An Interview with Massad Ayoob

Interview by Gila Hayes

mas interviewArmed citizens often ask questions about choosing an attorney, but that common inquiry hints at a much deeper underlying issue, a concern that goes far beyond just, “Do I have the name and number of an attorney to call after self defense?”

We watch the news, read articles, and read books about prosecution of people who appear to be entirely innocent. We watch their trials and observe testimony and arguments that make the defendant’s future look bleak. We wonder, presuming the necessity of self defense to avoid being killed, “If that was me sitting in the defendant’s chair could I have gotten that train wreck of a trial going in the right direction? Could I have guided the defense attorney’s strategy or interrupted their approach if I thought the strategy was wrong? Could a different attorney have stopped the criminal justice system from charging, indicting, and trying me after use of force in self defense?” Those are troubling questions because laypersons hesitate to question advice from attorneys.

We turned to Network Advisory Board Member Massad Ayoob, who has worked in the courts for 45 years as an expert witness, a police prosecutor, and continuing legal education instructor. In response to our questions, he provided a high-angle view of what he has seen: what works and what doesn’t work when defending innocent people’s use of force in self defense.

It was an informative conversation, and we switch now to our Q & A format to share it with Network members. For a more informal streaming video version, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieyK-4dogxU .

eJournal: It is good to be in the studio with you, Massad. I appreciate your willingness to answer my questions.

Ayoob: It is good to be here, and I am always happy to answer your questions.

eJournal: Let’s start with a little about your history with the legal defense of self-defense.

Ayoob: I have been an arresting officer since 1972. From 1988 until my retirement in 2017, I was certified as a police prosecutor in the New Hampshire system. Police prosecutor are non-attorneys who prosecute misdemeanors and violations, and we could take felonies up to arraignment level and could second chair with the regular prosecutor on felonies if they so desired.

I’ve been an expert witness for the courts since 1979 on cases involving weapons, and use of force, primarily homicides. Most of the cases that I do are self defense.

eJournal: How much of your time is split between cases in which private citizens used force in self defense and how much involves police?

Ayoob: I’m about equal between OIS – officer involved shootings – and private citizen self-defense shootings.

eJournal: That’s interesting, because I think our members, viewers and readers are mostly private citizens, and yet, police-involved cases suggest ways to defend use of force and attorneys can be urged to borrow successful strategies. We want to learn from your insights into how early in the legal process we could detect and reorient if we see our defense going off the rails?

Ayoob: To stay on the rails you want to make sure you’re on the right train. Now, most of the time the system works. Most of the time, innocent people are recognized as innocent, the justified shooting is recognized as justified, and the cases we read about and the ones we train for are the exceptions to the norm.

Still, it would be a real good idea before you’re ever involved in a shooting, to find out what attorney in your area specializes in or is familiar with the self-defense type shooting. The best thing to do is look around and see what attorney the local police and sheriff’s department keeps on retainer to defend one of their officers if they’re criminally charged in the wake of a shooting.

Now, certainly police and civilian will have different dynamics, but in the end, the self-defense shooting is a self-defense shooting. An attorney who’s done a lot of police cases understands the dynamics that have to be established and understands the elements of what today we call “force science,” the dynamics of violent encounters, which are not taught in law school. They’re learned in court, and they’re learned in CLE – continuing legal education for practicing attorneys.

If you can find that attorney, it’s not going to matter much whether you are carrying on a piece of tin called a shield or a piece of celluloid called a carry permit. What’s going to matter is –

• Was there genuine danger?

• Would a reasonable, prudent person in your position have recognized it as mortal danger and would they have acted as you did?

• Were your actions within what the courts call the mainstream of custom and practice for dealing with that particular type of crisis? Ideally, your actions will show– to use latest buzzword – that you acted to best practices.

Now, an attorney who’s defended a whole lot of cops who shot criminals in self defense pretty much knows the dynamics that have to be established for a jury when a private citizen has shot that self-same violent criminal in self defense. In the big cities there have been so many unmeritorious lawsuits and criminal charges against police that there are whole law firms that do nothing but sue police departments.

On the defense side there are whole firms that do nothing but defend police in these cases. One is Porter Scott in Sacramento, CA (https://www.porterscott.com/practice/public-entities/ ) and Manning, Marder and Wolfe in Los Angeles used to be another. Even if the attorney that represents your cops defends only police, he or she will know who can take a private citizen client, so the first step is to get someone who knows how to do this type of case.

