After the War of Northern Aggression ended, the good people of Massachusetts believed themselves to be of a better ilk than their erstwhile brethren in the beaten lands down south. After all, not only had they won a way, but they conducted themselves in a better, more highly evolved fashion toward men with darker skin. Or so they wanted to believe.
Yet what happened to Jason Vassell, a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, would make a fine 1950s apology tale, providing it ended the right way. As it’s happening at the moment, it’s impossible to know how it will end just yet, but the drama is building, the tension is mounting, and the district attorney is being put to the test. Can a black man at Amherst, subjected to an overtly racist attack, be treated justly for defending himself.
Ironically, this is a basic variation on the Castle Doctrine, beloved in such southerly hotspots as Houston for its authority to shoot at people who “need killin’.” Us northerners don’t always appreciate the concept, but we can still recognize the desire and right to remains alive and relatively intact when someone comes into our home with bad intent. The natural reaction is to survive first and argue about it later.
So what happened to Jason Vassell?
Early on the morning of February 3, 2008, Jason, an African American student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was in his dormitory. Two intoxicated white men, Jonathan Bowes and Jonathan Bosse, [neither of whom attended the college] approached Jason’s dormitory window repeatedly referring to him as a “nigger” and breaking in the window. They then forced their way into the dormitory lobby where they assaulted Jason, breaking his nose and giving him a concussion.
Under this continuing assault Jason was forced to defend himself with a pocketknife, injuring his assailants. As a result of defending himself against this unprovoked assault Jason, the victim of the attack, was charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon. These charges carry a possible thirty year prison sentence. One of the perpetrators, Jonathan Bowes, was charged only with misdemeanors carrying a maximum eighteen month sentence. The other, Jonathan Bosse, was not charged at all.
The attack happened about a year ago, on February 3, 2008. The case is about to go to trial in Hampshire Superior Court, with a motion to dismiss pending. Northwestern District Attorney, Betsy Scheibel, sees no problem.
According to the Boston Globe, Jason, who withdrew from UMass after the attack, has no priors and now lives with his parents awaiting his fate. But he’s still black and about to go to trial for defending himself from attack. Many students and professors on the Amherst campus have rallied to Jason’s support. Others say they will await the trial, when the truth will come out. Right.
Efforts to reach prosecutors yesterday were unsuccessful.
Well, that much is painfully clear.
In Texas, Jason would be a hero. In Amherst, he’s just an ex-student with a once-broken nose, a concussion, and a case going to trial for trying not to be the victim. But no need to worry for Jason, since the truth will come out at trial and no doubt they will give him back the year of his life lost to being attacked for being black. Then we can make that movie, once we have the happy ending.Update: Joel Rosenberg does a thorough and thought-provoking analysis at WindyPundit. Definitely mandatory reading.
Sheesh. Long(er) comments to follow.
I am skeptical – wish I could be there to sit through the trial so I could hear the evidence, not the stories being put out by partisans.
See: http://crimlaw.blogspot.com/2009/02/hate-crime-or-excessive-force.html
As Ken suggests, these facts are so egregious that one wonders whether there may be more to the story. On the other hand, now that the judge just denied my motion to dismiss by reason of collateral estoppel, I’m going to a trial in mid-March on an attempted murder case also involving self-defense where the prosecution is similarly unjustified. I thought our collateral estoppel argument was very strong, and if god forbid the jury doesn’t see things our way we’ll still have a strong appeal. (In a previous trial my client was charged with this count of attempted murder and with a murder count. The only rational basis for the acquittal on the murder count was self-defense. Since the alleged murder occurred less than a second after the alleged attempted murder, and both shootings were directly and immediately connected, the motion to dismiss argued that in acquitting my client of the murder on the grounds of self-defense, the jury also necessarily decided that he had not started or provoked a fight with another person and had not committed the crime of attempted murder.) The court’s reasoning in his order denying our motion to dismiss was insubstantial. It did not engage with the arguments made in our briefs. I have to wonder why I wasted the breath and the ink. It would be one thing if the court had come up with some ingenious argument or overlooked authority to rebut our argument, but that was far from the case. And Prof. Papke from Marquette Law School faults practicing lawyers or a substantial subset of them for “mean anti-intellectualism.” Gee, I wonder where that comes from. Law school gets us all fired up on the notion that good arguments matter. The reality is far sorrier.
