From Pro-Gun NH, an example of someone who would be in jail if it wasn’t for the passage of the “Stand Your Ground” law simply for trying to protect his family member in a public space. I keep hearing that we are “not to worry – this is not a problem in NH” with the underlying whisper message of “not to worry – NH prosecutors WILL do the right thing”. Then we here in NH saw what happened to Ward Bird with “a willing liberal prosecutor, Robin Gordon“. And now, a second time (emphasis mine, reformatted):
After two days of trial and jury deliberation in Hillsborough County Superior Court South, a verdict of not guilty was rendered in the case of State v Craig Moses. The attorney for Mr. Moses was Evan Nappen….who is also the General Counsel and one of the five Directors of Pro-Gun New Hampshire. Mr. Moses had defended himself and his cousin, who was knocked unconscious and was lying in a pool of blood after having been brutally punched and kicked in the head. The attack on Mr. Moses and his cousin occurred early in the morning of May 5, 2012 outside a Nashua nightclub called “The Junk Yard.”
Upon exiting the nightclub, Mr. Moses was sucker-punched in the chest, breaking two ribs; he was also punched in the nose, and was dazed from a head injury. While trying to get away from his attackers, he saw his cousin also being brutally assaulted, receiving multiple punches and kicks to the head that left him unconscious on the asphalt as the beating continued. When Mr. Moses reached the vehicle he immediately went to retrieve his lawfully-possessed .380 handgun, which he had kept in the locked vehicle, and for which he had a License to Carry.
In order to create a zone of safety around his fallen cousin…
…he displayed his handgun and shouted “Back the f*** up!” Unbeknownst to Mr. Moses, one of the persons warned away by his display of his handgun was a bouncer from the club, “Big Steve” Cormier, who was wearing a black shirt and had come upon the scene when Mr. Moses was inside the vehicle retrieving his handgun. The Hillsborough County Prosecutor [Patricia M. LaFrance, from what the website says -Skip] subsequently indicted Mr. Moses for criminal threatening with a deadly weapon, alleging he had pointed his handgun at Mr. Cormier. This felony charge carries a penalty of three-and-a-half to seven years in State Prison.
Thankfully, New Hampshire self-defense laws had been changed in 2011 following the Ward Byrd case, so that the statutory definition of non-deadly force was specifically amended to include the display and production of a firearm. Even more important in this case was the provision added in that year by State Representative David Welch to the law about criminal threatening, to say that “A person who responds to a threat which would be considered by a reasonable person as likely to cause serious bodily injury or death to the person or to another by displaying a firearm or other means of self-defense with the intent to warn away the person making the threat shall not have committed a criminal act under this section.”
So we see that a law that Democrats and gun grabbers wish to repeal (whose sponsor, Steve “Deputy Dawg” Shertleff, hypocritically gets to do exactly what his HB135 removes from citizens simply because of his past history as an LEO) did its job – it kept an innocent man out of jail whose “crime” (according to Patricia M. LaFrance) was to protect “family and friends”. If Shurtleff and the other gun-grabbers have their way, and this incident happened in the future, a man who was simply defending himself and his family member, would be in jail.
Congratulations to Evan Nappen.