Don’t make the mistake of looking for the most famous criminal defense lawyer. They probably got famous by pulling rabbits out of hats and finding some sort of reasonable doubt to acquit obviously guilty people.

What we’re looking at here is what’s called an affirmative defense. We’re stipulating, “Yes, we shot him,” but we’re maintaining that doing so was absolutely right. This requires a strategy that’s almost 180-degrees reversed from mitigating the guilt of the typical guilty client who is the bread and butter of the typical criminal defense law firm.

For example, the defense lawyer with a client he knows is “good for it,” or is guilty of some lesser offense, doesn’t want to put him on the stand. What can he possibly say that’s not going to either dig him in deeper or commit perjury, which is another felony by itself. If he perjures himself on that witness stand, there’s a distinct possibility that attorney would be looking at charges of subornation of perjury – that is, having advised or exhorted someone to lie under oath. That’s a felony in and of itself in my state and could cause them to lose their bar ticket in any state, so the default becomes, “I don’t put my clients on the stand.”

If I had shot someone in self defense and the attorney I was interviewing said, “Don’t worry about testifying. I never put my clients on the stand,” I’d say, “Thank you. How much do I owe you for your time? Goodbye,” because he’s just told me he’s got no clue how to do an affirmative defense. It’s not a “who done it.” We stipulate, “You done it. You shot him.” We’re stipulating to that. It’s now a “why did he or she do it?” and, if you think about it, who besides the defendant can truly, fully answer that question?

The courts demand reasonableness, both objective and subjective. Objective is the standard guideline of the reasonable person doctrine – the three-prong test of what the reasonable, prudent person would have done in exactly the same situation, knowing what the defendant knew at the time. Subjective reasonableness is, did this defendant truly believe that they were in deadly danger? Without the defendant testifying, it’s kind of hard to establish that.

Now we’ve had a few cases where we couldn’t put the witness on the stand. We had one in the Miami area. The defendant’s cardiologist told the defense attorney, “Look, Will’s condition is so precarious if you put him on the stand, you may win your trial, but you’re going to lose your client. His heart will not with withstand that degree of stress.”

We had enough circumstantial evidence that we were able to kill the case without going to trial. He is still alive, which he wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t pulled the trigger, and he now has concealed carry permit.

We’ve had more than one where a battered woman had killed the abuser. The battered woman’s syndrome is properly called learned helplessness. They have learned to survive by telling a brutal alpha male whatever he wants to hear. If we put her on the witness stand to be cross-examined by an aggressive alpha male it would be like feeding an antelope to a lion. In cases like that, we have been able, with enough other fact evidence, circumstantial evidence, and forensic evidence, to still win the case but it’s much more of an uphill fight if the jury can’t hear the defendant’s answer to the question, “Why did you pull that trigger and end that man’s life?”

eJournal: There’s an expectation in the jury’s mind that the defendant will explain.

Ayoob: There is, and if they don’t, the judge will instruct the jury to make no inference from the fact that they’re not testifying, but the judge’s instruction cannot overpower human nature. The human being consciously or subconsciously feels that silence – the accusation that’s unanswered – is seen as an admission of guilt and it creates a more uphill fight for the defense.

eJournal: This is a hard balancing act for the person who has never been taken to court and hires an experienced attorney because he or she is way out of their depth. That’s why we turned to the attorney who presumably spends her or his life in the courtroom. We defer to their experience; we hope to benefit from their experience. If the lawyer tells defendant, “I don’t think you should testify,” how big of a red flag is that? Should we walk out immediately?

Ayoob: If I know I’ve done the right thing, and if they tell me, “I’m not putting you on the stand,” I hear them telling me, “I think you’re so weak and stupid that you could be led wherever a cross-examiner wants to lead you,” or I hear, “I think you’re guilty,” or I hear, “I think you’re some crazy gun nut and if I put you on that witness stand, you’re going to turn into a werewolf in front of the jury.” I’d rather not put my life in the hands of someone who doesn’t respect me.

I’ve met a great many defense lawyers over the years with all the cases, and with the two years I spent as co-vice chair of the forensic evidence committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. They tend to skew very much toward the blue side of the political spectrum. In a time of political identity, if the gun issue comes up, even if they’ve never thought much about it, people who perceive themselves as progressive, think, “I’m a progressive, therefore let me check, yep, I’m anti-gun.” It’s the pigeonhole mentality of political identity.

