Oklahoma Pharmacist gets life.............
 

Oklahoma Pharmacist Who Killed Armed Robber Gets Life

For shooting an armed robber. Interesting case. He chases off the would be armed robbers, comes back and shoots one while he is down.

Christ, I'm usually 100% backing the victim(not the thug) to the extremes, but he shot the guy and put him down, chased the other guy outside the store, came back in, got a different gun and then put 5 more bullets into the guy?

Yeah, I'm not exactly shedding a tear from the victim, but that's a bit much.

Yeah, it's a very interesting case. I think he was claiming the robber was still threatening him, and there is no camera evidence either way.

Yeah when I read the details, it's hard to fault the verdict IMO.

Guilty? Yes.
Life in prison? A little questionable.

There is a similar case in Chicago where a guy whos house had been constantly robbed chased a robber like 10 blocks and shot him in the back. The argument is that his house had been robbed so many times that it was self-defense.

Tough case though. I don't think I could convict the Pharmacist though. If someone comes on your property and threatens you with a gun, you have a right to defend yourself in the most extreme ways. He is not a trained law enforcement professional and should not be held to those same standards for the use of lethal force. I don't feel like the pharmacist is a threat to society in any way.

Bacially what I'm saying is that if you threaten someone with a gun, you get what is coming to you.

He must have shitty counsel if he got life in prison for this.

Well, the sentence is another question altogether.

Obviously the guy was affected mentally by the situation the robbers put him in. He crossed the line, to put it mildly, but I believe that should be taken into account. Life in prison, and no chance of parole until he's 97, seems pretty extreme.

I must admit though, watching the casual way he shoots the guy on the ground before phoning the police is a little alarming.

What makes it crummy in both this case and the one you mention - especially the one you mention given it was his own home - is the fear you have of them coming back to get you later after you've chased them off.

I have no idea what gun laws are in the US (...I'm just glad we don't share them over here in .au), but I assume you need a license, and part of that would hopefully involve a general guideline of appropriate use?

I disagree with that last statement too. In an eye-for-an-eye kind of world that's how it would be, but that's not how the legal system works in our countries.

I would think that if someone can get a reduced sentence for killing their husband because they caught them in bed with another woman he should get some wiggle room for shooting the man who just threatened his life. I do agree though that he is not the posterchild for gun rights.

I think I remember defending that guy for the reasons you stated, or at least something similar. I wouldn't have even had a problem if he took the second guy down outside while he was running away. Difference is in this case the guy's already wounded on the ground, he took his sweet time then unloaded 5 shots into him at point blank range?

He sure didn't looked that threatened as he casually walked by him to get his other gun.

I think the guy in Chicago's defense is similar to battered women. That he had been victimized so many times that he felt he had to do it to make it stop.

I guess my defense of the pharmacist is that I don't think it's fair to judge his actions in the same way we'd judge a police officer. He is not a trained professional, just a pharmacist with a gun. His life was put in danger and he took care of that threat. That guy is not dead if he doesn't walk into the store and pull a gun on the pharmacist. Moral of the story is don't pull a gun on someone.

I agree, I say the same thing all the time in regards to defensive shootings. However I don't think his life was even remotely in danger and I think, based on how he behaved, he knew it.

but this isn't an eye for an eye situation, it's something that happened in the heat of a stressful situation.

Did the pharmacist cross the line, most likely, but I don't feel bad for the kid for one second.

I thought the same thing, a decent lawyer should have been able to get him off much easier.

Just for the record, I agree :). I don't really have a terribly passionate opinion of this case. Guilty or innocent, doesn't bother me that much.

Watching the video, I think he's guilty as hell and should serve every minute of 20 hours of community service.

Ditto.

Then again, I'm also one of those people who believes that if you break into my house with the sole intent of stealing my television and not harming anyone, I should be able to shoot you dead. You're not just taking my stuff (even if that is your total objective), you're invading my home. I'm the one who's going to jump at sounds in the house at night for the next 20 years. I'm the one who's going to wake up from nightmares of intruders.

