving a Honda behind an SUV carrying several girls who had been involved in a confrontation with Scott’s daughter, Shade, as they all left a club. Shade had called Scott on the way home and said the girls were chasing her and had a gun.
After Shade returned home, Scott grabbed a gun and opened fire from the front stoop of his house, fatally wounding Niles. His passenger later said that they were following the SUV to ensure that Shade made it home safely.
Witnesses testified that they heard gunshots as the SUV approached Scott’s house with its lights off, before Scott opened fire. And one of the girls in the SUV, Kiwiana, admitted that she had followed Shade home and fired a gun, but contended that she’d fired into the air after hearing a gunshot, according to the Court of Appeals opinion.
While the court affirmed Richland County Circuit Judge Maite Murphy’s ruling that the state’s Protection of Person and Property Act shielded Scott from prosecution, it vacated the portion of his ruling that dealt with Scott’s belief that he was reacting to a threat with an attack.
Justice Aphrodite Konduros wrote in the majority opinion that Murphy had conflated the two questions of whether Scott had faced a threat to justify a claim of self-defense, and whether he was being attacked so as to excuse his duty to retreat.
Konduros said that Murphy’s order was “therefore erroneous to the extent it relies on Scott’s perception of danger from the SUV and/or Honda driving by as an attack sufficient for granting immunity under” the law. She concluded that Scott’s actions were “in response to an attack, not just the vehicles driving by his home.”
But Judge Stephanie McDonald asserted in a concurring opinion that she would have affirmed Murphy’s ruling addressing Scott’s perception of the threat that the drive-by posed. She said the “circuit court’s examination of Scott’s reasonable belief that he and the girls were being attacked with deadly force was necessary to this self-defense analysis.”
Deputy Attorney General Donald Zelenka of Columbia said the state was “reviewing the order and our available options in this matter” and declined to discuss the opinion. He referred a question about the decision not to criminally charge Kiwiana or any of the other girls in the SUV to Fifth Circuit Solicitor Dan Johnson, who did not respond to phone and email messages.
Reacting to the solicitor’s decision not to pursue criminal charges against the girls, Dudek said: “There’s no doubt who put these wheels in motion and caused the ultimate death and it was those girls who were involved in the drive-by.”
He also said that he appreciated the majority’s affirmation of the lower court’s grant of immunity, but agreed with McDonald’s concurrence and “wished the opinion had been a little broader to encompass the other subsection of the statute.”
Dudek, who equated the drive-by with a home invasion for the purposes of stand-your-ground immunity, added: “The lesson here is that if you’re going to break into someone’s home or open fire on someone’s house there’s a likelihood that you’re going to get killed.”
Greenwood criminal defense lawyer Charles Grose, who reviewed the Scott opinion at Lawyers Weekly’s request, said the decision, which noted conflicting testimony about who fired the first shot, is significant in that it “shows that the appellate courts are going to apply a standard of review that gives the trial court a lot of deference in how they decide these cases.”
Kenneth Gaines, a criminal law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law in Columbia, added that the case illustrates the difficulties that arise when the law takes into consideration a person’s perception of a threat.
“The old common law rule was you had a duty to retreat and that was a good rule because it erased all this ambiguity about whether or not someone perceived something,” Gaines said. “The stand-your-ground law, what it says is you don’t have a duty to retreat, you can just stand there and start blasting. But that isn’t always justified. Your perception of the threat may be mistaken.”
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