While you ask good questions, the fact that Vassell was in his dorm when attacked seems to trump the minor issues, which is why I invoked the Castle Doctrine. The other side is that the prosecution has failed to float much of anything to refute the allegations, which could either mean they are terribly professional and circumspect, or trying desperately not to look like racist fools.
And how did your first sentence naturally flow into a comment all about yourself and your case?
He shouldn’t even have to go through this. Could you imagine the maelstrom that would follow if he had shot them?
For that matter, Cory Maye shouldn’t be in prison either.
I see that you run a very tight ship around here. All comments on YOUR blog must be very closely tied to YOUR thoughts in YOUR posts. I’ll try to be more cognizant of this rule in the future. Previously I mentioned cases I’m handling on this blog for similar reasons to the reasons I mention it to fellow practitioners in my office building — for sympathy and encouragement (let me hasten to add that this is the least important, as it’s the kind of thing you are by nature prone to ridicule), on the off-chance that the issue might be of interest to others, and on the off-chance that other readers might have some insight into or experience with the issue. Did you think maybe I was talking about MYSELF and MY case for some obscure marketing reason? If so, you’re more paranoid than I thought.
A few comments from the cheap seat (more Windy comments shortly):
Castle Doctrine/defense of dwelling isn’t just for the more civilized places in the country, where it’s understood that one’s dwelling is one’s place of refuge*; MN has it, as I blogged (orthogonally; as I keep harping on, the Housley case was about self-defense, not defense of dwelling) about recently.
MA appears, from my amateur vantage point, to have a very weak Castle Doctrine statute; see http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/278-8a.htm . Since I’m a [cynic | deconstructionist | sage | fool | guy with a keen eye for the obvious] enough to have watched things for a while and drawn the obvious conclusions, I strongly doubt that, even if that section applies to a dorm lobby, that alone will save Vassel from conviction.
Heck, at this point, I’m not sure that he shouldn’t be convicted, although I’m inclined to give the initial victim of an attack more than a little benefit of the doubt.
___________
*Decreasingly, alas, from the government. But I digress.
I’ve got some friends at UMass, and my interest in this saga is comes from the sickening feeling that the wrong person in this affair is going to end up jailed and scarred with a criminal record.
Additionally, it also grabbed my interest because it highlights some of the difficulties I have with self-defense — not that I don’t see or imagine a right to self-defense with force of one’s person and family if necessary — but because the stories of self defense that end up making the rounds are disturbing in their outcome.
It could well be, I suppose, that what gets kicked around in the press are the gruesome tales of execution-style killings of kids who came to steal a box of twinkies, homeowners discovering that the dark figure they just shot was a cop on a no-knock, or (at UMass) what seems like a fairly clear racial double standard in who is allowed to defend themselves from what.
These difficulties, in other words, come down to a concern that 1. self-defense with force is sometimes not practiced with wisdom or mercy and 2. even if the self-defense is fully justified, having it socially validated requires more trust in Justice system than I think is warranted (or unwarranted and unannounced).
That all said, I am thankful that Mr. Greenfield chose to write about this, first because the more people that read the Globe article, well, maybe it’s more likely that Jason Vassell will get clear of this.
And also because I really wanted to hear what responsible concealed carry and self-defense advocates like yourself had to say — what does a man like Jason Vassell do in a situation like the one described, and what should he do?
FWIW, I’m working on a posting on that subject right now. It’s a matter of some interest to me.
Got a link from a friend. I’m a UMass student with some connections to the J4J movement. I’d like to shed any light on this that I can if people have questions. And yes, it really is this bad, and this inexplicable.
On the contrary, everyone here is entirely fascinated by your experiences. One of the primary reasons I write every day is the hope of drawing you out to tell us a story about you. It’s what I live for.
But back to reality, yes, the comments are related to MY posts on MY blawg, rather than YOUR Comment on MY blawg. It’s really not all the tough to follow, now is it? Of course, if this is unduly paranoid, you know what you can do.
By the way, notice how all the other nice commenting folks felt compelled to speak to the facts and/or issues, rather than self-indulge in telling their own stories here? But enough about me, tell me more about you. What can I do for you?
And thanks for your heads up on this. I bet that Jdog will give us a thorough and brilliant analysis.
Wow… I went to UMass. The fact that this happened at all makes me pretty sad.
