Hognose, In CAlifornia it depends upon which County you live in. If you were in most rural counties you’d be fine because it’s a clear case of self defense.

In most urban counties you’s be looking at murder 2 and crippling civil suits.

Here in Sonoma County the use of an AR15 would make it almost certain you would be charged while if you used a model 94 you’d have a much better chance of not being charged with a crime.

Just the way it is in a place some describe as being 20 minutes west of reality.

I’m led to understand that California’s use of force laws are actually quite generous, certainly compared to someplace like Massachusetts, which has a “duty to retreat” even in one’s home.

Now, good use of force laws don’t help your choice of DA or jury if it comes to that.

And +1 for lever actions as home defense rifles. There aren’t many problems in the home that can’t be sorted out with a Win 94 or similar.

-John M.

Surprisingly the castle doctrine is a thing in Massachusetts.

MGL 278 Section 8A. In the prosecution of a person who is an occupant of a dwelling charged with killing or injuring one who was unlawfully in said dwelling, it shall be a defense that the occupant was in his dwelling at the time of the offense and that he acted in the reasonable belief that the person unlawfully in said dwelling was about to inflict great bodily injury or death upon said occupant or upon another person lawfully in said dwelling, and that said occupant used reasonable means to defend himself or such other person lawfully in said dwelling. There shall be no duty on said occupant to retreat from such person unlawfully in said dwelling.

That of course won’t stop the Hoplophobes in the Commonwealth from dragging you through the meat grinder.

Sorry, the duty to retreat was legislatively removed in the Gov. King era. While our laws of self defense aren’t as liberal as other state, the “castle doctrine ” is in effect in Massachusetts.

“Like, who gives a hairy rat’s what color the guys who busted down your door are? Well, of course, government agencies. By the way, Peters’s response is the only thing you should ever say to this question, especially if you and the crumb exsanguinating in your kitchen are nor the same skin tone.”

In fairness to the dispatcher, someone’s skin tone is one of the obvious things about them, and if the responding deputy sees a black guy running full-tilt down the road near the crime, but the perp is reported to be white, he knows he is not the perp in question.

And I can think of at least one good argument to tell the dispatcher the person’s race: “Now you told the dispatcher, Mr. Peters, that you shot two men in your house, in broad daylight, and didn’t notice what color their skin was? How well could you see these men? Were they even facing you? And wasn’t it true that you actually shot three men, but told the dispatcher you only shot two?”

I’d be interested in others’ opinions on this.

As for the grandfather, I can’t escape the feeling that people who talk this way about criminals weren’t spanked enough as children. And part of me feels like it’s not too late to start spanking them. Certainly civilized society needs to have some sort of stricture against speaking up on behalf of those who invade others’ homes with clear intent to do harm. It’s well and good to mourn your relatives, even if they died trying to harm others. It’s well and good to love them and honor their memory, such as it is. But to defend their actions, or impugn the actions of those who were forced through no fault of their own into bearing the mark of Cain? That is wrong, wrong, wrong.

“What’s the over-under on her kids’ descent into (1) the welfare system, (2) the criminal justice system, and (3) prison, themselves?”

1) No bet (house judges 100% probability)

2) No bet (house judges 100% probability)

3) 4:1 in favor

-John M.

“I’d be interested in others’ opinions on this.”

I think you have a good point.

Anecdote alert: I once witnessed a car accident. The people needed an ambulance, and first aid. I called 911 and the operator kept prattling on (‘what color are the cars?’) for an extended period before I hung up. I later asked an officer friend how to handle that, and his response was something like ‘You’re there, the operator isn’t. Tell the operator what they need to know, but you don’t have to answer their questions’.

One option is to tell them the brief facts and hang up. That loses the advantage of arranging the details of the officer’s arrival. You might keep the line open, but just put the phone in your shirt pocket. Or answer their ‘what race’ question with ‘Is EMS on the way? or ‘How long until the police get here?’ or whatever.

What you want to communicate is:

1)they attacked you

2)you feared for your life (‘they had a knife!”)

3)you want police and medical aid

4)whatever other details (where you are, what you look like, …) that will help the arriving officers not mistake you for a perp.

5)Maybe a description and direction for any fleeing perps.

Outside of that, I think I’d keep asking how long until the cops get there, or answer a question you don’t want answer with ‘I’m moving to the bedroom’, ‘I’m in the bedroom’, ‘I hear sirens’, or just don’t answer. You’re kinda busy, after all.

