Transcript from Nancy Grace’s show on CNN’s Headline News last night:
GRACE: In the last hours, we learn the homeowner, this 65-year-old man, Byron Davis Smith, actually calls the teens vermin. All of this is caught on tape. Smith has a home security system. And not only does it catch what he`s doing visually, you hear the audio, too. You hear the senior citizen shoot the boy, Nick. First of all, he shoots him. Then he puts his body on a plastic tarp and he drags the body across the floor and you see it, and you hear it, and you hear Byron Smith — breathing. So the boy would not bleed on his carpet.
Then you hear the girl coming down and you hear her say, Nick, Nick? She`s looking for her cousin. The guy shoots her. She`s shot, she`s down, he says, you`re dying, bitch. He puts her on a tarp, drags her over, so she doesn`t bleed on his carpet. And as she`s laying there, and he says, you`re dying, bitch, he takes the gun and shoots her in the head at about six inches range.
Now is that self-defense? That`s the question. In addition to that, afterwards you hear him referring to the two dead bodies as vermin. . . . .
GRACE: To John Lott, Jr., president of Crime Prevention Research Center, author of “More Guns, Less Crime.” What do you make of it, John Lott?
JOHN LOTT, PRESIDENT, CRIME PREVENTION RESEARCH CENTER: Well, I couldn`t agree more with what was just said. You have to have a reasonable person standard there. Just looking — listening to the conversation, the audio that you`re talking about, still doesn`t tell us everything. It doesn`t tell us whether they were still moving, doesn`t tell us whether there was still some possibility of a threat.
But surely in terms of the way you described it verbally, it seems like they were incapacitated at that point and there wouldn`t be a threat. In that case, there`s real question about whether he acted properly or not. Because you just can`t go and shoot somebody if there`s no threat posed to you.
(CROSSTALK)
GRACE: On the other hand — I agree with you.
LOTT: And you have to respond proportionately to the threat that you face.
GRACE: I agree with you, John Lott, Jr.
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