A whole lot of them find a gun person as repugnant as if the judge had assigned them to defend a child pornographer. That makes things difficult because an attorney cannot hide from the jury the fact that they don’t respect their own client. It also makes them reluctant to handle the evidence. Again, the analogy: imagine you had to handle the evidence in a child porn case. The attorney in a self-defense case is going to have to understand how guns work, how weapons work, and how self-defense works or they’re not going to be able to educate the jury.

It would be nice if beforehand you could find the attorney who represents the cops. Buy an hour of their time and ask them questions like, “What is – the common term for it is ‘the mood of the courts’ – in your particular area towards self-defense shootings?” Now, I just came here from Alaska where they appoint the judges and I frankly think that’s a pretty good idea. In most of the lower 48 states, judges are elected, and they become sensitive to political issues.

Often the mood of the courts means the mood of the current prosecutor. Prosecutors are elected and I’d kind of like to know whether the prosecutor in my community is the kind of guy that Friends of NRA invites to give the keynote speech at their annual meeting, or if he got $500,000 for his campaign from George Soros, because that prosecutor is going to need someone he can make an example out of to prove to the benefactor that it was a worthy investment. “Keep that in mind, Mr. Soros, when I run again in two years.”

Knowing those things is useful and those are things that your attorney can tell you. If I had an attorney who said, “No, I don’t talk to the clients before – wait till you commit a crime,” I think, “Okay, you’re not willing to advise me about things that might keep me out of trouble beforehand. Tell me again why I should be giving you money and why you should be representing me.”

eJournal: That’s a tough decision for the average armed citizen who has far less experience than you do. Backspacing a bit, you mentioned needing to explain to juries how guns work or the dynamics of violence. Aren’t we wandering into the domain of the expert? The attorney may not know everything, but will they hunt down an expert who does? As a client, maybe I need also to gauge the attorney’s willingness to turn to an expert witness and be attentive to what the expert tells them.

Ayoob: If I was paying an attorney, I’d want one that I was paying by the hour. When they give you a flat fee and you need expert testimony, that expert testimony is coming out of their flat fee. It’s coming out of their pocket and X number for that reason alone won’t bring in experts when you desperately need one – whether it’s an expert in dynamics of violent encounters or a forensic pathologist to explain, “No, that gunshot didn’t enter in the back and exit the front. That entered the front and exited the back.”

eJournal: Supposing that we were already post-incident and the attorney representing us said, “I don’t think I need an expert on this,” is that a red flag that gets us headed to the door?

Ayoob: Well, there might be cases where they don’t need an expert. You would need one if it was disputed whether the bullet had entered front to back, for example, or if the guy has been shot multiple times. The attorney, like the jury pool, grows up getting most of their knowledge about guns, gunfighting and self defense from TV and movies. In the old noir movies or the old cowboy movies, one shot would be fired. There wouldn’t be a drop of blood, but after the one shot someone would go “Oof” and swoon to the ground. By the ‘60s we had the Sam Peckinpah movies and the Dirty Harry movies, and with one shot from the gun, hamburger flies out of the body and the guy goes flying through a plate glass window.

If you shot him seven or eight times people will say, “Malice, malice! Murder, murder!” and your defense attorney may genuinely believe it. Experts in homicide investigation, scene reconstruction, experts in dynamics of violent encounters – what we today call force science – would be able to testify that it’s not at all uncommon for a man in a rage or under the influence of certain drugs to take bullet after bullet after bullet before they finally stop trying to hurt decent people. In a case like that, you definitely need expert testimony.

Maybe while you went bang, bang, bang, he spun away and then you stopped shooting. The pathology report comes back and says he was shot once here, once here and once here [points first to chest, then to side and back]. You’re going to need someone to explain the intersection of the time-space continuum and the dynamics of the violent encounter – that you’re firing at a rate of four or five shots per second, as fast as you can to save your life. He can turn in a quarter of a second. As his lateral midline passed your line of trajectory, you didn’t realize it because by the time you saw that he had turned and you stopped shooting, the gun had already gone off one or two more times. No jury is going to figure that out by themselves. Someone has to explain it and they don’t teach that in law school. You may have to be the one to explain to your attorney why you need experts.

