Man who killed burglar faces manslaughter charge

CHEHALIS, Wash. (AP) - An arrest warrant has been issued for a rural Centralia man who shot and killed an apparent burglar near his home last month.

The warrant for Oliver Glenn Hooker, 65, was issued Friday by Lewis County prosecutors. Hooker was out of state over the holiday weekend but was to be arrested when he returned home, Lewis County Undersheriff Gordon Spanski said.

At issue is the April 27 death of David Michael Cline, 38, of Longview, who was fatally shot as he loaded items into his vehicle from a property that includes two homes and at least one shed.

The property, which had been burglarized several times, is owned by Tom Treloggen, a former Hollywood film producer who lives in California. Hooker moved there about 10 years ago from California after he retired.

At the time of the shooting, Hooker told the Lewis County Sheriff's Office he fired toward Cline to prevent his escape. There was no reference to self-defense.

According to charging documents, Hooker fired three warning shots with his .38 caliber pistol, then fired a fourth shot in the intruder's direction because he didn't want him to get away. He fired a fifth shot that hit the car and a sixth shot that hit a tire, the documents say.

Hooker then checked the alarm in the shed to make sure it had activated to summon sheriff's deputies, and asked his wife to phone 9-1-1 and ask for police and an ambulance.

In a news release, Prosecutor Jeremy Randolph noted that in 1962, the state Supreme Court ruled that private citizens can use force to stop a felon to the same extent that a police officer can.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court limited police, and thus citizens', use of force to situations in which life is in jeopardy, Randolph said. That did not appear to be the case when Hooker fired, he said.

``In this case, the indication here is that Mr. Hooker was frustrated and that he shot in the direction of the victim to keep him from leaving the scene of the alleged burglary.''

I will predict right now, as a defense attorney with many years of experience, and generally well known, that this man will be convicted as charged and senctenced to serious jail time unless he can afford a quality attorney. Jury nullification for all intents and purposes does not exist in the United States anymore. As part of most jury instructions, most states have adopted instructions specifically addressing the nullification issue and ordering the jury to ignore their own conceptions of justice and fairness and follow the law and the facts as demonstrated and charged in the courtroom, lest a miscarriage of justice occur. They are further charged the sentencing is the time for the court to consider mitigating factors that may bear on the case, but that the jury should not find the defendant not guilty out of a feeling that what he did was right or justified if the law is otherwise. Meanwhile, the sentence will generally be mandatory because of the use of a firearm, but the jury will not be told that.

The only way to get jury nullification in such a case in my experience is to pick exactly the opposite of the usual defense jury. Pick the people that at the beginning of the trial during voir dire state that they believe your client is guilty just because he is sitting in court. Pick the most conservative, right wing jurors you can, until the judge calls you to the bench and asks if you are in your right mind and and tries to recuse jurors over your objection or makes the defendant waive on the record personally any objection to your strategy. Then, with such a jury, you will have the people with the courage to ignore ridiculous laws and acquit an innocent man.

Years and years of conservative, police loving, law enforcement loving Republicans getting their way in the courts and the legislatures have led to the point where we now find ourselves the victims of our own successes. As the state of the law now stands in most jurisdictions, a burglar can walk into your house with a U-haul sitting outside, load up all of your valuables while you watch, as long as you are not physically threatened and can run out of the door, while you are waiting on the police for a half of an hour, and you can do nothing to stop him that might cause death or serious bodily injury. He can then take off in the U-haul and leave, and there is nothing you can do but take down the license plate number and give it to the police. Your chances of getting anything back are about 10%. More than likely the police will not even pursue the case, letting the homeowner's policy cover your losses. It is a sad and pitiful situation in which we live, but it is the bed we made for ourselves. We forgot that every law we sought to enact could be used against us under the wrong circumstances, and conservatives are supposed to remember that the wrong circumstances always occur.

The law prohibits the use of deadly force to protect property -- and it has for many years.

And you will notice as well the government no longer has any respect for your property either. Our national heritage does indeed show our nation was founded with a principle that deadly force could apply to preserve both life and property from harm or theft. Criminals have used the nations courts to punish the victim of their crimes who act to protect life and property for far far too long.

Criminals have lost all fear of punishment. The courts turn them loose and those who try and stop them will serve more time and be considered the bigger felon. It's not a speeding ticket issue it is a life and property issue. Should a cop shoot a speeder? No of course not. Should he shoot the robber he see's running from the 7-11 with the stores reciepts? Yes indeed. Only after a order of halt is issued. Some people may be dead inside as well. I think we all know the difference between traffic laws and laws dealing in protection of life and property. It's our courts who seem to have forgotten.

I've worked at various jobs some involving a required risk of life. The most frightening job though was night clerk in a convience store. It was a bad neighborhood isolated and I worked alone. Showing the butt end of a revolver I'm certain saved me from several probable hold ups. Company policy forbidded carrying but even the manager and his son who worked there carried. You could always get another job if caught. The cops who came in at times also knew we carried them.

I'm 44 years old. I can remember being 12 years old and feeling safe walking in downtown Knoxville at night. Now I would do it only with a pistol on me. Some places forget it I won't go there at all. The more liberal and criminal protective the courts have become the higher the crime rate has risen. I can't believe sheeple still buy into the idea that the police will protect you from all harm and let anyone take all you have the police will catch them. Perhaps the biggest all time farce placed upon our free nation is don't resist theives and robbers let them steal what doesn't belong to them and leave.

It is here on Earth that the Republicans have historically led the call for more and more criminal laws and harsher and harsher sentencing. With the exceptions of libertarians and the liberal backing of hate crime and environmental laws, virtually all other significant enhancements the criminal law and sentencing has come at the urging of the law and order crowd, sometimes known as the crime control establishment, which is Republican and conservative to the core.

