While being beaten and choked, Kawanda Hampton stabbed her boyfriend, Jemond Carson, in her eastern New Orleans home on Feb. 13. Police called the killing a justifiable homicide, but Hampton’s problems aren’t over. She is facing criminal charges of obstructing justice. She didn’t know she was within her rights to kill him, she says, so she lied to police at first because she didn’t want to go to jail. These are messy, complex cases that take an emotional toll, for both the dead person’s family and the survivor who took the life. They are also challenging for law enforcement to investigate. Thorny legal issues cloud the thin line between whether police consider the survivor a perpetrator or a victim, a murderer or a hero.

 

A great story in the Times-Picayune about how justifiable homicides being up sharply in New Orleans, while the overall homicide rate is down.

 

One minute, a man and his wife were sitting in their backyard in Algiers. The next, a masked gunman lay dead, the trigger pulled by the husband.

The bloodshed last Wednesday marked the seventh New Orleans homicide this year that police ruled justifiable. Two killings were by police officers. Five were by civilians.

Lovers’ arguments led to two deaths. In another, a friendship dissolved, giving way to anger. And four men shot and killed strangers — other men who, police said, were committing rape, home invasion, armed robbery or pointing a gun at a cop.

As the number of murders in New Orleans has dropped for the last three years, self-defense killings have not. The seven justifiable homicides so far this year is more than double the three committed in 2013, and could match the nine recorded in 2012.

Read the rest.  It’s good.

2 thoughts on “BAD NEWS FOR BAD GUYS: Justifiable homicides headed northward in New Orleans”
  1. Start truthfully exhibiting what’s going on in Chicago and the exact same scenario will indeed unfold. For many years, true self defense shootings -killings- have been “classified” as just killings. This because the loyalist grabbers were using the inflated numbers to justify their infringements. Now that it’s admitted that the individual rights do not hinge upon these statistics, the incentive to keep the lie alive falls asunder.

    It’s time to remember or at least admit that even when a “gang banger” or other “criminal” shoots/ kills in self defense ITS STILL exercise of the rights EVERYONE has. Self defense is self defense. Ever wonder why soooo many instances go unsolved? Cuz maybe a LARGE number really ARE just that – self defense?

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