One of the big things I find the lawyers missing is constantly reminding the jury of the speed at which the actual incident occurred. Perhaps the decision to fire took a single second, but from the first telling, it takes longer to describe it then it took for it to happen. The curse is that the shooting itself is over in seconds, but days have gone by in the courtroom in which that single second was under discussion. It creates the false illusion in everyone’s subconscious that it happened in slow motion like a Sam Peckinpah movie, and you had all kinds of time to think of something else to do or perhaps talk to him and try to de-escalate – de-escalation being the art of trying to be reasonable with the unreasonable.

One of the things we need to do more than many defense attorneys do is constantly bring the jury back to the unforgiving speed at which those things happen. You can do that with expert testimony.

In line with that, everyone is focusing on what you did: you fired that gun. You fired these bullets into this man’s body, the jury has seen the autopsy pictures – usually carefully arranged so the prison tattoos aren’t visible. It’s all about what you did to him.

eJournal: You even admitted that you shot him.

Ayoob: Yeah, and they hear that as a confession to murder. A whole lot of people out there think homicide and murder are two words for the same thing. In the opening statement they’ve heard your attorney say, “My client shot him.” Yes, they hear that as a confession to murder. We have to explain that to them. I want to convince them that if Mother Teresa had been there, she would have picked up a gun and shot this SOB.

You need an expert if they say it was unfair that you shot him because he only had a knife. I’ve heard that so many times I want to throw up. We need to be able to explain that a knife never runs out of ammunition, never jams, comes with a built-in silencer, and you can run it almost as fast as a Singer sewing machine.

The public has a misconception that I call the myth of the hierarchy of lethality. They think that the gun is up here [gestures above his head]. It’s the deadliest of all handheld weapons. It’s so deadly President Biden wants to ban it. While we consciously know you can use a knife to stab somebody, subconsciously we think, “Look, I cut my steak every night with a knife; I open my mail with one every morning,” and we don’t see it as a weapon. We need to show how dangerous it is.

Every time someone tries to crush a policeman to death with their automobile and a cop shoots, invariably the next day the newspaper headline is “Unarmed Motorist Gunned Down by Police.” I tell departments to have the medical examiner come in to show their officers what it looks like when a human being is hit by an automobile.

Being strained through the grill is not a figure of speech. We find human flesh, body parts inside the grill, inside the engine compartment, up under the fender where they were spun by the wheel and flesh was torn off the body. When the public says, “Oh my God, look at the horrible, mangling injury that the police did to this unarmed man,” we need to explain, “Look, if that cop was carrying a .357 Magnum that fires a 125-grain bullet at 1450 feet per second, that’s 583 foot-pounds of energy. An automobile at 50 miles an hour is exerting half a million foot pounds of energy.”

I tell departments to have their trained accident reconstructionist use exactly the same formula we use to determine energy for pistol or rifle bullets. Get the gross weight of the vehicle plus the weight of any people on board. The accident reconstructionist can determine the speed at which it was going, and you’ll find out that the so-called unarmed motorist who tried to crush an officer to death was exerting more destructive foot pounds of energy than would have been exerted if the officer had fired every round of ammunition on his belt. Usually, we can show if every officer in the precinct had emptied their gun and fired every round of ammo on their belts, it still would not have equaled the destructive energy that was being directed against that officer.

eJournal: How is describing the potential damage to that officer not disallowed in court as mere supposition, just a fictitious possibility you imagined?

Ayoob: It’s not supposition. The question has to be framed. The question should not be asked on direct examination by your attorney as, “What would have happened?” It should be, “What could have happened?”

eJournal: Are you allowed to speak to could have happened?

Ayoob: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

eJournal: The finesse to elicit testimony about “what could have happened” suggests a skilled and experienced attorney. I am drawn back to one of our earlier questions: shall I hire a famous lawyer who has tried 50 murder cases, even though I’ve read the news and I know his clients aren’t innocent, decent citizens…

Ayoob: I’d rather have a lawyer who had 10 self-defense trials than 50 murder trials. I want someone who knows how to defend an innocent person. A lawyer who knows very well that his client is guilty of the crime accused or of some lesser included offense will use a strategy to mitigate guilt. That becomes their default. Even if they defend an innocent person, they’ll default to the same guilt-mitigation strategies they’d use for a guilty client. If a guilty man’s lawyer gives you a guilty man’s defense, you are going to end up with a guilty man’s verdict.

eJournal: You’ve stressed presenting an affirmative defense; to show what you’ve taught us for years as the “active dynamic,” focusing attention on what actions led to the need to shoot – the “why” of the situation. What else does the attorney need to emphasize?