As a quick example, Jeb Bush just brought the 10-20-Life law to Florida which mandates that if you use a firearm in the commission of a felony you must be given a mandatory ten year sentence, 20 if you fire the gun, and life if you hit anyone. These are real time sentences with no early release. These same sentences could have been imposed under virtually all circumstances before the 10-20-Life law, but now the court has no discretion. Hence, if you, as a conservative, pro-gun, law abiding citizen honestly believe you had to act in self defense to protect yourself or your family from a knife wielding crack-addled man stumbling toward your family screaming incoherently about something and you fire a legally owned and concealed weapon and wing that individual, and it turns out that the police were seconds away and the prosecutor believes that you could have directed your kids to run and you could have backed up slowly and merely held the gun on the man awaiting the sirens you should have surly heard through all of that adrenalin (although one cop says they weren't using the siren and the other testifies they were)(it's a questions for the jury), then you will be charged with a mandatory life sentence felony even if you barely nick the maniac in the arm--aggravated battery with a firearm. Your choices will be whether to accept the fifteen years, day for day, plea offer, or gamble on a jury pardon at a trial where the judge will be instructing a mostly anti-gun jury in a variety of ways that jury pardons are highly improper and result in a miscarriage of justice as they take away sentencing discretion from him. AND ONLY IF YOU HAVE BEEN LIVING ON SOME OTHER PLANET CAN YOU BLAME THIS ONE ON THE LIBERALS.

I have watched the constitution destroyed over the past 25 years and it has been at the hands of a conservative court using the War on Drugs as the excuse. I have seen the United States go from a free country to one in which every citizen in the nation commits multiple felonies every year and the only question to determine if he will be incarcerated is whether he is caught or whether he is a political problem for someone.

When I was a child, my father told me that we were superior to the communists because there the police could stop citizens at random and ask for identification papers, hold prisoners under indefinite detention sentences, search peoples homes and offices without telling them, and convict people of crimes without producing the witnesses against them. In my lifetime, I have come to see all of these things become legal in the United States at the urging of conservatives. We now hold more prisoners in local, county, state and federal prisons than any country in the history of the world, including the Soviet Union. We also monitor through probation, parole, or house arrest, more people than any country in history. If trends continue at their present rate, it would be cheaper by 2070 to consider an individual a felon, and have that person prove his record free from convictions, than it would be to run background checks.

The process that feeds this behemoth called the crime control establishment--the police, probation and parole officers, bailiffs, courts, defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, prison contractors, guards, court reporters, clerks, court clerks, etc., is to send people to a prison system that will produce recidivism, so that the person, or product can continuously be rotated through the system and those eating at the public trough may continue to do so. In addition, they must make clear to us that drugs, etc. are an increasing threat and that more police are needed because although the crime rate is actually fairly constant the hiring of new police officers will of necessity bring a rise in arrests since there will be more police to make arrests within that constant crime rate. Hence, every year the crime control establishment can call for more money for raises and new police officers based upon a rise in some area of crime or the need for new and more sophisticated crime fighting techniques.

This, the crime control establishment, is the conservative, Republican led arm of the state and federal bureaucracies. I have been in the belly of the beast for nearly thirty years, and I can assure you that it is the legacy of the Republicans and conservatives that we are dealing with when we deal with contemporary criminal law with few exceptions. The liberals never really ever won a single round. Their legacy is the ACLU, which fought the good fight against this monster, but now has become itself its own kind of demon. But that is another story.

"Hence, if you, as a conservative, pro-gun, law abiding citizen honestly believe you had to act in self defense to protect yourself or your family from a knife wielding crack-addled man stumbling toward your family screaming incoherently about something and you fire a legally owned and concealed weapon and wing that individual, and it turns out that the police were seconds away and the prosecutor believes that you could have directed your kids to run and you could have backed up slowly and merely held the gun on the man awaiting the sirens you should have surly heard through all of that adrenalin (although one cop says they weren't using the siren and the other testifies they were)(it's a questions for the jury), then you will be charged with a mandatory life sentence felony even if you barely nick the maniac in the arm--aggravated battery with a firearm."

Well, now I am certain you are a lawyer--it takes real skill to write a 149-word sentence with not a sign of a period, until the reader is quite out of breath.

How would you prefer that we handle an explosion of crime caused by liberal policies and laws--and liberal destruction of families, and liberal corruption of the culture...?

It is the definition of what constitutes a crime which is the problem, not the punishment. Do you think conservatives inserted all the "oh, by the way, if he uses a gun he gets 20 years more" into the laws? There seems to be a whiff of Sarah Brady in such legislation. Was it NRA members who suggested that self-defense, protection of property or one's family constituted a crime?

Perhaps on a different planet...

--Boris

Thank you for complementing that complicated sentence. I'm surprised you understood it. Jeb Bush had the law written and signed it. He in fact ran for governor of Florida on that particular law among others. You, quite frankly, have no idea what you are talking about. I, on the other hand, have spent the better part of three decades in the legislative halls, the courts, and the law libraries and know quite well who has pushed this mountain of unconstitional and/or unnecessary laws and draconian sentences upon this society. While the liberals have done their fair share of damage, the Republicans, the traditional law and order crowd, have done far more.

And as I pointed out, our society was not crime ridden until we began the production of career criminals by turning human beings into products to be produced to sustain the criminal justice establishment. Sorry, boris, but the sciences, both social and physical, are on my side. You have merely an uninformed opinion which you will stick by no matter what I say or prove. I even agree with you probably on most social issues, but on this one you are wrong. The crime control establishment is a conservative beast and, like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, he now comes hunting for us.

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