Arizona surgeon faces charges for firing gun into air. It raises questions about self-defense laws

An Arizona trauma surgeon is headed to trial on felony charges that could put him behind bars for decades.

It all began late one summer night in 2022 when a man was looking around Kris Johnson’s front door. He went outside with his wife’s gun and saw flood lights from two vehicles blocking the entrance to his neighborhood and fired what he calls a warning shot in the air. He ended up shot in the back and facing prison time.

But, despite the court asking prosecutors to offer a plea deal to keep Johnson out of prison, top Maricopa County Attorney’s Office officials won’t offer anything less than five to 10 years in prison. And it’s all raising questions about Arizona’s self-defense laws and how they’re carried out.

ABC15 investigative reporter Dave Biscobing broke the story and joined The Show to talk more.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Dave.

DAVID BISCOBING: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so walk us through what happened that night. Like, why did Kris Johnson fire a shot into the air?

DAVID BISCOBING: I'm going to keep this as brief as I can because we've done this very long, complicated story. But in short, it's 11 p.m. at night. They live in this area on the edge of the Valley, in the edge of Phoenix, that's pretty rural. There is no walk-through, drive-through type of traffic.

His wife is up late — she's a probation officer at the time — she's working on reports in her kitchen, and they notice, hear, she notices and hears a strange man at their front door. And through the doorbell camera and what she could see through their kind of frosted glass door, looked like he was trying to look for a way in.

And he's looking underneath pots, maybe for a key, he's kind of meandering around the front of the house. She runs, goes, gets her husband. She calls 911. He then takes her gun and he — they don't see him at the front door anymore.

So he goes out to his backyard and to the side of his house to see, make sure he's not trying to get in another way. And that's where down the block he sees these floodlights, right? And so very bright, very dark neighborhood, you cannot see.

Dave Biscobing

I've been out there. There's no streetlights, you can't see more than, you know, 20 yards ahead of yourself. And so these are blinding lights. You cannot make out what's happening in front of you. He does the biggest mistake, he says, of his life — something he admits was wrong — and he fires off a warning shot into the air.

In return he hears, you know, "Show me your hands or I will shoot you." There are nine shots fired in his direction as he's sprinting away. And no time did the police identify themselves as police. They didn't have their emergency red and blue lights flashing.

And he is, you know, shot in the leg. And so then it takes them, he runs back to his house. It takes quite a bit of time for them to figure out what happened. And now he's facing these charges.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. OK. So let's talk about the prosecution of Johnson, David. Like, this case has taken four years to get to trial. The indictment was thrown out twice ... and the judge in the case has said he doesn't think Johnson should end up in prison because of this. What has he said?

DAVID BISCOBING: Well, that's the judge after this came back for a third time to attempt to get these charges to stick because there were problems with the indictment and the prosecutors and police not telling a grand jury about self-defense laws properly, which is why it got thrown out twice.

The judge was like, "Hey, this is not the typical person we want to see put in prison. Like, I don't want this to be anywhere close to prison. Please come up with a resolution." And the County Attorney's Office, up in and including the County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, won't budge. They won't offer anything less than five to 10. And so that is where we're at and why we're very much looking at the possibility of trial.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. So you also spoke with a criminal justice expert from John Jay College of Criminal Justice about this case. What did he have to say?

DAVID BISCOBING: He really just doesn't see how there's justice in this case at all. He sees fault on everyone's side, right? He's like, the doctor should have stayed in his house. That's, in his words, "your castle." That's where you remain. He made a mistake.

But he also says the police not identifying themselves really contributed to the quote "chaos of that night." And he goes, "Where's the intent here?" Right? "Like, where's the intent of charging this doctor with aggravated assault? This was not meant to, you know, harm police, so why are we treating them as if they're these major victims and that requires prison time? What is the benefit of putting this man in prison to society?"

That's his big take. So he sees fault everywhere, where everyone should really just take a deep breath and move on rather than trying to punish this surgeon for what is just a terrible round of mistakes by everyone involved.

LAUREN GILGER: So Johnson is claiming self-defense as you said. What do you think this case says about Arizona's self-defense laws, how they've been carried out here?

DAVID BISCOBING: I think that it says a couple things. One, that there's a lot of confusion for the public about what counts as self-defense, right? Leaving your house and firing off that warning shot, in a way that kind of negates some of the self-defense claims, according to some of the legal experts I've spoken to. So that's an issue, right?

And so it's understanding what it is you're allowed to do. But then also, there's a lot of questions about, you know, the idea that what is fair, right? We saw in the prison, the former prison director Charles Ryan's case, he got in an armed standoff with police and, you know, he pointed a weapon at SWAT officers and he was given just straight probation by the same County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, who said he was probably too drunk to really mean it at the time.

And so there's a lot of questions from a lot of people on all ends of the spectrum here about fairness, kind of justice, and, you know, what counts and what doesn't and how this is all being applied.

LAUREN GILGER: What has the Maricopa County Attorney's Office or the county attorney herself had to say about this case?

DAVID BISCOBING: They don't want to discuss this case. They say it's because it's ongoing, and you know, that's going to be their standard response. I've been a little surprised at basically the terseness and kind of the — condescending's maybe not the right word — but the nature and the professionalism of their response.

We've sent very detailed, very straightforward just, you know, facts that we intend to report and, you know, our story's very long, very in-depth, included way more information than they've ever presented to a grand jury or even to a preliminary hearing on this.

And they told us, "Well, you apparently — we're not going to comment but, you know, apparently the facts have been misrepresented to you." We asked, "What facts have been misrepresented?" They just ignored that entirely. They won't even send any statements that they'll attribute to a specific official.

So no one even wants to put their names on the stuff that they do send. So this has all been kind of telling just kind of the lack of the normal level of professionalism that should exist in trying to get some answers whether they intend to comment, you know, or not.

LAUREN GILGER: Last minute here, Dave. What response, if any, have you gotten from Phoenix PD?

DAVID BISCOBING: Well, Phoenix PD, this is an interesting aspect of it. They again say because this is ongoing they won't comment on it. Of course, they do comment on it when it initially happens and their initial version of events was that this doctor essentially got into a gunfight with these officers, which is not actually what happened. But they won't comment.

But they did say their Critical Incident Review Board approved of this, found the officers within policy. But as I followed up on that, I'm now learning that the Critical Incident Review Board that they use to kind of, you know, use as like, oh we really take a deep look at these things — they don't even take votes.

This is just something I need to investigate further. They just kind of reach some sort of consensus without voting, and so there's — that's something I'm digging into and I can probably promise you that there's going to be more reporting as that relates to this case and many others going forward.