Armed Citizens Can Step On Legal Land Mines If They Aren’t Careful Following Self-Defense Shootings

What armed citizens say to responding police after a self-defense shooting can put their freedom at risk, firearms instructors and attorneys told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The instructors and attorneys said that armed citizens make those errors in the immediate aftermath of an encounter, often turning what would be a justified incident of self-defense into a criminal trial. Some of the most common mistakes involved what they did immediately after the incident.

“Odds are if you’re the good person who’s never been involved in the justice system before, you probably have no idea what you’re doing,” Tom Grieve, a former prosecutor who also is a firearms instructor and appears on panels for the United States Concealed Carry Association (USCCA), told the DCNF. Grieve noted that because the vast majority of self-defense uses do not involve any shots being fired, far too many armed citizens can find themselves in trouble.

“They know how to use the police against you because they’ve been through the system,” Grieve said. “They understand what they should or should not do and I see a lot of people walk themselves into criminal charges because law enforcement misidentifies them as the bad guy because they don’t understand how to play the system.”

One factor that was mentioned was the armed citizen’s interaction with police in the immediate aftermath of the self-defense incident. While all advised caution in what an armed citizen says to police during that timeframe, not all of them agreed on how much to say.

“I’ve been telling people since the 1970s, you need a brief statement,” Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) President Massad Ayoob told the DCNF. “You need to make it clear from the beginning: This guy attacked you. You need to point out the knife that he dropped. You need to point out, you know, witnesses you saw before they disappear. But you must not try to answer any detailed question.”

Ayoob noted that a number of physiological and psychological effects could make it easy for an armed citizen to get facts wrong and look like a liar in front of police.

Attorneys for Freedom partner & managing criminal defense Attorney Andrew C. Marcantel agreed, saying too much could be a problem for an armed citizen, but he had a different view of what to say in the immediate aftermath.

“By far the number one, I mean, and pretty much any criminal defense attorney will tell you this, who handles these types of cases, is speaking to the police and assuming that the police are on their side and assuming they can talk their way out of the situation and assuming they’re in a good shoot, and assuming they’re in actually a good lawful shoot, those assumptions can cause one to get a case of what I call diarrhea of the mouth,” Marcantel told the DCNF. “When the cops show up on the scene and start just volunteering all kinds of information to the police, much of which turns out to be incriminating.”