Quote Originally Posted by Doc Mustang View Post
In criminal court you can be found guilty "beyond reasonable doubt" but you are never found innocent "beyond a reasonable doubt". Instead, you are found "not guilty" which is decidedly different from innocent.

A "not guilty", dropped charges or no filed charges may not help you in civil court as much as you might think. Your (civil) defense attorney may attempt to have the case thrown out on the basis of justified use of self defense but the judge may decide he wants a jury to weigh the evidence.
Now that you bring that up I do not know how the rulings of a criminal case apply in a castle doctrine case. I don know that normally if you are found guilty by a jury or plead nolo-contrende in a criminal case it cannot be use against you in a civil case where if you plead guilty is can. I would think that the judge would look at the evidence and the results of the DA findings on whether or not to allow the case to go forward. If you were never prosecuted that would be well within your favor but if you wrere prosecuted and it went to a jury trial then I doubt that the evidence that it was justified under castle dooctrine was very strong.

The whole thing about castle doctrine protect is who gets to decide if it indeed falls under protection of that law. It may very well be determined by a civil court jury. This is where we find people very over-confident of being saved by the castle doctrine.