But, I wonder what the real story is here, as there are elements of this that seem fishy.
First of all, they broke his window and then forced their way into the lobby? Why didn’t he call 911 and stay in his room? I don’t know of a single dorm room on that campus that doesn’t have an impregnable door.
I am a big fan of the castle doctrine, having lived in Flori-duh long enough to have amassed a pretty good sized arsenal of my own at home. But, your dorm building isn’t your castle, your dorm room is.
I wasn’t there and I have no better facts than you, but if Jason is in his dorm room and two assholes decide to break his windows and start hurling epithets at him, then I’m on his side.
If he picks up a knife and goes down the stairs to the lobby to confront them, now he’s the one who has escalated the situation.
Trust me, in this part of Massachusetts, this kid is going to get a fair trial. Lets see what the real story is before we rush to judgment. Sometimes the victim isn’t as much of a victim as he (or she) seems.
I’m always a big fan of avoiding harmful rushes to judgment, myself, and if he really went out to restart an ended confrontation and punish them stabbily, that wasn’t okay, sure, but . . . staying in the room?
Let’s assume that the report at the partisan site (I’m blogging it at the moment; there’s some stuff I need to at least try find out before I publish) isn’t utterly inaccurate — he’s in his room, the window’s been broken inward by folks who have been threatening him at four in the morning, and who may or may not know that the cops are on their way — waiting in the one place where they’re guaranteed to be able to find him?
Huh? You might do it in your home, and I might in mine, but we’ve both got specialized tools for that sort of situation; an Amherst student is vanishingly unlikely to have such in his dorm room.
As to grabbing a tool on his way out, all that demonstrates is that he isn’t a moron.
We’ve been talking this over elsewhere, and I’ve been asking the same question / taking a similar position with a slightly different spin, namely that he would have been a lot better off had he barricaded the door and waited for the blue lights and sirens.
But, some of the discussants point out that this was happening at 4AM, Vassell was probably a combination of scared, angry, and suffering a bit of wounded pride.
It’s also been pointed out from some UMass folks that he may not have trusted the UMPD — there were apparently a couple of nasty race and sexual orientation-related incidents that didn’t get a lot of positive institutional support.
But I’ll hold there until Jdog weighs in.
The general idea behind a Castle Doctrine is that it is your [insert deity of choice / some authority higher than man]-given right to be secure in your home, car, and person.
If the actual story is as Jdog speculates, i.e. that he went to restart something, then he might be a bit at fault. If he had been given a concussion, I’d say that lessens it.
If he’s in a place he is allowed to be, if a couple of guys, drunk or otherwise, start pounding on him, he’s within his rights to defend himself with his fists, a knife, or ballpoint pen.
And, “yeah.” If you ever find yourself in a fair fight, you need to revisit your tactics.
Did you really write this? We need to have a talk, young man.
Well, maybe the Gambler’s Fallacy will work, for once. About the only thing I’m sure about is that it’ll be long . . .
It is long, and it happens also to be an excellent and thorough analysis. You take a meandering path but end up in the only place possible.
Excuse me for being so egotistical as to openly lament that the freedom of a man I know personally is about to be put in jeopardy again in a retrial that should be precluded as a matter of law. Just like this fellow Jason in Mass., my client is “going to trial for trying not to be the victim.” The pending mid-March attempted murder trial looms large in my consciousness right about now, the day after our motion to dismiss was denied and I broke the news to my client at the jail, but there’s apparently little appreciation of that around here.
Granted, it might be easier to have an internet discussion about a case when (some) of the relevant facts have been published in the Boston Globe. On the other hand, I know the facts of the similar injustice facing my client, and they similarly suck. I guess I fell into the trap of commenting on what I know rather than limiting myself to commenting on a case and a defendant halfway across the country. I guess I thought this blog was about “Simple Justice.”
[Ed. Note: Balance of comment deleted for use of the word “dude” and excessive whininess.]
Thanks for the very thorough workthrough of the timeline and the issues as stake over at Windypundit.
FWIW at the local CBS station the prosecution offers an alternate account that involves Vassell wearing a mask (?) at one point.
I would be really interested to see the surveillance tapes.
You’re excused. Just don’t let it happen again.
Well, what I meant, Mr. Greenfield, is that the jury pool in this area is left of Trotsky.
Thank you for that clarification. My faith is restored.
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