Ayoob: Again, we need to be constantly reminding the jury of the speed of self defense. We need to constantly remind the jury that when they’re deliberating, every minute they think about it is 60 times longer than the one second the defendant had. That’s got to be taken into consideration. The United States Supreme Court has said so in Graham v. Connor, the guiding light for police use of force. The court spoke of the tense, rapidly evolving circumstances that the officer faced in such situations and instructed that must be taken into account. The court also expressly said that 20-20 hindsight could not be applied to exigent circumstances such as these. Defense attorneys need to emphasize that more.

eJournal: Do you remember what Pennsylvania attorney Chris Ferro said about his defense of Spencer Newcomer? He related how he flashed a picture on a movie screen in the court room just for the same length of time that Spencer had – no longer than a moment! – to determine whether what was coming out of Wintermyer’s pocket was a gun or, as it turned out to be, a phone. As you said, it happened terribly fast, and the jury in that courtroom experienced its brevity. (See https://armedcitizensnetwork.org/the-anatomy-of-a-self-defense-shooting-pt-3)

Ayoob: That was brilliant.

eJournal: I remember Ferro saying it was risky, but he believed it was a risk they had to take. I don’t think he was wholly confident how it would work. It succeeded, as you said, brilliantly.

Ayoob: Newcomer was acquitted. Marty Hayes did a great job as the expert witness in that case.

eJournal: Thank you. Mostly, we’re pleased Spencer is not in prison. He suffered a lot. The story, though, describes the courage a defense attorney needs and how the attorney must show the speed at which an incident happens.

Ayoob: The attorney is reconstructing and letting the jury understand the terrible danger that the client faced.

eJournal: Earlier, you identified an essential element – the defendant’s testimony. You mentioned answering the jury’s question of “Why?” Through our discussion of trial strategies another question keeps coming to mind. What could be done by a skilled, courageous attorney to prevent having to go to trial at all?

Ayoob: The dirty little secret is how often, when properly handled, cases are killed before going to trial. Again, it’s a part of the dichotomy of guilt mitigation versus defending the truly innocent person. So many defense lawyers will say, “Don’t give the other side any more than we have to.” They play “hide the ball.” I keep hearing the phrase, “Save your best moves for the dance.” That’s all well and good, except if the truth is on our side, we let the other side know it upfront.

It’s highly unusual for a defense lawyer to call the prosecutor and say, “Hey, my client wants to talk to you.” They generally do a double take. After the client has calmed down and you figure out what the heck has happened, we recommend the client, with the defense attorney, of course, speak with the prosecutor and their investigators. Record the whole thing – sound and video. I say video because sometimes our communication is more visual than audible. If you said something sarcastic, the video capturing the facial expression lets people know it was sarcasm. Just the words could be misinterpreted.

We have found that very often the other side will say, “Okay, we had not seen it from that perspective; we had not known about that element. Thank you for coming in,” and sometime between the next day and a couple of weeks later, the case goes away. In 45 years as an expert witness, I have twice had periods of two years where I didn’t have to set foot in a courtroom because each time it was killed pre-trial.

eJournal: But you still had an ample case load, they just didn’t go to trial.

Ayoob: Yes, and that, of course, saves a great deal of grief, a great deal of angst and a great deal of expense. If you know you’ve done the right thing, you think the evidence is going to show you did the right thing, and your attorney doesn’t want to sit down and talk to the prosecutor, I’m not going to accuse anybody of bad motives, but bear in mind if you kill the case before trial, the attorney doesn’t get to charge you $100,000 for the trial.

eJournal: Expense is a less pressing concern for Network members, where the members know of our history of paying what it takes to defend innocent members, but I think we would be cruel not to consider the defendant’s own well-being and that of their spouses and families. If they have children or elderly parents, what are those vulnerable people going to be put through? How will their community treat them if their dad, mom, son, or daughter shot someone in self defense?

Ayoob: In the course of these cases, we generally meet not only the client but often their family. The agony they’re going through, wondering whether they’re going to see their son the next time on visiting day instead of at home is heartbreaking.

The sooner you can get the truth across, the sooner you can kill the case. Look at defensive gun usages themselves. The vast majority of them end when the good guy or gal presents the gun. The bad guy realizes, “I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, and I can die from this!” and they run away.

