WARREN — When the new “stand your ground” law takes effect April 6, a person won’t have to retreat into a home, car or other places before using defensive force in Ohio, joining 36 other states.

A defense attorney says if the new law had been in effect earlier, some self-defense cases may have turned out differently — including that of Nasser Hamad, who shot and killed two young men and injured three other people who came to his Howland home on Feb. 25, 2017, as part of an ongoing feud.

Hamad, 49, died of kidney cancer in prison in 2018, 10 months after being convicted of two counts of aggravated murder and six counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to 36 years to life in prison. An appeals court affirmed his convictions and sentence. The Ohio Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

The five went to Hamad’s house to confront him following threatening messages Hamad and two of the young men exchanged earlier that day on Facebook.

A physical fight in Hamad’s front yard ensued, followed by Hamad going into the house, getting a gun, approaching the five as they were returning to their van near the street and firing. When he ran out of bullets, he returned to his house, reloaded, returned to the van and fired more shots.

WELL-KNOWN CASE

The case drew lots of attention. Some people wanted charges against Hamad, a businessman, to be dropped, wondering why a person couldn’t defend himself with deadly force from an attack on his own property.

Attorney David Doughten of Cleveland, one of Hamad’s trial lawyers, said he thinks “stand your ground,” also known as Senate Bill 175, would have caused prosecutors to charge Hamad with manslaughter instead of aggravated murder. He doubts prosecutors would have pursued the death penalty as they did. But Doughten said he doubts the new law would have prevented Hamad from being indicted.

“Stand your ground” expands a person’s right to use deadly force in self-defense from inside his or her home or car to anywhere a person has a right to be. But under other provisions of state law, a person only can defend himself with deadly force if he or she believes he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm.

Doughten said regardless, Ohio’s laws do not “allow disproportionate force” in response to a threat.

“If you punch me in the mouth, I cannot pull out a gun and blow you away,” Doughten said.

“It has to be proportionate force. The whole thing with stand your ground is if someone has a gun, you can use a gun in response if it’s a subjectively reasonable fear on your part,” Doughten said.

Prosecutors argued Hamad started shooting at the five as they were leaving the area where the fight occurred near Hamad’s house on busy state Route 46 near the Eastwood Mall and neighboring eateries.

Doughten said from the prosecutors’ point of view, “even if (Hamad) was entitled to fire the first shots,” he could not reload in the house and return to fire a second time, even under stand your ground.

Hamad testified during the trial that after the fight and the five were returning to their van, he heard one of them say, “Get the gun! Grab the gun!” Prosecutors said no other gun besides Hamad’s was found.

Hamad also said as he walked to the van, his goal was to detain the five for police and he fired two warning shots, but he saw men moving in the back seat and feared they were reaching for a weapon.

Afterwards he reloaded and fired again because he viewed the five to be still a threat, Hamad said at the time.

LIMITS

Doughten said despite the new law applying to areas outside of a person’s home or car, “there are limits. At some point, when the threat is over, you have to stop and you can’t use disproportionate force.”

Doughten said a late-2018 change in Ohio self-defense law may have helped Hamad more than stand your ground. State lawmakers overrode then-Gov. John Kasich’s veto of House Bill 228, which shifted the burden of proof in self-defense cases from the defense to the prosecution. The change required prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person who used deadly force did not do so in self-defense.

Doughten said stand your ground and the 2018 change today would give a juror greater reason to consider a not-guilty verdict.

If a juror was having a hard time deciding guilt or innocence, that likely would lead to a not-guilty verdict because the benefit of the doubt now goes to the defense, he said.

The Hamad verdicts may not have been changed from guilty to innocent, but it may have changed from guilty of murder to guilty to manslaughter, Doughten said. The jury in the Hamad case declined to recommend the death penalty.

Mike Yacovone, an assistant Mahoning County prosecutor, has indicated that the 2018 self-defense change may have been a factor in two instances last year of a Mahoning County grand jury refusing to indict a person on murder charges after being charged that way initially.

Doughten said he believes a grand jury would not have indicted Hamad if he had fired at the five the first time, gone back in the house and stayed there.

“The prosecutors argued, and apparently effectively, that a couple of the people who were shot were in a car when he came out,” Doughten said of the first round of fire. “And at that point, they would have argued that stand your ground would not have applied.

“And if those were the facts, the prosecutor would have been right. You can’t finish it under stand your ground. Once you are no longer in danger, you cannot say, ‘You started it, I’m allowed to kill you.'”

NOT SO SIMPLE

Doughten said it’s important for people to know that stand your ground “doesn’t give you the grounds that if you see a gun, you’re going to blow somebody away. It’s not that simple.

“You have to prove they had a gun; you were in a threatening situation, even if you don’t have to walk away.”

He said he represented a defendant in Cuyahoga County in 2010 in a self-defense case that he thinks might have had a different outcome under Ohio’s current laws, including stand your ground.

Matthew Warmus was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 18 years to life in the shooting death of parking lot attendant David Williams in a dispute over a parking fee.

During the dispute, Williams put Warmus in a headlock and punched him three times, but let Warmus go after Warmus’s female friend told Williams they would leave.

But Warmus went to the trunk of his car and retrieved a handgun, pointed it at Williams and told him to get on the ground, according to an appeals court ruling.

“Williams began reaching for his own gun when Warmus fired three shots from a range of no more than 3 feet,” the ruling states.

Warmus, however, said Williams pulled out his gun first as Warmus was threatening to call police. Warmus said he walked to his car, got the gun out of the trunk and pointed it at Williams. Then Warmus said he told Williams to drop his gun, but Williams refused. “Warmus then ‘shot until (William’s) gun wasn’t in his hand anymore,'” the ruling states.

Two eyewitnesses said they never saw Williams holding a gun. “One witness saw Williams reaching for his gun as Warmus shot him,” the ruling stated.

Doughten said in 2010, Warmus “had a duty to retreat,” and witnesses said Warmus “could have gotten away.”

But in that situation today, Warmus would not have been required to walk away, Doughten said.

OTHER OPINIONS

Christopher Becker, one of the assistant prosecutors in the Hamad case, and Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins declined to comment on how Hamad’s case might have been different under stand your ground.

Attorney Sean O’Brien, former Ohio legislator and former assistant Trumbull County prosecutor now working in private practice, said he did not think stand your ground was necessary because a person had the right to defend himself or herself with deadly force before the law changed.

Florida has stand your ground, and O’Brien said a 2018 case there shows how it can lead to unnecessary deaths.

In Clearwater, Markeis McGlockton shoved Michael Drejka to the ground outside of a convenience store during a dispute over a parking space, which caused Drejka to pull out his gun and kill McGlockton.

McGlockton “pushed him and stood pretty far away looking at him,” O’Brien said of the incident, captured on surveillance video. It shows McGlockton and the other man about 10 feet away from each other and McGlockton moving away from Drejka at the time Drejka fired.

Initially the sheriff declined to file charges against Drejka, citing stand your ground, but Drejka later was charged and convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

O’Brien said Hamad was wrong for firing at the five the second time — and the first time.

After the fight, Hamad got his gun from the house and “starts shooting. That’s definitely not stand your ground,” O’Brien said. “That’s not any legal shooting.”