"Stand Your Ground [law in Florida] essentially makes it legal to shoot one's way out of any situation that feels threatening..."
We are going ahead with our coverage of Stand Your Ground laws.
United States map showing states with Stand Your Ground Laws
This primer may help readers understand some evidence that Florida's vague SYG law has had unintended consequences; namely that it enables criminals to get away with murder. This diary is the second in our primer series for those who are beginning to think seriously about so-called "Stand Your Ground" Laws (SYG). Our first SYG primer,
Report on Stand Your Ground Laws Highlights Racial Disparities, focused on the disturbing rise in justifiable homicides in states that have passed SYG laws.
These two primers are part of our broader discussion about lawful defensive gun use. Our most recent article focused on defining what actions are legally permitted as self defense with a firearm, Defensive Gun Use - You Decide by Hugh Jim Bissell. To add Hugh Jim Bissell's original diaries to your stream, click on the ♥ or the word "Follow" next to HJB's name.
Please join us below the fold for a discussion of unintended consequences. This is an open thread.
Stand Your Ground laws have one defining feature
They lower the burden of proof a shooter must show when they invoke their right to self defense as justification for homicide. Most self defense laws require a potential shooter to retreat if it is possible to do so safely. Stand Your Ground laws remove the duty to retreat. In some states it is sufficient for the shooter to state that they were in fear for their life or imminent bodily harm. If the shooting victim is dead and there are no other witnesses, a Stand Your Ground law may prevent police from doing anything more than a cursory investigation. In that case estimation of reasonable fear rests largely on the shooter's judgment, which obviously can be used to cover the shooter's own aggressive behavior. According to the Law Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence, "In certain circumstances, the [Florida Stand Your Ground] law actually creates a presumption that a shooter had a reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm when using deadly force."
...Continue reading Report on Stand Your Ground Laws Highlights Racial Disparities
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Vague Law - Evidence of a Flawed Law
A Tampa Bay Times Investigation
Many killers who go free with Florida 'stand your ground' law have history of violence by Kameel Stanley and Connie Humburg (July 21, 2012)
Stetson University law professor, Charlie Rose, and his students predicted that Florida's Stand Your Ground law would enable killers with long criminal histories to benefit from law's vague language. "Right now it makes it available to everyone regardless of what you did to put yourself in the situation," he said. "They did not put limitations on who could use it."
A review of arrest records for those involved in more than 100 fatal stand your ground cases shows:
• Nearly 60 percent of those who claimed self-defense had been arrested at least once before the day they killed someone.
• More than 30 of those defendants, about one in three, had been accused of violent crimes, including assault, battery or robbery. Dozens had drug offenses on their records.
• Killers have invoked stand your ground even after repeated run-ins with the law. Forty percent had three arrests or more. Dozens had at least four arrests.
• More than a third of the defendants had previously been in trouble for threatening someone with a gun or illegally carrying a weapon.
• In dozens of cases, both the defendant and the victim had criminal records, sometimes related to long-running feuds or criminal enterprises. Of the victims that could be identified in state records, 64 percent had at least one arrest. Several had 20 or more arrests.
[snip]
"The legislators wrote this law envisioning honest assertions of self-defense, not an immunity being seized mostly by former criminal defendants trying to lie their way out of a murder," said Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. attorney from South Florida.
Coffey said the most troubling part about habitual offenders using the law is that their experience may have taught them how to manipulate the system.
"People who've been through the legal system are going to be more seasoned to using the law to their advantage," Coffey said. "And it doesn't take a master of fiction to write in a few lines of the script to turn a homicide into a stand your ground case."
...Continue reading Many killers who go free with Florida 'stand your ground' law have history of violence
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A Flawed Origin - Political Distortion of a Tragic Killing
A Tampa Bay Times Investigation
Florida's 'stand your ground' law was born of 2004 case, but story has been distorted by Ben Montgomery (April 14, 2012)
PENSACOLA
In 2005, as lawmakers pushed to pass sweeping self-defense legislation that would become known as the "stand your ground" law, critics had one challenge: Show us a case in which someone had been treated unjustly.
• Backers of the new bill had an answer: James Workman.
Here was a 77-year-old retiree asleep with his wife in an RV outside their hurricane-damaged home in 2004. And here came a menacing intruder, prowling through the dark, bursting into the trailer. The homeowner shot the intruder, [Rodney Cox] then had to wait months — painful, anxiety-filled months in legal jeopardy — before prosecutors decided the two shots he fired were justified, that what he did was protect himself and his wife.
[snip]
After a friend identified Rodney Cox's body, after police shipped home his bloody shorts and shirt, his family and friends gathered in North Carolina. They viewed a slideshow of his life and played his favorite music. They went to his mother's house and ate his favorite meal, baked lasagna, and told stories and wondered how this had happened.
They still wonder. What was wrong with Rodney that evening? Why was he acting out of character? The autopsy showed that his skull was fractured. Had he been beaten? Did he run into the trailer in fear for his life?
...Continue reading Florida's 'stand your ground' law was born of 2004 case, but story has been distorted
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Uneven application, shocking outcomes
A Tampa Bay Times investigation has found that Florida's "stand your ground" law is being used in ways never imagined — to free gang members involved in shootouts, drug dealers beefing with clients and people who shot their victims in the back.
… Explore the analysis of SYG cases at The Tampa Bay Times: Florida's STAND YOUR GROUND Law..
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Additional Background for Stand Your Ground Laws
An article at Mother Jones by Hannah Levintova (Nov. 16, 2012)
The fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in February turned a national spotlight on Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. Following widespread outcry about the killing—in which George Zimmerman shot the unarmed 17-year-old Martin allegedly in self defense—Florida Gov. Rick Scott convened a task force to evaluate the 2005 law. This week, the group came back with their report. Their conclusion? The controversial law is just fine as it is. But there's just one problem: That verdict flies in the face of much troubling evidence to the contrary.
Stand Your Ground essentially makes it legal to shoot one's way out of any situation that feels threatening: Unless law enforcement authorities can prove that's an invalid explanation from a shooter, a resulting homicide can be deemed justifiable under the law, and the shooter is immune from criminal and civil prosecution.…
The evidence to date indicates it is terrible public policy. Since the spreading of the law, multiple studies have found that Stand Your Ground laws:
• don't deter crime
• are associated with significant increases in homicides
• are racially discriminatory—homicides involving white shooters and black victims are 11 times more likely to be deemed "justifiable" than those where the scenario is reversed.
...Continue reading 8 Months After Trayvon: "Stand Your Ground" Law Deemed Just Fine by Florida [my bold and minor formatting for readability]
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