For making it legal, yeah my beef would be with them, my beef is with him for doing it.
I'd say that the 911 call shows he intended to shoot/kill them no matter where they were. I don't know how that legally impacts the case if they actually showed up on his property when he opened the door (and the lawyer makes it sound like they were a foot away
) but it would impact me as a juror. HE escalated the situation to a deadly one, not the robbers.
I mention that the penalty for burglary isn't death because that is not what the burglars should have gotten for their crime. Their lives were worth more than that, no matter how screwed up they were.
The problem is that when you allow the escalation that Texas allows, burglars aren't necessarily the only ones to have bad things happen to them because of it. This man was lucky he didn't shoot a cop in the process of shooting the burglars. If he had, this would be a whole different story no matter how "threatened" he felt at the time.
Is the "shot in the back" vs "shot in the front" issue at all relevant in Texas?