After Tucson killing, this columnist says Arizona's lenient self-defense laws need to change

A Tucson man who shot and killed a visiting doctor after a traffic dispute was recently sentenced to four years of probation, no prison time.

Navy veteran Jason Jameson pled guilty and tried to administer first aid to Dr. Jeffrey Hohner. After he shot him, prosecutors offered him a plea deal to of negligent homicide.

Judge Howard Fell was emotional as he closed the sentencing hearing in Tucson.

The sentence came after he claimed self-defense. And, Tim Steller, a columnist for The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, says it shows just how lenient our state’s self-defense laws are, and why they need to change.

Full conversation

TIM STELLER: So this all started in March 2024. Dr. Jeffrey Hohner was here in town. He lived in Puerto Rico but he was training nurses in wound care, and he was going with two nurses in a caravan of three cars. He was in the last of the three cars and that probably explains in part how a traffic conflict came up because they were trying to stick together.

Jason Jameson drove around them and started slamming on his brakes and slowing to a slow speed. And then Dr. Hohner drove around in front of him and stopped in the road, got out and confronted him, confronted Jameson at Jameson's car window. The two of them went back and forth. It appears Jameson spit on Hohner.

They each reached at each other, grabbed or struck each other in some way. And then Hohner started walking away and Jameson shot him in the back. He later told police that he thought Hohner said something about getting a gun or "I'm going to kill you" or something like that. Of course there's no corroboration of that, and it's a very self-serving statement.

The thing that he did in his, you know to his credit was he, Jameson, called 911 and then got out of his car and tried to help render aid along with the other people who were there.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. So you obviously disagree with the sentencing here, this four years of probation, but point out that this is related to the laws in the state and that we have, you think, maybe too lenient of self-defense laws.

Tell us what do they say, first of all. How do they work here?

STELLER: So we have a "stand your ground" type law, which allows you to use self-defense without retreating when a reasonable person would perceive danger and you use force proportional to the danger that you see the issue. There's a couple issues.

One is that the state law passed in 2006 puts the burden on prosecutors to prove that it was not done in self-defense. So in other words, if there's a scintilla of evidence, as one prosecutor told me, that you acted in self-defense, then these jury instructions come into play that say that the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense.

GILGER: Right.

STELLER: That of course puts the prosecutors on the defensive, puts a large obstacle in front of them and you know, also incentivizes people to claim self-defense. Not that people are thinking of that that much on the street, but it's a culture, I think a cultural thing, this, this self-defense violence.

So then what happens is prosecutors start losing cases or, or they must plead down cases to much lower charges. In this case, the Pima County Attorney's Office told me they had lost three previous self-defense cases. So they were motivated.

First they offered that the, the defendant Jameson was charged with second degree murder. Then that was reduced to manslaughter. And eventually the Pima County Attorney's Office offered a plea deal to negligent homicide.

GILGER: Right.

STELLER: He accepted that plea. He acknowledged his mistake, because I've been mentioned this before, but Hohner was not armed. There was no threat to Jameson's life. So they went to sentencing and the judge, Howard Fell, as you heard, denounced gun violence, but then paradoxically sentenced Jameson to four years of probation. Even though the presumptive sentence was, I think, two and a half years in prison.

GILGER: Right. So I mean, you mentioned the phrase stand your ground laws. Like I think that kind of rings a bell for a lot of people. I remember covering this back in the day, like this was the early 2000s. There was a big case in Florida in which the self-defense thing came up.

And a lot states like ours kind of embraced that position and loosened laws around self-defense, allowing for people to use it in this way. And it really shifted the burden to prosecution as you outline.

You talked to the county attorney down there about this. What did she have to say?

STELLER: Well, she said that the burden shifted after she became an attorney. And then it makes it hard on them because, you know, typically in a jury, a jury is a mixture of people and there are, you know, the way I think of it is people with more and less active amygdalas. That's the fear center of your brain.

So when people are considering whether a fear is reasonable or not. You know, they're retreating to their own perceptions and deciding whether I would view this as reasonable. And so you may not get an acquittal, but you might get a hung jury or you may decide not to take the risk of pursuing a case at jury trial because you've had acquittals or hung juries before.

Now, I should add that in this case there has been quite a bit of pushback against the county attorney. People saying that, listen, this was a case she should have taken to trial. The man was shot in the back, he was not armed. A jury could have easily perceived that and decided that it was not a case of reasonable, of danger, that a reasonable person would not have seen danger here.

GILGER: Tell us about the jury instructions because you write about this in your column on this case and they're interesting.

STELLER: Yeah. So this is the standard across the state. The juries must find that a reasonable person in the situation would have believed that physical force was immediately necessary and the defendant used or threatened no more physical force than would appear necessary. So that's kind of that, that makes sense, right.

But then the thing that always gets me is they say the use of physical force is justified if a reasonable person in the situation would have reasonably believed that immediate physical danger appeared to be present.

Here's a kicker. Actual danger is not necessary to justify the use of physical force in self-defense. And that's where Kenneth Hohner, who's the older brother of Jeffrey Hohner, is trying to campaign for a change in the law that would remove this burden on the part of the prosecutors if it's found that the deceased victim did not have a weapon or any way to threaten deadly physical force.

GILGER: Right. So this has turned into something of a, of a campaign for the family of this doctor who was killed.

Some defense attorneys, of course, that will defend these laws and the way that our self-defense statutes work. Like they say they, you know, are harder in other states and that, you know, they require the force used to be reasonable.

STELLER: Yeah. You know, as one defense attorney, actually it was Jameson's defense attorney told me, you know, it's all context dependent. That is, you know, the jury will be able to hear the, the details of the, of, you know, why he perceived danger and you know, what the actual situation was and make a choice.

Yeah. Still case law and, and again, experience, you know, when, when cases go bad for prosecutors, then that tends to push them toward not taking risks in, in prosecution. And so as a result, people don't see any payoff in pursuing people who claim self-defense.