I’d also love to hear responses from any resident attorneys.

“I’d be interested in others’ opinions on this.”

Your spot on John.

When giving a suspects discription, race is the second most important item on the list, closely behind sex.

>race is the second most important item on the list, closely behind sex.

You know, I had an epiphany about the MSM when I was probably 10 or 11. Growing up in a college town but hearing the nightly TV news from Spectacularly Failed Big City near by, I noticed that suspects were being described as “A six-foot man in a red shirt” or “A thin man wearing a tan jacket” without further description. The “current” nonsense has in fact been going on for decades. As an aside, drove down the main drag through SFBC on Saturday which was sunny and in the 50’s (deg F). Spotted several drug crews already hard at work at 2 pm (Hey, that skinny dude with the phone to his ear is the guy who takes your money, that big dude leaning against the fence is security, and … sure enough, around the corner behind the bombed-out looking former high school is the actual courier with his mountain bike.) Who says these guys are lazy. Also on main drag were, over the course of 7 miles, five new marijuana dispensaries. SFBC: still f*cked up after all these years.

>“Fat, stupid, and guilty is no way to go to court, you idiot!”

Hah! I was trying to work up a Dean Wormer reference, but “4’10” and 250 lbs is no way to go through life” just doesn’t have the same ring as the above. I bow to the master.

So for all the laudatory “cool, collected and competent on the 911 call” comments, I’d note that there are plenty of people who would be horrified by that. (The readership, or at least the commentership,of this blog is utterly alien to quite a few people in these United States.

“How can you say that? No, how can you even think that!”

“Well, the first part’s easy: I open my mouth and the words come out. As for the second part, it’s because I’m not an idiot.”)

Anyway, while hopefully this never goes to trial, I could definitely see someone trying to push a depraved indifference type angle against Zach Peters exactly for failing to lose it. (Though I guess it depends on what he sounds like on the tape.)

Those questions will never be asked under oath, because this case never sees a courtroom.

There isn’t a D.A. in OK (worthy of the title) who’d even bother taking it to a grand jury, because they’d beat him to death with handy furniture on the spot for even trying.

Game over.

Meanwhile, fat stupid b*tch (“Fat, stupid, and guilty is no way to go to court, you idiot!” – Dean Wormer) is going to get three first degree murder charges, which she’s already cleverly confessed to on TV, and for which, sadly, she’ll only get LWOPed, rather then executed, as is her right and due.

The three room temperature perps didn’t make “bad choices” in getting shot, the bunch of them made dozens to hundreds of bad decisions, in an unbroken Chain of Stupid going back weeks.

Getting shot dead, while both just, and gratifyingly amusing, was merely the consequence of gravity when one jumps off a high cliff with rocks at the bottom. The headstones are merely life’s parting gift for that amount of perspicacity about how things really work.

With their deaths, the gene pool in Broken Arrow is now measurably brighter, on average, and three family trees stunted forever in ways that should warm the hearts of social anthropologists and moral philosophers around the world.

This is also Lesson #223 in why you shouldn’t hang around single mothers.

But don’t get the wrong idea, even I shed some tears over this case. Entirely because the events described weren’t recorded for posterity on home security video, and won’t be available on pay-per-view, for endless rebroadcast.

Sure. But what if it’s a borderline shoot? This one happened not to be, but yours might be. And almost every state has left-wing enclaves full of Democrat county prosecutors with ambitions to serve in the Chelsea Clinton administration. My own deep red, famously cranky right-wing state almost strung up a guy on a borderline shoot a few years back, largely because he lived in a liberal enclave. (Though being a devotee of James Yeager didn’t seem to help him any, either.)

“Boy, I saw the fellow well enough to put 3 pills in his chest, but not well enough to tell you what race he is.” Put yourself on a jury and roll that one around in your head a little bit.

-John M.

One can “what if” until the cows come home. This case is this case; hypothetically, one can imagine anything that tickles their fancy. Starting with how many angels can dance…

And there are dozens of reasons for not noticing skin color during such an incident, and I’m speaking from experience. Starting with

“Well counselor, my immediate attention in the two to three seconds available to me between when the door was broken down by the deceased brigands in question and until deciding whether or not I was justified to shoot, I was focused on the knives they were wielding in their hands. I wasn’t watching a runway model show, I was fighting for my life. Skin color doesn’t kill people. Knives in their hands as they charge towards you do.”

The prosecutor who tried that tack would be in private practice by the next week.

