General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: George Zimmerman’s wife reveals she’d left him the night before he killed Trayvon Martin [View all]Tommy_Carcetti
(43,166 posts)They need not prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, but since self-defense is an affirmative defense, they can't just say it was self-defense without having some sort of substance behind it. Otherwise, you are forcing the state into a strawman position where they have to rebut their own theory of what they claim the defendant's self-defense theory is.
If the defendant puts forward a plausible, colorable theory of self-defense, then the prosecution would have to rebut it beyond a reasonable doubt.
But if you ask me, the defendant's theory of self-defense was never plausible. A person who is being chased by a stranger for reasons unknown who then loses that person does not immediately to then decide to double back and ambush and attack the same person whom they had tried so hard to escape. It defies all logic.