Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX)
Curious, that this bill was reintroduced in the House several days ago and yet all I can find for news on it is from conservative sites, but oh well. Here's my attempt to change that.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) has reintroduced this bill as --
H.R. 2812: To encourage States to prohibit “stand your ground” laws and require neighborhood watch programs to register with ...
... local law enforcement agencies and the Department of Justice, to direct the Attorney General to study such laws, and for other purposes.
And simply put, it seeks to prohibit Stand Your Ground laws, with a punishing hit to the pocketbook for states that refuse to change -- reducing their federal funding, and reallocating that money to states that do not have Stand Your Ground laws on their books.
This is why I keep an eye on some of our enemies, unfortunately. Sometimes they spot things before I find them on Daily Kos. If Huffington Post had less woo and fluff I might have spotted it there first. In this case, it's through the NRA and the Daily Caller (yuck) that I found this news.
The Daily Caller contacted Rep. Jackson Lee, and got a little more information about it, albeit mixed in with spin from DC as might be expected.
Jackson Lee’s press secretary Mike McQuerry reiterated to The Daily Caller that Congresswoman Lee is pushing the bill now because “she’s always been interested in what happened with Trayvon.”
However, Zimmerman waived his right to a defense under Florida’s stand-your-ground law. When TheDC pointed this out, McQuerry said merely, ”She just thinks it’s the right time to pursue it now.”
That's a convenient excuse for conservatives, although Zimmerman's lawyers had their reasons not to stage a SYG defense; it wasn't necessary for them to put the law on trial along with Zimmerman.
ThinkProgress explains:
Zimmerman’s lawyer chose instead to go to trial, once again declining to specifically raise “Stand Your Ground” as a defense and keeping the law out of the trial. But the principle’s irrelevance ended the moment the jury received their instructions for deciding the case. As Ta-Nehisi Coates reveals, the written instructions that sat with the jurors as they deliberated made very clear that under Florida law, a shooter has a right to stand his ground:
If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in anyplace where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.
Since Zimmerman’s lawyers opted not to invoke Stand Your Ground as a defense, observers have characterized this case as a regular old “self-defense” case, rather than a “Stand Your Ground” case. But what these jury instructions make clear is that, in Florida, there is no longer an effective distinction. Stand Your Ground is the state’s self-defense law, whether or not a defendant opts to hold a hearing specifically on the question. In fact, this section on the “Justifiable Use of Deadly Force” is the only place in all 27 pages of jury instructions in which the phrase “self-defense” is used.
Also, at
Media Matters, they show what the instructions would have been
without Stand Your Ground.
Former State Sen. Dan Gelber, who was a leading opponent of Stand Your Ground's enactment, noted on his blog that those instructions differed widely from the instruction that would have been read to a jury before that law took effect. At that time, jury instructions would have stated:
"The defendant cannot justify the use of force likely to cause death or great bodily harm unless he used every reasonable means within his power and consistent with his own safety to avoid the danger before resorting to that force.
The fact that the defendant was wrongfully attacked cannot justify his use of force likely to cause death or great bodily harm if by retreating he could have avoided the need to use that force."
Back to the reintroduced
Justice Exists for All of Us Act. As it was just brought back, there is no bill summary yet, but it is possible to view
last year's version of it. Rep. Jackson Lee's bill would prohibit Stand Your Ground laws. It would require that neighborhood watch programs register with law enforcement. And it would back this up with funding cuts to states that refuse to comply.
(c) Failure of State To Comply-
(1) IN GENERAL- For any fiscal year after the end of the period for implementation under subsection (b), a State that fails, as determined by the Attorney General, to substantially implement this section shall not receive 20 percent of the funds that would otherwise be allocated for that fiscal year to the State under subpart 1 of part E of title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C. 3750 et seq.).
Naturally, this bill died in committee last year. And while the same fate seems rather likely this year as well, if now is the time to take action against SYG laws, here is someone doing just that. Boehner's House has redefined incompetence and set new standards for lack of productivity, but on occasion Republicans have been pressured into doing things they don't want to do.
I continue to believe that more progress can and is being made at the state level, like in my home state of Arizona -- where some Democrats, and perhaps more curiously John McCain, have challenged the Stand Your Ground law on the books here. But that's no reason to ignore Rep. Jackson Lee's bill in Congress. It is an opportunity to put pressure on the politicians more interested in a status quo that is claiming American lives.