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A bill to shift the burden of proof in Stand Your Ground cases has found a House sponsor, sealing the deal for a sequel in the Florida Legislature this year.

Rep. Bobby Payne, R-Palatka, filed the legislation last Friday. HB 245 would shift the burden of proof in Stand Your Ground self-defense cases in the Sunshine State.

If passed, HB 245 would give defendants more protection from prosecution in Stand Your Ground cases by requiring prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt whether a defendant is entitled to immunity at a pretrial hearing in order to disprove a claim of self-defense immunity.

The legislation would flip the responsibility onto the prosecutor to prove why a defendant shouldnt be allowed to use the Stand Your Ground defense in court.

Sen. Rob Bradley, R-Fleming Island, filed the companion legislation (SB 128) to shift the burden of proof in self-defense cases last month. Now with joint legislation, the bill has the beginnings of what it needs to become a law in Florida.

Bradley filed identical legislation during last years legislative session and the bills future seemed promising initially. The measure had a relatively easy time making its way through the Senate, but it did not fare as well in the House, where it stalled out in the House Justice Committee, flopping due to a 6-6 vote.

The measure came on the heels of a Florida Supreme Court last summer which ruled defendants would be responsible for the burden of proof showing they shouldnt be prosecuted in Stand Your Ground cases.

Supporters of the bill said the its crucial to protect Floridians right to self-defense. We have an obligation to zealously guard the protections granted us all in the Constitution, Sen. Bradley explained.

The legislation had, at the time, gathered significant support from pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association, which said the bill was vital for gun owners who may use their weapons to protect themselves in potentially harmful situations.

Floridas Stand Your Ground law has been on the books since 2005, but it garnered national attention in 2014 during the Trayvon Martin case, where defendant George Zimmerman claimed he was using self-defense when he shot the black teenager to death in Florida. Zimmerman was acquitted for the crime. The legislative session begins in March.

Reach reporter Allison Nielsen by email atallison@sunshinestatenews.comor follow her on Twitter:@AllisonNielsen.

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Florida House Reloads Stand Your Ground Burden of Proof Bill - Sunshine State News

Florida's Stand Your Ground law led to a "abrupt and sustained" increase in homicides, according to a study published by the American Medical Association.

Since the law's passage, gun-related homicides have increased nearly 32 percent from when the law passed in 2005 and 2014.

"These increases appear to have occurred despite a general decline in homicide in the United States since the early 1990s," according to the study authored by two professors at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and one from the University of Pennsylvania.

Florida was the first state to enact the law and 22 other states have followed suit.

The study, "Evaluating the Impact of Florida's 'Stand Your Ground' Self-defense Law on Homicide and Suicide by Firearm" found that the state's homicide rate was higher compared to states such as New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Virginia that do no have Stand Your Ground Laws.

The law, which says a person has "no duty to retreat" when he or she believes that force is necessary to prevent harm to themselves or others, gained notoriety after neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in Sanford in 2012. Zimmerman claimed self-defense.

Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings who is also the president of the Florida Sheriff's Association, that supported the law said the study falls short of "objective reason."

"The Florida Sheriffs Association ... believes that the reasons why individuals commit homicides are a complex matter which cannot be attributed to a single factor," he said in a statement. "As such, the report should be narrowly interpreted and falls short of objective reason."

Gary Kleck, a criminal justice professor at Florida State University and expert on use of force, called the study arbitrary because there can be many other reasons for the rise in homicides.

"It's very weak methodology," he said.

dharris@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5471

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Study: Stand Your Ground law increased homicides in ...

On Monday, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a paper on American self-defense law so fundamentally flawed that it is hard to view its publication as anything other than an act of propaganda.

The papers title describes its purported purpose: Evaluating the Impact of Floridas Stand Your Ground Self-defense Law on Homicide and Suicide by Firearm and its implicit conclusion is that Stand Your Ground is bad public policy because it fosters unlawful killing. Indeed, one of the papers authors, Antonio Gasparrini, makes this conclusion explicit in telling the U.K.s Daily Mail that this study highlights how Stand Your Ground is likely to be a cause of the rise in Florida murders (emphasis added).