A whole lot of the same principle applies here. If, instead of pulling a gun on your attacker, you pull a large caliber attorney on your accuser and let them realize, “Here is what we’ve got. It’s the truth. It’s not going to change; that is why I can share it with you now. That’s why I want you to know it now. If this goes to trial, you are going to lose.”

You don’t put it that way; you let them come to that conclusion. In a prosecutor’s office, losing a case is an absolute humiliation. In a civil lawsuit, you show whichever young associate attorney is running the case, “We are going to win,” then he has to go back and tell the senior partners, whom he hopes to one day to join in the partnership, “We are going to end up spending six figures of your money on prostitute experts to say what we want said and the other side is going to destroy us anyway. We’re going to lose. Abort the mission; cut the losses.” They generally fold their tents and go away or offer a settlement so low that it’s cheaper than going to trial and it makes sense to settle.

eJournal: There’s another element the family faces: the neighborhood judging them harshly. Nearly a decade ago, we saw an attorney give a masterful press briefing in a member-involved case. It was so very impressive, I’ve never forgotten. Some attorneys are willing to inform the public through the news media; others are not. It is common for lawyers to refuse to speak to reporters on behalf of their clients. What do you think about news briefings given by attorneys on behalf of innocent clients who are accused? Is it okay? Is it advisable?

Ayoob: This is another classic example. All attorneys are taught in law school the same thing that all cops are taught in the police academy: we don’t discuss our cases in the press. It will all come out in court, they say. That is in the nature of a treaty. It’s understood that neither side will discuss the case unless the other side starts a war in the press. This paradigm has been changing for more than a decade now.

The classic example is the Zimmerman case from February 2012. The incident occurred in Sanford, FL. The family of the young man who was killed, Trayvon Martin, knew he had been getting into trouble. That’s why he was hundreds of miles north of his home with his mom. Now he lived with his divorced dad. It was like tough love, you know, “I can’t do anything with the kid; maybe you can.” I don’t think even they realized how much crime Trayvon Martin had been getting into until the prosecution finally cracked his iPhone. All they knew was their unarmed 17-year-old son was dead.

They hired an attorney named Benjamin Crump, who describes himself as a civil rights lawyer. He, in turn, hired Ryan Julison, who’s website says he’s available for litigation support. This takes the form of demonizing whomever it is you want to get money from. He was the one who took the picture of Trayvon Martin at the age of 12 and juxtaposed it with the ugliest picture he could find of Zimmerman. He created the whole trope of the innocent child skipping down the street with the box of Skittles when the evil racist guns him down to satisfy his blood lust.

Zimmerman was 27-year-old kid who had never been in trouble for anything before. He was the duly elected captain of neighborhood watch. He couldn’t afford an attorney and with no one to answer that charge, he kind of fibrillated for a while. We’ve discussed earlier how the false allegation that goes unanswered is seen as true.

eJournal: If you don’t dispute the lie…

Ayoob: … “it must be true.” Zimmerman won – the evidence clearly showed he was being violently attacked by Trayvon Martin, it was self defense and the jury appropriately acquitted – but he is still considered one of the most hated men in America. He literally had to change his name and lives in hiding.

I describe this mistake as only addressing the first jury (the criminal element of the case) and the second jury (the civil element of the case) but forgetting the third jury – the court of public opinion. That is the world in which this person and their family is going to have to live after you’ve won the trial, after you’ve won the acquittal, after you’ve won the lawsuit. If you end up like Zimmerman, having to live in hiding for the rest of your life, it’s a pretty hollow victory. Attacked, you need to respond. When the other side breaks the treaty, the treaty no longer binds you. When that’s happening, I want an attorney who’s going to have the guts to call a press conference and stand in front of the camera. Don’t be the first to do it, but if the other side falsely accuses, then do it and say, “Here’s the truth. Here’s what happened.” The case you just mentioned in which an attorney spoke to the press on behalf of a member was John Daub’s case.

eJournal: He’s written publicly about his case, and he talked about his post-incident experience for this journal in the latter half of https://armedcitizensnetwork.org/network-track-record .

Ayoob: John Daub was the victim of a violent home invasion early in the morning with his wife and his kids at home. He wound up having to shoot the man who had broken in. It was a cross-racial shooting. The man he had to kill was mentally ill and would have been the perfect picture of the sympathetic decedent.

