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Cases of self-defense arent always simple especially in states with a stand your ground law.

In July 2018, police say Michael Drejka fatally shot a man who shoved and knocked him to the ground in an argument over a parking space in Florida.

Although critics say Drejkas use of deadly force was uncalled for, the Pinellas County sheriff declined to arrest him, citing the states stand your ground law, which gave him immunity. The decision sparked outcry and calls for reform.

But its not the first time a stand your ground law has created controversy. Many states have similar laws on the books.

Heres what you need to know about them.

Generally, stand your ground laws allow people to respond to threats or force without fear of criminal prosecution.

Most self-defense laws state that a person under threat of physical injury has a duty to retreat. If after retreating the threat continues, the person may respond with force.

If you attack me in a non-stand your ground state, Ive got to try to get out of it, explained CNN legal analyst Mark OMara. I have to retreat before I attack The theory is, it (responding with force) has to be your last chance.

But in stand your ground states, you have no obligation to retreat, OMara said.

In other words, someone facing an imminent threat can use lethal force right away without first trying to escape.

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While most states provide some form of legal protection in cases of self-defense, 25 have enacted stand your ground laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

The laws in at least 10 of these states, mostly in the South, literally say that you can stand [your] ground.

Its important to note that not all stand your ground laws are the same. States may word and even enforce them differently.

Florida has had several high-profile cases that sparked national conversation about stand your ground laws.

The state passed its stand your ground law in 2005, allowing people to meet force with force if they believe theyre under threat of being harmed.

Of all the states with stand your ground laws, Floridas is probably the strongest at this point, OMara said, for three reasons.

First is the fact the states law says a person has no duty to retreat.

Second: the states law provides immunity from criminal prosecution and civil actions, OMara said, which not all other stand your ground statutes do.

The final reason, OMara said, can be attributed to a recent change in the law, which shifts the burden onto the state to prove that a shooter did not act in self-defense and is therefore not entitled to stand your ground immunities.

Previously, the shooter used stand your ground as a defense, and had to prove she or he feared further bodily harm. But no longer.

Nowhere else is there anything like this in criminal law where somebody asserts something and the burden then shifts to the other person, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said in a press conference. Thats a very heavy standard and it puts the burden on the state.

Floridas law has drawn attention over the years, most notably in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.

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In 2012, a jury found George Zimmerman who OMara represented in that case not guilty in the shooting death.

Martin was walking to his fathers fiancees house from a convenience store when Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, saw him and called the police. Zimmerman defied an order to not approach the teen. When he did, the two got into a physical altercation, and Zimmerman shot Martin.

As the case garnered national attention, onlookers speculated whether Zimmerman would try to use the Floridas stand your ground law as part of his defense.

Zimmerman was charged in Martins death but was eventually acquitted. Ultimately, he did not lean on the states stand our ground law, but did claim self defense.

Still, the case cast a spotlight on Floridas stand your ground law and demands to change it.

Supporters of stand your ground laws say they give people the right to protect themselves. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush defended the law at the National Rifle Associations 2015 annual meeting in Nashville.

In Florida you can defend yourself anywhere you have a legal right to be, he said. You shouldnt have to choose between being attacked and going to jail.

The NRA has pushed hard for stand your ground laws in the past. Its former president, Marion Hammer, helped create Floridas law back in 2005.

Critics say the laws encourage violence and allow for legal racial bias. In 2013, Sherrilyn Ifill, then president and director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, gave testimony in a hearing on stand your ground laws.

Even those who do not consciously harbor negative associations between race and criminality are regularly infected by unconscious views that equate race with violence, she wrote.

Racial stereotypes, she wrote, could cause people to misinterpret innocent behavior as something threatening or violent, and stand your ground laws could justify this violence.

With the controversy surrounding stand your ground laws, there have been efforts to change or repeal them. In 2017, North Carolina lawmakers filed the Gun Safety Act, which would repeal the states stand your ground law. No updates on the bill have been available since April of 2017.

The NCSL says recent attempts have not been successful.

Link:
'Stand your ground' laws: Everything you need to know - CNN

Imagine if your state legislature passed a law saying that any person who feels threatened by another person may use lethal force to execute the perceived threat. Then say that, as a matter of state policy, residents should presume that Black people are more threatening than White people.

This sounds absurd, but this is basically a Stand Your Ground law in a nutshell.

These laws pervert self-defense and make it self-offense." Our countrys weak gun laws and prolific civilian firearm carrying mean Stand Your Ground laws increase, rather than decrease, gun crime. This, alone, is an unacceptable attack on everyones right to live. And when combined with deeply-rooted, racist conceptions of white innocence and black criminality, as well as courts unequal applications, Stand Your Ground laws particularly devalue Black lives.

