A 14-Year-Old Got Shot In The Back. The Shooter Just Walked Free.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comA South Carolina jury watched the video: a 14-year-old kid running away, then getting shot in the back. And they cleared the shooter. The kid was Cyrus Carmack-Belton. The man who shot him was convenience store owner Rick Chow. Chow said he thought Cyrus had stolen water. But surveillance footage showed the water never left the store. Cyrus died anyway.Here’s the part I can’t get past, as someone who spent 20 years wearing a badge: Stand Your Ground is giving civilians more legal cover to kill than cops get. If I shoot a fleeing suspect in the back, I’m living inside Tennessee v. Garner—deadly force is supposed to be about an immediate threat, not a hunch, not anger, not “he might’ve done something.”South Carolina’s law (the “Protection of Persons and Property Act”) takes that old duty-to-retreat principle and guts it. It says there’s no duty to retreat in a place you have a right to be, including your business, and it builds in immunity if the shooter claims the right kind of fear. And once the person who got shot is dead—once the only living narrator is the guy holding the gun—“I believed I was in danger” becomes a magic sentence a jury can hide behind.If you’re thinking “that’s not self-defense,” you’re not crazy. Real self-defense is stopping an imminent threat. What we’ve created with these laws is something else: a system where chasing someone down and killing them can get laundered into “reasonable fear,” even when the video looks like a kid trying to get away. And if we don’t face what these laws actually do—case by case, body by body—more families are going to bury kids and watch the shooter walk.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!