Memo to Texas “Civil Rights” Group: Fathers (Allegedly) Defending Their Daughters From Sexual Assault Have Rights, Too

If you want to get a view of how upside down so-called “Civil Rights” can get, you can look no further than James Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

It started with the story of an unidentified father who heard his four year old daughter screaming from a barn on his ranch.  When he went to see what the commotion was, he walked in to see a man allegedly doing... something to her.  Some reports say she was being allegedly “raped” and some say she was being “molested.”  Either way, the father took action and literally beat the man allegedly violating his daughter to death.  You can read more about the story, here.

That led to a lot of people saying, “Good job” and “Glad he was dead.”  I for one support the death penalty for child rapists, so long as they have due process before they are killed.  I am pretty consistent in my disdain for any kind of vigilante justice.

But the father here isn’t claiming that he had a right to summarily execute this person.  He is claiming that it was an accident in the process of defending his daughter.

And just to be clear, you have a right to use force not only in self-defense but in the defense of others.  And in most states it is implied, but in Texas it is explicitly stated in the statute, that you can use deadly force to prevent or stop a sexual assault.

Now, over at Hot Air, Allah has this analysis of that self-defense claim:

What makes this case conceivably tricky even under Texas’s otherwise expansive self-defense law is that most uses of deadly force involve a weapon, which can kill with one blow, and not one’s bare hands, which usually can’t. If the father had shot the guy or stabbed him in the chest, the fatal blow would have been the neutralizing blow and therefore textbook self-defense; in this case, the neutralizing blow might well have come before the fatal blow. Self-defense technically only covers you up to the former point.

Which is right to a certain extent, but I think he is missing some issues.  First off, there is the fact that this father is not only allowed to use the necessary amount of force to stop the attack on his daughter but also amount of force he reasonably believes is necessary to stop the attack.  Humans are not robots.  We cannot be expected to figure out down to the decimal point how much psi we should apply by striking a fist to a person’s face in order to stop them without killing them.  So the question isn’t whether it was strictly necessary at that moment to keep striking his daughter’s alleged attacker; the question is whether he reasonably believed it was necessary.

Another issue is whether or not he had the intent to kill this man.  That is an element, too.  Now bear in mind in many cases the intent to kill can be inferred from circumstances.  If you point a gun at a person and pull the trigger, and you kill the guy, the law allows a jury to say, “gee, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you were trying to kill him.”  Or to be less snarky, the jury is allowed to conclude that you intended your actions to have their natural consequences.

But a punch?  Ordinarily a punch is not a deadly act.  For instance, Mike Tyson once famously knocked a man out in ninety seconds...

...but even a monster like Tyson has never killed a man in the ring.  Indeed contrary to what you might have thought watching a Ron Howard movie, it’s kind of unusual for person to kill with their hands.

Further complicating this situation is that the father literally might not have known his own strength.  In this moment of (allegedly) righteous anger the father might have felt the famous “adrenaline rush” that allows mothers to move cars off their children and the like.  When your adrenaline starts pumping you are literally stronger than you normally are.  So he might not have realized that at this moment he was hitting like... well... Mike Tyson.

Which is not to say that the guy is definitely justified, either.  There is an investigation going on, as there should always be when a guy is killed, and maybe we will learn something surprising that turns the facts on their head.  But at this moment the state of Texas would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that 1) he was not acting reasonably in defense of his daughter and 2) he intended to kill the man.  And barring some surprising set of facts, it seems unlikely that the state of Texas will to meet that burden.

But enter director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, James Harrington.  He decided to tut-tut all of this support for the father as follows:

James Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, an Austin-based nonprofit group, questioned the father’s decision to “summarily execute” the alleged molester without due process.

“Assuming it’s true that this guy was molesting the daughter, and we don’t know what exactly happened at this point, he would then have the right to defend [her], and hit him enough to have him stop,” Harrington told FoxNews.com. “But you cannot summarily execute him, even though I can understand the anger he would have.”

Without specific knowledge of the case, Harrington said he was “surprised” that the girl’s father had not been already charged.

Harrington continued: “The question is: When does it move beyond self-defense?”

Some of what Harrington said is valid, but the part that galled me is where he said that the man should have been charged.  No, in fact I think barring some surprising revelation, I don’t think he should be charged.  You can accuse me of impressing my recent own nasty experiences into this, but I don’t think a person should be charged—let alone arrested—unless the prosecutor at least thinks you are in fact guilty (after an investigation, of course).

And as a leader of a so-called Civil Rights organization, Harrington should get that.  All criminal suspects deserve that, whether they are men accused of doing unspeakable acts to little girls, or fathers accused of murder pleading the defense of his daughter’s innocence.  Both kinds of defendants equally should be free from prosecution until the prosecutor has reasonable certainty that a crime has been committed.

As I said recently, the government exists to protect our rights.  And even the best governments can fail.  This little girl had a right not to be sexually violated.  The state allegedly failed to prevent that.  I don’t say that as criticism—I don’t think we want a government so omnipresent as to be within earshot of every barn in America.  But allegedly it didn’t successfully protect this little girl and it (allegedly) fell upon this father to do so.  And to hear him tell it, in doing so he vindicated some of the most precious human rights there are.  And those rights deserve recognition, too.

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