Normally, the reaction would be, “Oh my God, you gunned down blah blah blah …” without taking into account disparity of force, the violence with which that man had broken into John’s home, the fact that John had to protect his children, et cetera. John called the Network and the Network brought in attorney Gene Anthes https://gbafirm.com/attorneys/gene-anthes/. Gene Anthes did a press conference on the lawn in front of the shooting scene, so the public got both sides from the beginning.

With any controversial shooting, if you look at the newspapers from the old days, letters to the editor from crackpots or letters saying crazy stuff were just thrown out by the editor. Public comments now are mostly unmonitored and the electronic comments in most newspapers, include things like, “This is why nobody should have guns, blah blah blah … This crazy person killed a poor innocent blah blah blah.”

Now, go back and look at the commentary about the Daub case. There are always some that come out of the woodwork, so there were some people saying, “There’s no such thing as a justifiable homicide,” but the majority of the comments I saw were, “Thank God he had a gun. How awful that poor man had to do that to save his family.” Do we see a small, subtle difference here? Yeah, we do.

Today, John Daub and his family live normal, happy lives.

I want an attorney who’s got the guts that Gene Anthes has, to stand up and address that third court – the court of public opinion. That is what I believe now has to become the paradigm.

eJournal: The alternatives are the press knocking on a locked door and no one answering, so the reporters say, “We reached out, but no one would give us any answers,” or some poor, frazzled-looking homeowner coming to the door and saying, “I can’t talk to you.” Either way, it looks like you’re hiding, and the absence of facts fuels speculation and the accusations get wilder and wilder.

Ayoob: It needs to be the attorney speaking to the press, but you need an attorney that will do it.

eJournal: Yes, well put. There are a lot of facets to this subject. What do we need to add that we haven’t covered?

Ayoob: Have support. These things get very expensive. Zimmerman’s expenses went way over a million and I took a lecture from Rittenhouse’s two attorneys and they both said the case went over a million, paid through donations because he wasn’t a Network member. God bless everyone for giving, but that is what the Network is for. The Network literally founded the industry of post-self-defense support. It is the one I belong to, and I personally think it is the best.

eJournal: Thank you for saying that. The Network values the attorneys we work with, and the problems we have talked about today have been notably absent in the 34 member-involved cases we’ve had since we opened in 2008. Still, we reach many readers and viewers outside the Network and our members are never restricted to Network affiliated attorneys, so we needed to hash out this subject. I appreciate the way you handled it – not calling out lawyers in defenses you’ve seen fail, but focusing on what is important, and what has worked so very, very well, like the example you gave of what Gene Anthes did for John Daub.

Ultimately, each individual must be their own best advocate. Hiring a lawyer to defend you is much like going to a physician who tells you that you need surgery. You’re skeptical. What do you do? You get a second opinion from another doctor. I fear we fail to take such a proactive approach when facing the criminal justice system. It’s uncomfortable! The closest most come to a courtroom is the clerk’s office when we pay traffic tickets. If that’s our only exposure to the courts, of course we’re reticent to challenge the strategy of a professional who seems to know his or her way around.

Ayoob: You need to remember that the attorney works for you. At the same time, all of you that are watching this are alpha males or alpha females. You’re used to being the one who protects others; you’re used to being the shot caller. You’re used to making the decisions.

Once the trial is going, understand you are not the player anymore. You’re the stakes. The attorney is the player. You want the best damn player of this game that can be found and that is not necessarily the most famous criminal defense lawyer. It is going to be the best, most experienced affirmative defense lawyer who can get the truth across to the jury.

eJournal: Excellent summation. Thank you for sharing your experiences and knowledge with us.

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Network Advisory Board member Massad Ayoob is author of Deadly Force: Understanding Your Right to Self Defense which is distributed in our new member education package that’s sent to all new Network members. He has additionally authored several dozen books and hundreds of articles on firearms, self defense and related topics. Since 1979, he has received judicial recognition as an expert witness for the courts in weapons and shooting cases, and was a fully sworn and empowered, part-time police officer for over forty years at ranks from patrolman through captain. He serves as president of the Second Amendment Foundation. Ayoob founded the Lethal Force Institute in 1981 and now teaches through Massad Ayoob Group of which he is the director. Learn more at https://massadayoobgroup.com or read his blog at https://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/.

 

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