Jury Acquits Man In ‘Stand-Your-Ground’ Shooting by Whoopie • 31 May, 2015
image: blurbrain.com
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Accused of murder for confronting two unarmed trespassers with a deadly barrage of gunfire, Wayne Burgarello walked out of a Nevada courthouse a free man after the jury found him not guilty of all charges in the latest of a series of cases nationally testing the boundaries of stand-your-ground self-defense laws.
Burgarello, 74, a retired Sparks school teacher, insisted he was acting in self-defense when he shot and killed Cody Devine and seriously wounded Janai Wilson in a vacant, rundown duplex he owns in February 2014.
A jury deliberated for six hours before finding him not guilty on a charge of attempted murder as well as four alternative charges of first- and second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter. He would have faced up to life in prison without parole if convicted of first-degree murder.
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Here are the details of the incident from another source: Janai Wilson admits that she had broken into and had been squatting at the house on and off for years. She even went so far as to have the address placed on her driver’s license in the lame hope that she might steal the property under the rules of ‘adverse possession’.
The night of the shooting she says that she met Cody Devine at a party and brought him back to the property with the intention of injecting meth. They were in the process of doing just that when the owner showed up.
It was dark, Cody Devine had a black flashlight and pointed it at Mr. Burgarello who in a moment of panic opened fire with a hail of bullets that killed Devine and left Wilson seriously wounded.
When I first heard of the case I knew right away that no jury was going to find this guy guilty, ‘stand-your-ground’ law or not. I can’t even imagine how and why the DA brought charges, other than the fact that anti-gun District Attorneys hate ‘stand-your-ground’ laws because it strips away their prosecutorial discretion.
The fact the “victim” admits to repeated breaking and entering, burglary, vandalism and drug abuse on the property only made the prosecution of Mr. Burgarello seem all the more spiteful on the part of the DA.
One last point from my perspective to the so-called ‘squatters movement': There is no such thing as an “abandoned” property so long as the owner and their heirs live. A person may buy a vacant house and let it fall into disrepair if they wish, but that structure and more importantly the land it sits on is still theirs.
What you think you know about ‘adverse possession’ and property rights is largely a communist fantasy.
Squatting is not a civil matter, it should be treated as the crime it is: Theft, and the police should be allowed to arrest squatters as they would any defiant trespasser. Barring that, property owners should be allowed to use whatever force is necessary to evict unlawful occupiers.
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