If the citizens there bothered to recall him before they tarred and feathered him, and gave him a ride to city limits atop a railroad rail.

In this case, I suspect the jury would need to be restrained from leaping out of the box to get any sumbitch prosecutor trying to make his bones on this kid. And open laughter at the questions asked and the answers given would be the least they’d respond with.

And when, as likely were this to see a courtroom, the jury deliberates for five whole minutes before no-billing a guy, and also includes a scathing rebuke to the prosecution in their final statement, as would also likely happen in this incident, it tends to focus the minds of soon-to-be-unemployed lawyers and their colleagues rather precisely, and get front-page newspaper space, above the fold, just before it goes worldwide.

For bonus points, no one has any astroturfed constituency for Stupid White Lives Matter, so the only reason to even think of pursuing prosecution in this case would be purely for selfish political gain, or froth-slobbering hatred of the Second Amendment. Neither are liable to cut much ice in an OK court, which is not interchangeable with the Southern District of Manhattan. Thank heavens.

“One can ‘what if’ until the cows come home. This case is this case; hypothetically, one can imagine anything that tickles their fancy.”

Part of why I look at case studies like this is to be able to extrapolate from the specific to the general. Without putting words in his mouth, it seems that Our Gracious Host looks at case studies this way also, since he wrote, “By the way, Peters’s response is the only thing you should ever say to this question, especially if you and the crumb exsanguinating in your kitchen are nor the same skin tone.” Thus extrapolating from the specific case to the general case.

“The prosecutor who tried that tack would be in private practice by the next week.

If the citizens there bothered to recall him before they tarred and feathered him, and gave him a ride to city limits atop a railroad rail.”

Allow me to note that while Angela Corey, the special prosecutor for the George Zimmerman trial did lose her primary in 2016, she remains, as far as I can tell, un-tarred and un-feathered. And Bernie de la Rionda, the prosecutor who tried the case remains, as far as I can tell, an assistant state attorney in Florida, the same job he’s held since 1983. Also un-tarred and un-feathered.

Context matters. George Zimmerman would’ve been a lot better off to have told 911 “I’m not sure what race he was” than to have said, “He looks black.” But it was dark and raining and Martin was wearing a hoodie. If someone has to shoot someone or someones wearing a tank top in broad daylight, that may just start to stack up to being a not-credible witness. If people don’t believe your claim that you can’t identify someone’s race, why would they believe your claim that you were attacked?

-John M.

Zimmerman’s case was seven kinds of apples to horse apples comparisons.

He was only charged after the governor, under political pressure, ignored the local D.A. and police, and appointed a star chamber horse’s ass special prosecutor, who despite the facts of the case, and the application of the vast resources of the state, couldn’t change physics, time, and space, and convince a FL jury that any crime had occurred, except by the decedent.

Who also happened to be the special darling of both President Race Baiter, and the Criminal Black Lives Matter national conclave (but I repeat myself).

Regarding identifications of eyewitnesses (generally so faulty that prosecutors prefer physical evidence over eyewitless testimony, at about a 10:1 ratio), if you haven’t been in the situation personally, I commend at least the work of Dave Grossman, specifically On Killing. While he pulls his sociological theorizing right out of his rectum, his description of the physiological events in a life-and-death encounter are and should be required reading for anyone who might ever go or be put into harm’s way, and have to make a similar decision in a matter of seconds, and deal with a drastically altered sensorium.

As neither a cop nor a former military gunslinger, nor dressed for a duel, the homeowner’s conduct, not to mention marksmanship, in this case bespeaks anything but unreliability.

If, as stated, “Courage is grace under pressure.” – Ernest Hemingway, this kid was a lion when it counted, exactly as the box score shows, and not some panicky trigger-happy schmuck, or any sort of unreliable witness.

This is why common law for some hundreds (if not thousands) of years accords him, as the legal resident, with a broad presumption of innocence even before the other 57 damning facts crop up in the discussion.

Pray sir, kindly extrapolate that.

Well, they were wearing masks. That being the case, he probably couldn’t tell. Which reminds me of the following story:

A bank’s workers open up at 9 on Monday morning, finding the vault door hanging from its hinges, and the night watchman trussed up in the corner saying “Mfff! Mfff! Mfff!”

Removing the adhesive tape, they question him.

“What happened to the vault door? There can’t have been an explosion, someone would have heard.”

