Members of the state and local NAACP were in Marietta Wednesday, rallying support for a Cobb County resident convicted of killing a man in his front yard and trying to link the case to Georgia's "stand your ground" law.
The group is continuing its effort to free John McNeil, who shot and killed Brian Epp on the front lawn of McNeil's Kennesaw home in December 2005. McNeil claimed self defense, but was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2006 by a Cobb jury.
"If the framers of 'stand your ground' intended the law to apply equally, then [McNeil] shouldn't be in jail," Edward DuBose, president of the NAACP's state conference, said on the steps of the Cobb County Justice Center. "John McNeil did not have a duty to retreat."
The group argued that McNeil, who is black, would not have been convicted if he had been white.
Cobb District Attorney Pat Head was attending a conference Wednesday and unavailable for comment, but in previous statements to the media he has supported his office's prosecution of McNeil and denied any racial motivation.
The shooting occurred prior to Georgia's 2006 implementation of the stand-your-ground law, which expanded self-defense laws and removed a person's obligation to retreat when threatened. But self-defense and defense-of-property laws were in place long before the incident, said McNeil's attorney, Mark Yurachek.
Cases like McNeil's spotlight the difficulty in proving self-defense and stand-your-ground cases, University of Georgia law professor Ron Carlson said.
"Often in these cases there are no eye witnesses to the crime except the one person left standing," Carlson said Wednesday. "If that person claims he was threatened by the person who was killed, so often he's the only one telling the story."
According to trial testimony, Epp confronted McNeil in McNeil's front yard in a dispute over a home Epp had been building for McNeil. Epp appeared to have a knife in his pocket and was about to charge McNeil, who had a pistol and fired a warning shot into the ground. Epp rushed McNeil anyway and McNeil shot him in the head.
McNeil's murder conviction was upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court in 2008. Yurachek has since filed a legal action with the Superior Court in Baldwin County, where McNeil is being held, to try and get his client a new court hearing, possibly leading to a new trial.
The attorney is arguing that the jury wasn't told about a previous conviction against Epp and was not informed of other evidence in the case.
The state attorney general's office does not comment on ongoing cases, spokeswoman Lauren Kane said. The office did file a response to Yurachek's initial legal action denying the attorney's claims and asking the court not to grant the requested relief.
Both sides are scheduled to submit briefs in the case to the judge next month.
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