In fact, the paper does not, and indeed by its very methodology cannot, do anything of the sort. The papers defects are numerous, but I shall focus on just two.

First, the paper conflates homicide and murder, and thus cannot result in valid findings with respect to murder in particular or with public safety in general. Second, the study contrasts Floridas Stand Your Ground law with a set of four purportedly nonStand Your Ground states. One of the four states in the control set, however, routinely applies Stand Your Ground doctrine in much the same manner as does Florida. This failure of methodology substantively invalidates the papers findings, and should have been identified in peer review long before publication in JAMA. (The widespread defects in the peer-review process of even, or perhaps especially, premier scientific journals are another subject entirely).

Homicide and Murder Are Not Synonyms

It is a common misconception that homicide and murder are essentially synonymous. They are not, and the authors should have explicitly noted the distinction in their methodology. Instead, they fail to even vaguely reference this essential issue until the third-to-last sentence of the paper. (Why this was buried in such a manner is left to the reader to consider.)

Homicide merely means the killing of a person by a person. Murder refers to the subset of homicides that are unlawful. This distinction is vital for public-policy discussion, because homicides that do not qualify as murder are not only lawful but are in many cases a social good. A few hypotheticals illustrate clearly why this is so.

An intended rape victim who shoots and kills her rapist to stop his sexual assault has committed a homicide. She has not, however, committed a murder. Her homicide of the rapist is lawful self-defenseand by any reasonable moral standard is preferable to the alternative of compelling her to allow herself to be raped. Similarly, a homeowner who shoots and kills an armed felony intruder has committed a homicidebut not a murder. In both cases, the killings qualify as lawful self-defense.

As a final example, and to draw an analogy to a recent well-publicized event, if a lawfully armed citizen shoots and kills a terrorist ruthlessly gunning down unarmed gay people in a Florida nightclub, he has stopped a murderous act of terrorism, not committed a murder. This to-be-wished-for outcome was prevented at the Pulse massacre by laws that prohibit firearms in locations that serve alcohol, a prohibition ignored by ISIS-allegiant Omar Mateen. (Criminals ignoring the law is a common mechanism of failure for preemptive gun-control laws generally, and is perhaps a matter worthy for a paper published in JAMA.)

By failing to distinguish between murder and homicide, the JAMA paper conflates unlawful and lawful killings. Indeed, it is quite possible that fully 100 percent of the increase in Florida homicides, which the paper attributes to the Stand Your Ground law, were in fact lawful acts of self-defense, the alternative to which would have been the murder, maiming, and rape of innocent victims. If so, the effect of the Stand Your Ground law has been to reduce the murder, maiming, and rape of innocent victims, arguably the very social good intended by its passage. For some reason, however, I see a remarkable absence of press coverage of this paper headlined, Stand Your Ground Law Shown to Safeguard Innocent Life. Odd, that.

Its Hard to Effectively Study What You Dont Actually Understand

The second fundamental error in this paper is that the authors have a basic ignorance of the legal principles they are purporting to study. This is perhaps not surprising given that their listed associated academic departments include Social Policy and Intervention, Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Biostatistics and Epidemiology, but nothing actually related to law. (Incidentally, I extend an open invitation to researchers desiring insight on these legal issues.)

A key facet of the papers methodology is a contrast of Stand Your Ground in Florida to four purportedly nonStand Your Ground states: New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Virginia. Although it is true that New York, New Jersey, and Ohio impose a legal duty to retreat on all defenders who have the safe means to do so before they are permitted to resort to deadly force in self-defense, this is not the case for Virginia.

In fact, Virginia takes a unique approach on whether a defender has a legal duty to retreat or has the right to stand his ground. Under Virginia law, a defender who has made a contribution to the affray that is, someone who is not an entirely innocent party in the conflict does indeed have a legal duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense. In that subset of self-defense scenarios, Virginia acts much like the duty-to-retreat states of New York, New Jersey, and Ohio.