The watchman says “They tied me me up, backed up a truck, and led in an elephant. I don’t know where they got it, but it head butted the safe-One! Two! Three times-and the lifted the vault door off the hinges. It was noisy as hell in here, but you probably couldn’t hear it a block away.”

One of the local cops asks the watchman “Was it an African elephant or an Indian Elephant?”

“How should I know?”

“The African elephant has big, floppy ears, the Indian elephant-”

“Sorry, can’t help you. He was wearing a stocking over his face.”

I think the stocking came from the Broken Arrow getaway driver, to fit that pachyderm.

“Like, who gives a hairy rat’s what color the guys who busted down your door are?”

The people who are about to have to go looking for them might like a general description of who they’re looking for, but I’m spitballing, here. 😉

Well, in this particular case, they didn’t have to look very far. Two were DRT and one was in the red puddle at the end of a very short blood trail. Selous Scouts tracker skills not required.

Right? Nice shootin’ by young Audie Murphy, there. No official word I can find yet as to whether it was Three-for-Three or even Three-for-Two, yet. (But the “Poodleshooter!” crowd assured me that the round was “designed to wound”.)

Dispatcher didn’t know that, though. Heck, they thought they had a bolter until arriving deppities tripped over his cooling ass in the driveway.

I love a happy ending. 🙂

Riverside County, Ca. here. You’d walk using a handgun, an 870 or Model 94. Probably walk if you used an AR, but no guarantee. That’s based on several home invasion gunfights over the last 30 years or so.

Riverside County eh? Do you know Jesse? ;p

Suicide does seem to be the apt phrase for what happened.

Freedom means people need to make bad decisions, including smoking reefer, eating at Taco Bell, and buying Nickelback albums. But choices have consequences. Some might be fairly minor to practically nonexistent. Others can be life changing or life ending.

I am reminded of an image I saw, showing a kestrel attempting to steal dinner from a Harris hawk. The kestrel, in this case, was a quarter the size of the hawk. The caption reads ‘The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math.’

These three were VERY bad at math.

“…need to make bad decisions, including drinking Blue Nun, eating at Ruth’s Chris, and buying Celine Dion albums.” Sentence fragment paraphrased to illustrate. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

Breaking into a home, that’s a bad decision; your examples are preferences.

Criminals (even bumbling, incompetent ones) have little respect for normal citizens because they consider them prey. Every gored wolf *knows* that the stupid buffalo just got lucky, after all.

Good to hear about some dead arseholes.

I have…for no particular reason whatsoever…a Rossi Puma chambered in .357 to go with my Smith Model 19.

The cowboy assault rifle is light, powerful, and most importantly, kinda quaint and old fashioned and almost harmless looking. It provides an aimed shot every 2 seconds and can be reloaded through the gate without taking it out of action.

If you can’t have a modern assault rifle, the 19th century version provided by the genius of JMB works just fine.

The common thing I see running through this is “It’s not your fault.” and “You have rights but not responsibilities.” Which are the two things I see and have seen wrong with society for a very long time. I will be very much surprised if Peters doesn’t face a civil wrongly death suite and looses his AR to the evidence system never to see it again.

Keep your powder dry and your faith in God.

Depends on the state. In NC, if you are injured in the commission of a crime you may not sue over those injuries; the same law functions for ‘wrongful death’. If OK has a similar law the next-of-critters are basically out of luck.

Considering how cheap ARs are getting, he might consider it a fair trade in exchange for ventilating three ne’er-do-wells.

The state should actually give the homeowner a gift certificate for a 1k rounds

of the ammo of his choice. A reward for saving the state the cost of feeding,

housing and health care of three scumbags.

Its a damn shame Rodriguez didnt break in the home as well. Might have had a

four-fecta.

I’m thinking her IQ is higher than she was given credit for – because she got the OTHER 3 to do the dirty work and didn’t do it HERSELF!

Manipulative sociopath. She got others to take all the risk, refused to take any responsibility for the consequences of her own actions, shifted blame onto the victim, and seems to completely ‘star in her own movie’.

I’m thinking, no matter how bad the OK social services/foster care system might be, those three kids might just have dodged a bullet by being taken away from her.

Oklahoma, like my home state next door, has a state law disallowing civil action for justifiable – self defense – homicides.

If he does, I’ll pay for a new one. Assuming I don’t get trampled to death first by the other 5000 people lining up to do the same thing for him.

3:1 odds when this is over, Mr. Zach will be able to open a gun store.

