The issue comes back to Reasonable Doubt ultimately anyway. That's why from a pragmatic perspective the alternate burdens of proof play a lesser known role when people discuss self-defense, etc. There's intentionally no probability attached to these things, except preponderance of evidence which one could say 50%+, at least for only two realistic scenarios. But the 'better 10 guilty... 1 innocent' does attach a vague ballpark to reasonable doubt, 90%+, and that sort of damages 50%+ for two opposing scenarios because in effect you don't need 50%+ that it was self-defense, you need 10%+ of self-defense to establish its no longer 90%+ to be guilty.

And that's what it comes down to, we've decided that people don't go to prison or the chair unless it is 90%+ and that's all the defense needs. You may feel self-defense should require a lower bar, a partial shifting of the burden, but its the degree to which someone needs to prove that which really matters. No state has self-defense dialed up so high zero justification beyond the claim is needed, nor any so low that proof by the defendant needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt. What you're essentially arguing is that you object to the 'better 10 men' aspect of things. Nothing wrong there, it is a statement much easier to say as a theoretical then swallow in application since it means swallowing someone you think is 89% likely to be guilty being back out on the streets. And when you throw in recidivism rates, one would have to contemplate that if 1 in 2 murderers will do it again then for every one innocent man in prison for murder we essentially killed 5 people from not putting those 10 behind bars.

There's no getting around it though, if you feel 'more likely than not' is the proper standard for a self-defense case, you're saying its okay to sentence someone for murder if there's a 49% chance they had self-defense. So again, while self-defense does require an affirmative defense much of the time, the level is essentially whatever is needed to make it reasonable doubt.

Now in terms of intentionally murdering someone with self-defense in mind, that's much harder than it sounds like. There's no dispute who did the killing, and a SD claim has to be made pretty early on. So the investigators don't need to jump any hurdles to investigate the accused nor split focus to other scenarios. They will be digging around for everything, internet records of you googling self-defense laws in recent months for instance. Emails or witnesses establishing you knew the man, etc, and had a hostile relationship. They're probably going to find something unless you didn't know the guy or were very careful. In either case it is a hell of a lot easier to kill them and not stick around to claim SD. We don't get a lot of bogus SD claims attached to prolonged preparations for the simple reason that anyone that cautious and dedicated is likely to try a safer route. Upping the burden on the defendant to prove it was self-defense is really very unlikely to cut down on murders.

Also keep in mind that the old bit about criminals being stupid is typically very true, not just criminals as a job descriptor, but most crimes are committed (and planned, if planned) by people acting pretty stupid compared to their normal. Its easy for people to forget, because we have so much crime, that clever crimes are actually very rare when contrasted against the sheer size of our population, and the 'clever' crimes usually are non-violent anyway.

You should try it some time, I've had to help draft a lot of ordinance and such over the recent years, especially of late, and its changed my perspective a lot. It hammers home that law often requires specificity and that criticism of law is best done the same.

The standards of the community watch someone is involved in may be of use to the defense but almost definitely not to the prosecutor. They're not legally binding, and more if its a 10 step process and the person follows, say, the first 5, then deviates from the script, what that is mostly going to establish is beneficial to the defendant, indicating they were acting with the intent of properly stopping criminal action of another, following the script, then deviated in fear and/or haste. Because it speaks to motive and to state of mind, which matter way more for SD then reality itself does. Following the script established quite strongly that person believed they were interrupting a crime, deviating part way through indicates they panicked and were afraid. That just by itself is nearly enough to justify their subsequent actions as being taken in fear for their life, and it doesn't make a drop of difference if their life was actually in danger. That's why, as I said, you can have two competing yet non-contradictory self-defense claims going on.

Also you're bringing up Zimmerman/Martin again, I'm not just telling you that you shouldn't need to, I'm telling you that it damages your entire argument to rely on that. You're essentially announcing in 40-foot high flaming letters that you want the law to have resulted in a guilty conviction in this case rather than really considering the law in general terms. And when law gets written up that way it usually results in even greater unfairness to others down the road.

That's actually fairly irrelevant of course, you objected to Florida law on SD before you read it, basically nuking the notion that you found the law in of itself flawed but rather just objected to the law based on the outcome of the case differing from what you wanted. Not a point for objectivity, especially when you were, and remain, unable to really put into words your objection to the letter of the law.

That's simply not so. We've discussed this, they do have a burden of proof to justify the use of force its just lesser and weighed against the ultimate burden of beyond a reasonable doubt. I don't understand the dilemma here. This is well established across the board. Killing someone is not a crime, murdering someone is, and like any other crime it must ultimately be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The murder, not the killing. If a jury believes it's 50/50 if the killing was SD, then they must go not-guilty, because that's very reasonable doubt. So is 4:1, again the unofficial 10:1 is that range, if you're not getting near or exceeding that then the outcome isn't conviction. If a jury is presented with 8 roughly equally probable scenarios, based on evidence, and in only 1 of those 8 is SD justified, then its still not guilty. As I said, the "Better 10 men" is much easier to say then to swallow, but its what we use.

Everybody lies, and people often say untrue things they believe are true even when they clearly contradict other things they're claiming. Perjury is - with good reason - tricky to prove. Eye witnesses to events, especially ones involved in them, routinely not only remember things inaccurately but remember things they want to be true, and the more they replay it the less accurate that memory becomes. This is very true of traumatic events and especially of ones where your own actions are under judgment. I've known people who shot enemies in blatant justified circumstances but before long were sick with grief and uncertainty over it and rapidly had their own version of events mutate from what others witnessed to be more guilty. I've known others who totally fucked up in a battle and before long had rewritten events to include things that justified it that didn't happen but which they truly believed did and hell I've seen others involved rewrite their own memories to be truly convinced it did. People make lousy witnesses, especially for almost any occasion we need good ones.

On any criminal matter he said she said generally results in a not guilty if that's all there is. It doesn't matter what the crime was, shoplifting or rape or murder. Now you keep talking about justification but you seem to keep ignoring that the need to justify a killing is not under discussion, its already there quite firmly. Once it has been established you've killed someone you must explain why, if you can. Inability to do so, at all or insufficiently doesn't conclude the matter though. This is why I've advised you to keep to hypotheticals.

Example: Two men are found, one dead, the other unconscious clutching a gun. He reports to have no memory of the event, but all evidence conclusively demonstrates he shot the other man.

Now this man can't really claim self-defense and justify it because he remembers nothing, but the case is not over, the state must still prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was a murder. Again, this is the hazy nature of affirmative defense, it implies a burden of proof but it still ultimately comes back to the beyond a reasonable doubt burden on the prosecution. Yet the defense can offer nothing, the defendant remembers nothing, the defendant does not recognize the man. Now based on your prior remarks you think this person is well setup to escape justice, but not so. Motive, means, and opportunity. The last two are established, the prosecutor needs to come up with the first, if he can show the defendant did know the man, well that's pretty solid - though not definite - proof he's lying but that lie does not necessarily mean he's a murderer. He may well have met the man in passing, in his memory, but blanked out the altercation they had at the bar that led to the fight and killing, and been afraid to admit he knew him at all, or later remembered him but been afraid to change his story. From what you've been saying in this and recent posts, that act of not apparently not telling the truth should result in a conviction. But this is where we get into the practical, because that bar altercation is going to have been witnessed, forensic evidence may exist indicating who started the tussle, and so on, and it has to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Its not that rare or impossible, most murders that make it to and through a grand jury do result in convictions.