This is a story that should infuriate every American with common sense. Unfortunately, it probably won’t. 29-year-old Orest Schur is a veteran and a former US Space Force sergeant. He’s just been sentenced to 54 years in prison in Colorado, for the “crime” of shooting and killing one of his carjackers. The bad news is that because Schur was charged, convicted, and sentenced in state court, President Donald Trump cannot issue him a pardon for this incredible injustice.
The incident happened in Denver in July 2023. Schur’s car alarm went off at 11 p.m., so he went outside with his sidearm. He discovered two individuals, masked and dressed all in black, trying to break into his car. The carjackers jumped into another vehicle and fled, and Schur pursued them in his car.
He fired several shots at the fleeing criminals and they crashed their car into a neighbor’s fence about four blocks from Schur’s home. Schur then fired a few more shots, killing one of the carjackers and wounding the other. It was dark and the two criminals were in disguise. Schur had no idea that he had just killed a 14-year-old and wounded a 13-year-old.
The “fleeing felon” doctrine has been around for thousands of years. It was most certainly the law of the land in America for the first 197 years of the country’s existence, and the Founding Fathers all supported it. Here is the fleeing felon doctrine in a nutshell:
If you catch someone stealing your personal property, and in the heat of the moment, you chase that person down and kill them, you have not committed a crime. It’s terrifying to catch someone on your property in the dark, and if you have a surge of adrenaline and kill that person to protect your own property, your family, or your community, you never used to be charged for killing the criminal.
Before it became the law of the land in America, the doctrine dated back to the English common law. There’s a record from 1329 in Northamptonshire Eyre, in which villagers chased a would-be cow thief down and killed him, which suggests the doctrine had already been codified into law by then.
The English common law dates back to the reign of Alfred the Great (871-899). Alfred was the first English king to begin codifying a set of national laws and tying them to God’s law from the Old Testament.
Moses was actually the first person to write down what would later become known as the fleeing felon doctrine (Exodus 22, Numbers 35, and Deuteronomy 19).
But in 1985, a group of sh*tlibs on the US Supreme Court discovered that the Founding Fathers, the English common law, Alfred the Great, and the Lord God Almighty Himself had gotten the fleeing felon doctrine wrong for the past 3,500 years. How lucky we are to have such smart people in black robes!
In Tennessee v. Garner, the Supreme Court ruled that only a police officer can kill a fleeing felon, and only if the officer believes that the felon poses an imminent risk of death or serious injury to someone. It hasn’t been lawful for a property owner to pursue a fleeing felon and kill them since then, in all 50 states. Even if you live in a gun freedom state that allows you to kill a fleeing felon, you can still be charged federally.
If you think we’re being outlandish in declaring that Orest Schur did nothing wrong, think back to Mohammad Anwar. He was a 66-year-old, hardworking, legal immigrant who supported his family in Washington, DC, as an Uber Eats driver. Two black teenage girls carjacked him and killed him. They were sentenced to seven years in juvenile detention.
If a carjacker kills you while in the process of stealing your car in America, they get a slap on the wrist and a few years in juvie detention. But if you kill a carjacker, rid your community of a dirtbag, and make life a little bit better for all your neighbors, you can die in prison.
If that’s not a broken and upside-down system of justice, then what would a broken and upside-down system of justice look like?