And let’s also recall that one of the stolen items the three stooges liberated from his garage, just before they kicked in the final door they’d pass through this side of the gates of Hell, was a machete.

10:1 in his favor any wrongful death case loses at trial by unanimous vote of the jury, if it ever gets past a judge.

And notably silent now are the voices of the usual suspects saying you don’t need an AR-15 for home defense, and even quieter the voices of those pointing out how weak and underpowered the carbine round is. Strangest cases of coincidental laryngitis seen in some years.

***And notably silent now are the voices of the usual suspecasts saying you don’t need an AR-15 for home defense, and even quieter the voices of those pointing out how weak and underpowered the carbine round is.***

It would be mildly instructive to know what ammunition was used, and how many rounds per perp. That little detail about the chubby driver’s pal making it outside all the way to her car is troubling; he really should have gone down sooner like his partners. The possibility that he was hit by a round that went through-and-through one of his partners seems likely.

“Shot placement”. Where exactly he took the round and what structures it interdicted are important here, all chest hits are not created equal, one is not guaranteed to be the equivalent of another. Both may be fatal in two minutes, but one perp may drop like a sack of poop and the other perp may continue to steal oxygen briefly. But I take your point, one might think on a through and through that the projectile would be well past the yaw cycle…..

Defensive shooting shares at least one thing with real estate: In both cases,

the three most important things are Location, location, location.

Even in the USSR, where citizens were deliberately deprived of their right to self-defense, killing an assailant within the house gave a 95% chance of justification. The recommendation of the prosecutor (heard personally) – the main thing is that at least the foot of the corpse crossed the threshold.

A moment of humor. Petersburg. The real robbery of the gas station, the highway to Kirishi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMzKDwvuskw

Well done on behalf of the defender.

As for the criminals, I doubt any of them were on the verge of curing cancer, so their loss is likely a net positive for the nation.

Connecticut is a mixed bag in this area. The state has stood by its castle doctrine for many years. If it is your home or business, there is no requirement to retreat. Despite the state’s infatuation with “assault weapons”, the police rarely, if ever, charge an individual for defending themselves in their own home.

I’d pay good money to watch a video clip of the events as envisioned by our wheel-girl, for science. I bet it plays like a LifeTime movie, right down to the soundtrack. Unfortunate upshot is, us taxpayers will probably be left to foot the bill for three eventually memberships to Club Fed (her + the grubs).

I think the Spartans were on to something when they left the odd-looking ones out on the hillside.

I’m picturing the scene in Platoon where Willem DaFoe got mowed down.

How you liking Sheriff Sniff, Abe Frohman?

I am amazed at his calm professional demeanor throughout this. Between the controlled use of fire, the number of center mass hits and the way he comported himself afterwards, nothing but praise. Puts many “trained” professionals to shame. The woman is clueless. It will cost her during her trial. Her kids were screwed long ago, this just reshuffles the deck of poor role models and life choices they have to learn from.

I’ll bet she won’t go to trial.

Her public defender will confer with the DA and she’ll take a plea deal for life w/o parole or, if she turns state’s evidence on that last accomplice, life w/parole , just to take the big trip off the table.

Since no law abiding citizen suffered injury, everyone will go for it and they’ll be one, and maybe even two less crims off the streets.

Dispatcher: “OK, where were they shot?”

Peters: “Um, upper body.”

I believe the correct answer to that question is;

Dispatcher: “OK, where were they shot?”

Peters: “ In my kitchen.”

Peters did an outstanding Job.

How Peters handled the phone call and kept the police dispatcher informed about the situation should be taught in schools as exemplary how to talk and what to say to 911.

How he handled the now dead criminals was okay, too. 😉

tangentially unrelated: am I the only one who wondered why a nuke is lost in Oklahoma?

What is the motivation? Probably an amphetamine or opioid monkey. Looks like BA, OK is pretty solid middle class majority. Bottom feeders are loose.

Oops – Bottom feeders WERE loose.

Wouldn’t it be nice if an IQ of 85 or lower adversely affected the reproductive system?

Unfortunately that seems not to be the actual case. There seems to be an inverse relationship between IQ and fertility. Idiocracy is a prescient documentary.

You simply need a bit of brain power to use contraceptives and reflect about your mating habits.

that 911 call was a model for all to follow

I love a happy ending

Three in, three down? Someone buy that guy a hat.

You have the right to shoot an intruder(s) in your home in California.

Three up and three down? Sounds like the end of a inning.