With rights come responsibilities. The right to keep and bear arms is not a free for all; it does not encompass a right to trigger-happy vigilantism devoid of reason or proportionality. Stand Your Ground laws are an affront to our right not to be shot and we must stand our ground against them.

Continue reading here:
What are Stand Your Ground Laws? | Brady

Photo by Ryan Vaarsi via Flickr

To George Zimmerman, a 17-year-old black kid in a dark hoodie was a threatening presence. Under Florida's Stand Your Ground statute, this was reason enough for him to shoot and kill Trayvon Martin in his family's neighborhood in Sanford, Florida in 2012.

Florida was the first state to pass a Stand Your Ground law in 2005. The controversial statute that's been enacted in 23 states across the US authorizes a person to use lethal force to defend his or her life against any threat (or perceived threat). But critics of the self-defense statute argue that it perpetuates racial biasand a recent study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine has given law's detractors new evidence to prove it.

In "Race, law, and health: Examination of 'Stand Your Ground' and defendant convictions in Florida," researchers Nicole Ackermann, Melody S. Goodman, Keon Gilbert, Cassandra Arroyo-Johnson, and Marcello Pagano combed through data from a Tampa Bay Times investigation. They further examined the 204 cases in the state in which Stand Your Ground was cited as a defense against homicide or some other violent act and the results were, sadly, not surprising. The study found that in cases argued from 2005 to 2013, juries were twice as likely to convict the perpetrator of a crime against a white person than against a person of color. "These results are similar to pre-civil rights era statistics, with strict enforcement for crimes when the victim was white and less-rigorous enforcement with the victim is non-white," the researchers report.

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Take the lesser-known Stand Your Ground case of 69-year-old Trevor Dooley, a black man who claimed the statute as his defense for shooting an unarmed white man, 41-year-old David James, at a basketball court following an altercation. Although the Tampa Bay Times said this was a "case with many similarities" to Trayvon Martin's, the judge denied Dooley immunity and convicted him of manslaughter.

Behind this unequal application of the law, the study reveals, is implicit racism built on the effects of hundreds of years of explicit discrimination; Implicit Association Tests have consistently shown that, regardless of explicit preference, both black and white people associate whiteness with positive stimuli and blackness with negative stimuli.

Stand Your Ground laws are an example of "the constitutive presence of racial bias in our society by the determination of whose life is valued, demonstrated through the legal consequences for taking such a life," the study concludes. Or in other words, the question of whether #blacklivesmatter cannot be affirmed by an individual, only by our institutions and our laws. And self-defense doctrines like Stand Your Ground are akin to Jim Crow laws that viewed "white as the superior race and helped to legalize certain forms of homicide."

Read More: Alternatives to Alternatives: The Black Riot Grrrls Ignored

James Jones, a psychologist at the University of Delaware, is a member of the National Task Force on Stand Your Ground Laws, which calls for other states to conduct similar studies such as this. In the American Medical Association's Monitor on Psychology he ultimately calls for the repeal of Stand Your Ground laws and other statues that provide far too much room for bias. "What we know from our research is that there is a lot of racial and ethnic bias in the judgment of threats," he writes. "It's important for us to show inherent bias in laws that use such a subjective criterion for self-defense."

Ackermann et al. underline the urgency of this endeavor in their study. "We have made a lot of progress since 1787, but this halving of the odds of being found guilty of a crime if the victim is non-white is an eerie reminder of the infamous three-fifths compromise."

Read more from the original source:
'Stand Your Ground' Laws Are Racist, New Study Reveals

Gun control and violence in the United States has been a controversial topic, particularly in recent years. Some citizens and politicians push for gun control, while others believe that the countrys laws surrounding guns should remain the same. Gun laws vary by state, including regulations on purchasing firearms and concealed or open carry permits and laws. One particularly controversial law is the stand your ground law.

Stand your ground laws allow a person to use force if necessary if there is a threat of harm. Many self-defense laws state that a person that believes they are being threatened with personal injury has a duty to retreat. If there is a continued threat after leaving, the threatened person is permitted to use force to defend themselves. In stand your ground states, there is no duty to retreat.

For example, a robber comes into the home of a person who is sleeping. The person awakens and investigates the noises and is met by the robber holding a gun. In states with stand your ground laws, the threatened person could respond with force including using their own gun, if one is owned if necessary. A person that defends themselves in such a situation would not have to worry about criminal prosecution.

Opponents of stand your ground laws often believe that such laws can be dangerous. For example, a person could shoot first when there isnt a real threat. One such instance was the case against George Zimmerman, who faced criminal charges following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was later acquitted of the charges.