A defender who has not made a contribution to the affray, however someone who is in every sense the innocent victim of an act of criminal predation has absolutelyno legal duty under Virginia law to retreat before they may use deadly force in self-defense. Because of this, to include Virginia among the set of nonStand Your Ground states used as a contrast for Florida is to fundamentally undermine the studys methodological validity on this point.

My reading of the papers methodology suggests that the authors fell into this error because they mistakenly believe that Americas Stand Your Ground laws are to be found only in statutes, the laws created by the state legislatures. This is a grave error. America also recognizes case law, the laws created by decisions of courts. That this is the cause of the authors error here is suggested by the fact that the paper claims that Stand Your Ground doctrine is the law in a minority of 23 of the 50 states. In fact, 35 states impose no legal duty on a defender to retreat. The states the authors missed largely enacted Stand Your Ground not through statute but through case law, and generally many decades before Florida adopted its Stand Your Ground statute in 2005.

For example, California instructs its juries in self-defense cases that a defender may not only stand his ground, he may even pursue his attacker if necessary for his safety. This position makes California one of the most aggressive Stand Your Ground states in America, and its stance is based on its case law dating back to 1898. At the same time, California has not a single Stand Your Ground statute on the books. It is noteworthy that the authors erroneously fail to include California as among the Stand Your Ground states.

This second error strongly suggests that not only did the authors either not understand or choose to conceal the vital distinction between murder and homicide, they fundamentally dont understand how the legal doctrine of Stand Your Ground is implemented or created in American law.

Research or Propaganda?

In closing, I note that in the third-to-last sentence of the paper the authors write: Our study examined the effect of the Florida law on homicide and homicide by firearm, not on crime and public safety. Wait, what? And you waited until the very end of the paper to explicitly disclose this highly relevant fact?

Then, pray tell, what was the purpose of writing the paper in the first place? Indeed, the same question must be raised with respect to JAMAs decision to publish the paper. If the paper is not informative or useful for public-policy purposes, given that it explicitly concedes that it does not address crime and public safety, then exactly what is its purpose? Surely the purpose could not have been to serve merely as propagandistic raw materials for antiStand Your Ground headlines by a nave popular press eager to uncritically accept JAMAs prestige? Surely not.

The papers conflation of murder and homicide and its basic ignorance of the legal principles in question are only the beginning of its authors errors. The two described above, however, should be more than sufficient to compel JAMA to immediately retract this paper because of its fundamental flaws in methodology and frank lack of utility.

Andrew F. Branca is an attorney and the author of The Law of Self Defense: The Indispensable Guide for the Armed Citizen.

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A picture of Trayvon Martin is seen on a table with others pictures of people killed by gun violence at the third annual Circle of Mothers conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, May 16, 2016.

Floridas Stand Your Ground law, the subject of controversy following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, has been linked to a significant increase in gun-related homicides, a new study has found.

As NBC News reports, the paper, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, says that the implementation in 2005 of the states self-defense law was associated with a 24.4 percent increase in homicides and a 31.6 percent increase in firearm-related homicides.

A so-called Stand Your Ground law removes the duty to retreat when confronted with a perceived deadly threat. Florida was the first of more than 20 states to have implemented such laws.

Published at 4:59 PM PST on Nov 14, 2016 | Updated at 7:31 PM PST on Nov 14, 2016

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'Stand Your Ground' Law Linked to Significant Increase in ...

The stand your ground law only applies when the shooter is white and the victim is black.

These laws have been hotly contested since the 2012 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by self-appointed neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman. In 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of the fatal shooting because of self-defense arguments, to which a jury determined that he used reasonable force to propel Martins alleged attacks. Despite uncontroverted testimony showing that Zimmerman was initially following Martin, even when a 911 dispatcher said we dont need you to do that, Zimmerman was found not guilty of all charges.