It’s truly unfortunate that this young man was forced to be the instrument of their joint suicide pact, but he’s to be commended for his composure, marksmanship and courage. The driver will get Hers. The Grandfather is speaking through grief and a royally fubared’ moral compass. Hopefully he finds the grace and wisdom to fix it. Real life is implicitly attended by real consequences as this case so aptly demonstrates.

The grandfather, I will also say, keeps saying stuff like he knows what they did was wrong. Like any relative of a criminal, he’s upset that they are judged only on their crime, not on the totality of their lives.

Call me a cynic, but if your life at age 17-18 is doing home invasions, your future probably doesn’t include solving Fermat’s Last Theorem, or curing myeloma. Having these lives cut short didn’t deprive humanity of anything but more home invasions, and maybe a murder of a productive citizen, given the way they were prepared to meet resistance with violence.

Hell of an epitaph to have. Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be criminals.

Fermat’s Last Theorem was proven in 1994.

-John M.

I’m always in the 5% that’s the last to know.

here’s the thing I brought up in an earlier post that none of the media seems to be catching onto: the weapons they were carrying. impact weapons. not crowbars, screwdrivers, tools to break into things. they brought weapons with the intent to offer violence. knives alone *might* be argued away. knives in conjunction with brass knuckles? no way – the intent to offer physical, personal violence is easily demonstrated with that combo of weaponry. you can’t really even call that a robbery anymore; that was a legitimate home invasion.

I thought about the dispatcher’s question a little, and it sounds like they had an idea who these guys might’ve been. perhaps they’d had a rough description of the assailants from other robberies, so a guy calls in and says I’ve got two or three in my home and I just fired ’em up, it makes sense that the dispatcher might be thinking “hey, we heard about something similar in a shift briefing” or something. I don’t really think they were concerned about the racial aspect of it as they were ascertaining the ID of the perps.

This is a feel good story all around

If that kid needs a loaner AR, he is welcome to one of mine and couple of loaded magazines to go with it

I also would like to know the details of ammo used and red dot or iron sights

Inside the house, I like a bullpup like a Steyr Aug or a Tavor

That is where the bullpups short length and rapid transition to multiple targets really shines

I disagree that a lever action is a good choice

No matter how much you train, time is lost in operating the lever

I understand the legal aspects of using a traditional cowboy gun instead of an assault rifle

I guess if you live in liberal enclave that would be a consideration

From a tactical viewpoint semi auto seems faster and keeps your eye on the targets

I would also like to know how many shots fired

Because anyone worth shooting once is worth shooting twice!

The Oklahoma felony murder statute may not apply here. Note that the killings were done by the victim of the underlying felony in self defense, rather than by one of the fat lady’s co-felons. Looking at the OK felony murder form jury instructions, it seems that their statute was intended to exclude actions by the victim. But there’s also a note of a case where a mook was convicted of felony murder of a cop where the evidence indicated that the dead cop was killed by another cop’s bullet in a shootout.

The old common law rule is that all of the co-felons are responsible for any foreseeable consequence of their joint actions, but the pesky legislators sometimes get their own ideas.

I took a look at the linked jury instructions, as well as the underlying statute 21 O.S. sec. 701.7 (http://webserver1.lsb state.ok.us/OK_Statutes/CompleteTitles/os21.rtf, page 181). I think there may be a mismatch between the commentary to the jury instruction and the statute. The commentary talks about exclusion of “…deaths at the hands of police officers, victims of the felony, or innocent bystanders…” with a citation to statutory language of “when he takes the life of a human being”, and references a 1993 Oklahoma Supreme Court case. However, the current statutory language reads “…when that person or any other person takes the life of a human being…”. Also, the comments to jury instruction OUJI-CR 4-64 (www.okcca.net/online/oujisrvr.jsp?oc=OUJI-CR%204-64) read that “The felony-murder statute (citation omitted) covers not only deaths that were actually committed by the person charged with the underlying felony but also deaths that were committed by that person’s intended victims, police officers, and innocent bystanders.” with a reference to a newer (2003) OK Supreme Court opinion.

IANAL, or familiar with OK legislative history, but my guess as to what happened here is that at one point some sloppy law drafting narrowed the felony murder statute more than intended, and it was later revised again to address. When the later revision happened, the commentary on the jury instructions for Felony Murder were updated, but the commentary on the meaning of “In the Commission of” got missed. I think that the felony murder statute could apply here, contra the commentary to jury instruction 4-65.