When you violate my sense of security, you're violating my quality of life. You've decided my television is worth more to you than my peace of mind.

So if I decide that my peace of mind is worth more than your miserable little life, that makes us just about even.

i think he was lucky, thats cold blooded murder... he should be on death row, im pretty sure OK does that...

Yeah, that's Murder One.

The end result only came about because of the "victim" robbing the place. Hopefully the pharmicist gets a better lawyer and gets this reversed.

Yeah, I don't see how you watch this video and then call the "second" shooting self defense. He doesn't even spare the guy a glance as he walks past him to get another gun. He's clearly not threatened in the least. He defended his property, and then on top of that decided to kill a guy, two different scenarios here.

If he had walked in his store and found a burglar who had accidentally slipped and knocked himself out, would it be okay to go get a gun and kill the guy? Not much difference here that I can see. Without the video, it'd be questionable, but this guy shows no sign of being caught in the heat of the moment.

I wonder if they could stick the other robber dude with a felony murder rap.

Weird, I'm pretty sure that in the thread here on the Detroit case (which seemed more heat of the moment than this one), the general consensus was that those of defending the homeowner valued property more than life, and I think someone told me I was going to end up shooting a family member coming in late or something. It's early yet though.

But ya, let's remember that the primary purpose of prison is protection of the community. There's other goals that have been recognized, but in every state- that's the most important criteria. And I guess we could say that with this pharmacist in jail, home invaders are safer, so there's that.

Agreed.

While I agree with that as an ideal for the purpose of prison, I don't think it's realistic to suggest that our legal system and sentencing system are built around that idea. It would be pretty easy to find a majority of the prison terms being served, or not served, that violate the idea that prison is for protection of the community, not punishment of the criminal.

The thing that bothers me about sending this guy to jail is that he is never put in this position if a guy doesn't walk in and points a gun at him.

This is how I feel about it also. Once you walk into a store with a gun to rob it what happens in the few minutes after is on you.

And while it seems easy to "hold a guy at gunpoint" until police come, it isn't necessarily that simple. The guy on the ground could be armed, he may be able to get to his gun quicker then you think, the guy's cousin might have been outside acting as a lookout and now he might be coming in to take you out. You lose the benefit of the doubt regarding your intentions when you invade someone's house. Community service, probation, maybe a gun safety course of some type all might make sense as a sentence.

That's the hard part about being a grownup, you have to be responsible for your actions even when life isn't fair. I don't need a Get Out of Consequences card just because some other asshole doesn't know how to function on earth.

But did you watch the video? I'd be completely with you there (well, to a point) if there was no video, I'd give the guy the benefit of the doubt that he was still worried. That guy looks more worried about what he's going to have for dinner than he does about the guy on the ground.

I think it's tough to judge his intentions and callousness. The guy may have been in shock. It's tough to judge the mindset of someone who just had a gun pointed at their head.

So how far do we take this theory that "the guy wouldn't have been put in this situation if...". Can he just repeatedly stab the guy? Saw his head off? Feed him to his dogs? I mean literally any action is covered by that blanket statement.

Yeah, once the guy is down and wounded and not being seen as a threat(which is wasn't by how the guy was acting), thats about it.

because I'm sure we would all be acting so rationally in that spot.

So we get to commit murder when someone has done something to put us in an irrational frame of mind? Where do you draw the line? Someone cheating on you? Your boss firing you? Bank foreclosing on your home? Hospital refusing to treat your child because you're poor?

Christ man, I'm usually full on with your argument. But yeah, if you are not a murderer I don't expect you to put 5 shots at point blank range into a man you alreay shot and put down 30 seconds ago, you are just calmly coming back for seconds. I don't care how irrational you are, that's just not something people do in any state of mind.

If he shot the guy, he went down, and he just kept on shooting in one action, that's one thing. What he did was something totally different.

None of those examples you gave are violent situations where you just defended yourself for what could likely be a kill or be killed situation.

Once fight or flight takes over and you choose to fight my opinion is you become less responsible for making irrational choices, especially when you were not the instigator.