Stand your ground laws remove a white individuals duty to retreat before using force even deadly force in self-defense against a black person. For the past 10 years, they have been backed by powerful gun lobbyists, anti-black legislators, and conservative media. Currently, 33 states (Florida being the first) have some form of stand your ground laws, and like most laws, they have been grossly misapplied ever since.

It is clear that such laws only hold up in court when the targets are black people. Matthew Apperson, 37, understands this all too well.

Man who fired at George Zimmerman is sentenced

Most would think that Zimmerman who many believe literally got away with murder would crawl under a rock until it was safe for him to reappear. But even after the killing of Martin, Zimmerman has had multiple run-ins with law enforcement, and his actual and perceived whiteness allows him to escape every time. From multiple traffic ticketsto Shellie Zimmerman, his wife, filing for divorceto punching Shellies dad in the face to domestic violence charges filed by his then-girlfriend that were eventually dropped to the current incident against Apperson, its apparent that Zimmerman loves controversy and escaping prosecution.

Like Zimmerman in 2013, Apperson claimed he shot at Zimmermanin self-defense, alleging that Zimmerman pulled a gun on him during a road rage incident. The Seminole County jury later convicted Apperson of attempted second-degree murder for shooting into an occupied car and for aggravated assault. Apperson was sentenced to 20 years in prison, part of Floridas mandatory minimum sentence for shooting at another person with a gun.

Here we are again: another Florida court that promotes justice just gave Zimmerman another license to continue his reckless behaviors. Lets face it: ifZimmerman wereblack, Apperson would have been acquitted of all charges. We know this because it happened a mere three years ago. Now, to be clear, the stand your ground law was not the direct reason for Zimmermans 2012 acquittal because the law grants immunity from prosecution (and Zimmerman was prosecuted by former State Prosecutor Angela Corey, albeit minimally) but it was absolutely interwoven into the self-defense theory.

The sad truth is that stand your ground laws dont apply to black people unless the defendant is white and the dead person is black. The purpose of stand your ground laws is to not have to retreat or flee, even if a person has a safe place to do so, if an individual reasonably believes doing so would prevent death or serious bodily injury or harm. Marissa Alexander knew this wouldnt apply to her black body because the person she was defending herself against was her husband.

On July 31, 2010, after an argument ensued between her and her husband, Rico Gray, who physically assaulted her, Alexander fired a single shot at the wall to scare off him off. Gray was not injured. In May 2012, Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in Florida for discharging a firearm. It didnt matter that Gray was previously arrested three times for domestic violence charges, and it didnt matter that Alexander was afraid for her life because both Alexander and Rico were both black, and stand your ground laws wouldnt apply to either of them.

Despite Alexanders release from prison in January 2015, many advocates and activists understood that there was a gross misapplication of stand your ground laws when they would otherwise apply if the victim were black and if the defendant were white.

The stand your ground law often seen as an offshoot of the castile doctrine, which grants immunity from liability to individuals when an intruder enters their home started to coddle white fear of black intruders. In the eyes of many white people, black people are already perceived as initial aggressors, and therefore, stand your ground laws have continuously worked to the disadvantage of black people and our bodies.

Statistically, there are more stand your ground laws concentrated in the South, where there are also more black people. Over the years, this has provided more coverage to white shooters of black victims than it has black shooters of white victims. Race matters a lot in stand your ground states and verdicts.

If there is anything the Trayvon Martin killing taught black people in America, it is that the definition of justice differs throughout this entire country and race plays in 100 percent of that definition. The Zimmerman case in 2013 was a perfect example of where these stand your ground laws would have been used to protect people like Trayvon the person being followed by a stranger much older and bigger but blackness doesnt work that way.

It never has.

Preston Mitchum is a Washington, DC-based writer, activist, and policy nerd. He has written for the Atlantic, The Root, Ebony.com, Huffington Post, Hello Beautiful, and Think Progress. Follow him on Twitterhereto see just how much he appreciates intersectionality.

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Stand Your Ground laws only apply when the targets are ...