Several states have adopted stand your ground laws. Those states are:

Some states use stand your ground in practice, such as through jury instructions or case law. These states are:

Some states have also adopted stand your ground laws, but these laws only apply when a person is in their vehicle. These states are:

Finally, there are states with castle doctrine, which allows a person to defend themselves using force while in the home or their vehicles, but have a duty to retreat in public places. These states are:

Read the original here:
States With Stand Your Ground Laws 2021

We cannot bring back the loved ones killed by vigilantism disguised as self-defense under the purview of Floridas stand your ground law. But 16 years later, we can at least restore the duty to retreat when a person can safely withdraw from a threat. And yet, state Sen. Shevrin Jones Self-Defense Restoration Act (SB 1052) faces an uphill battle, given the prevalence of a misbegotten belief in a shoot first, ask questions later method of dispute resolution.

When I published Stand Your Ground: A History of Americas Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense in 2017, I naively believed that the laws that originated in Florida would get dismantled by legislators and outraged citizens, exhausted by the carnage that the laws encourage. But since 2005, 36 other states have passed stand your ground laws they continue to spread across the nation, a pandemic of weaponized self-defense.

As John Roman of the Urban Institute explained, stand your ground was a classic solution in search of a problem. The existing laws, including the castle doctrine and laws governing self-defensive force, already allowed people to protect themselves and their homes, and they allowed non-aggressors to fight back when threatened in public spaces.

Stand your ground proponents have argued that women need the law in order to defend themselves from dangerous perpetrators and rapists. They have asserted that existing laws would force women to retreat from aggressors, thus putting themselves in additional danger by turning their backs on potentially armed, larger male strangers.

But in focusing on the threats of strangers, they ignored a vital fact. By far, womens greatest statistical threat continues to be men they know, usually their own intimate partners and exes. As the case of Marissa Alexander, who spent years in prison after firing a warning shot at her husband, made tragically clear, stand your ground laws were not designed to provide legal immunity to women defending themselves from violent intimate partners and exes.

The accumulating archive of cases of woman imprisoned for surviving an assault testify to the historic backdrop of our cultures underacknowledged patriarchal and white supremacist suspicion of women, especially Black, brown and indigenous women, who resist partner violence. As in Alexanders case, such defendants are often portrayed as angry rather than fearful.

In addition to betraying any semblance of gender equity in rules of justifiable force, stand your ground laws amplify gun homicide rates. The implementation of Floridas stand your ground law was associated with a 24 percent increase in monthly homicide rates and a 32 percent increase in monthly firearm homicide rates. The states stand your ground law is also associated with a 45 percent increase in quarterly rates of adolescent gun homicide, driven by a 52 percent increase in the gun homicide rate among Black adolescents.

While these data alone are shocking, what they dont reveal are the manifold ways in which stand your ground laws invite and reward violence when the aggressor claims to have been acting in self-defense, especially if the only other witness is dead. We have watched as predominantly white aggressors use excessive force against unarmed, usually non-white men or boys, and then appeal for legal immunity. When armed assailants claim to have been victims of an attack and/or to have been in fear for their lives, they are often granted the benefit of the doubt. Those judging the reasonableness of this claim including law enforcement, judges, lawyers and juries must weigh the defendants claim of fear against the perception of threat that the deceased person may have posed.

Floridas stand your ground law places the burden of proof on the prosecution to show that the defendant was not acting in self-defense, which also stacks the deck against justice in cases of wrongful violence. As the case of D.J. Broadus a 31-year-old Black man killed by his white, male (ex)lover reveals, its hard to disprove a defendants claim of self-defense when the only other witness is dead. The law provides layers of legal immunity so that an aggressors claims of self-defense cannot be questioned, effectively reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator.

While the Self-Defense Restoration Act sponsored by Jones, a West Park Democrat, will not bring back those whose lives were unnecessarily taken in the past 15 years, it will revise the law to reinstate a duty to retreat outside ones home. This does not mean that law-abiding people will be required to try to run away from violent criminals who may pursue them.

Rather, it means that people will be expected to resist a threat with reasonable and commensurate force if they are unable to retreat. It means that someone who kills another person in legitimate self-defense will need to justify their actions in a court of law, as should be the case when a human life is taken. It means the re-instatement of law and order, and above all public safety, in a state that has already seen too much unnecessary violence and destruction over the past decade and a half.

Caroline Light teaches gender and ethnic studies at Harvard University. She is the author of stand your ground: A History of Americas Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. Follow her at @carolineelight. She wrote this exclusively for the Tampa Bay Times.

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Instead of standing your ground, retreat when possible | Column - Tampa Bay Times