It's easy for us to be armchair quarterbacks on this, but unless you have been in that situation I don't think you can comment on how someone is supposed to behave.

He walked back behind the register, slowly got a gun, walked back to the victim, shot 5 times, walked away. Sure as shit didn't seem to have any urgency sparked from "irrational thinking".

Where the fuck do you get fight or flight from that? He was just pissed off.

Again, he never has to make that decision if two guys don't walk in and hold a gun to his face.

It was also 2-on-1. There were employees in the store he was protecting. In the heat of the moment, how is he supposed to assess the injuries to the one guy while hoping the other guy with a gun doesn't come back into the store. He made sure one of those threats was no longer there and I think he had the right to do that. It might be overboard, but that's the risk you run when you try and commit an armed robbery. Sometimes the old pharmacist is not going to take a chance that you're still capable of fighting back.

Yeah, no. He was pissed off and murdered him. Video tells all.

The video shows the fucking moron robbing the store at gun point. IMO, I couldn't kill someone enough for pulling a gun on me.

I got a gun pulled on me once by a cop as I left my door. He was on alert for a possibly burglar due to an unknown silent alarm in my dorm, and I was just walking outside, and I just looked at him and said "What the hell are you doing?" He looked sheepish at me and mumbled sorry and lowered his gun. That's it.

Umm, what video are you guys watching? Firstly you can't see the "victim", so you have no idea what he was or wasn't doing at the time. Secondly I don't know how the hell you judge if the pharmacist was calm or not. I could just as easily believe, just from the video, that the guy was still scared for his life and fired the shots to make sure the robber didn't get up, which I haven't got a bit of problem with.

Let's assume that when he walks back in he doesn't see the robbers gun and the robber is still moving, is it ok to shoot then?

I think it's fairly insane to expect this guy, being put in a situation he didn't ask for, to act like a cop at best or even level headed at worst. There's every reason to believe he's scared for his life and very little reason to believe he's shooting a helpless victim. Judging from some of the comments on here I expected to see him firing at a lifeless body in the video and that's not even close to what we see.

If he was scared for his life then why would he walk right past the guy to go retrieve the second gun? If he was comfortable with getting that close then he could have simply disarmed the kid before calling the police. He had every intention of making sure the kid was dead, though. Casually shot him five times point blank without hesitation. It was ice cold.

On re-watching the video I noticed when the pharmacist was leaving the store he went around the far side of the counter, but when he returned walked around the near side closest to the downed robber. Sure didn't look like someone in fear for his life, but someone intent on revenge. It almost seemed like he was angry the other robber got away and took it out on the one he still had available.

There's a big difference between standing over someone and delivering shots than reaching, looking or moving the guy to disarm him. You say "simply disarm" like it's akin to picking up an apple. You're expecting him to make the judgement call of aiming the gun and hoping the guy doesn't try anything or shooting him and being assured of it. This isn't a case of turn your tv off when it's thundering and lightning outside safe or sorry, it's a life and death case of safe or sorry and I can't imagine i'd rather not be safe. I don't doubt for a moment he had every intention of making sure the kid was dead, but you're assuming in favor of the man who just robbed him at gunpoint. I'm sorry but that video shows me no evidence that the robber wasn't still doing something to provoke that fear even if it was just words.


Seriously dude? He walked out of one end because that's where he was. He walked into the other end because that's which one was closest.

I thought it was going to be Mister Gower.

The way you worded this makes me chuckle. :lol:

Eh, whatever man. If I feared for my life enough to empty a clip into a teenager I sure as hell wouldn't be taking the path of convenience because it was closest. I also definitely wouldn't turn my back to the gunman. The pharmacist didn't seem to show any concern that he might be in danger at that point.

Did anyone happen to notice that the kid that got shot wasn't even holding a gun before he went down?

Well it's clear that Oklahoma is a violent state. The robber had a gun. The pharmacist emptied his clip into the robber. The judge gave the guy life...

They all want people to die...whee...

And of course God wants them all dead via by sending tornadoes their way.