Outrageous, it is.
A lot of attention has been paid to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law
and far too little to the state’s extreme gun sentencing laws. Less
than a year ago, I told readers of this page about the outrageous case
of Orville
Lee Wollard, a lawful gun owner who fired a warning shot in his home to chase off a young man who had been abusing his teenage daughter.
Wollard believed he had the right to protect his family so he rejected a plea offer. Unfortunately, a jury rejected
Wollard’s
self-defense claim and found him guilty of aggravated assault with a
deadly weapon without intent to kill. A Florida judge was forced by the
state’s mandatory gun sentencing law to send
Wollard to prison for 20 years.
Particularly galling was the fact that just two weeks after
Wollard was sentenced, the
U.S. Supreme Court in Heller
v
. District
of
Columbia
affirmed the right of Americans to have a firearm “and to use that arm
for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the
home.” The ruling was cold comfort for the Wollard family.
Just
when it seemed that Florida’s inflexible gun sentencing laws couldn’t
produce a worse result, I learned last week of an upcoming sentencing in
Florida that exceeds
Wollard’s for sheer stupidity and rank injustice.
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