We have seen the legislator who was responsible for the Florida Stand Your Ground - more properly termed Shoot First or Make My Day legislation - claim that the law was never intended for gun carrying civilians to instigate conflicts.
I would argue that it has always been the intent of the authors - the NRA and ALEC, not the legislator - to function exactly as it has. It has functioned to protect shooters similar to Zimmerman, but those cases haven't drawn the attention that the Trayvon Martin case has; THAT is the only significant difference. The law has consistently protected the shooter of unarmed individuals, especially black teens, who were not doing anything wrong, and who were the party being threatened, not threatening anyone.
It is only the uncomfortable massive national pushback that is causing any consideration of change, and even then, not much. Baxley is wrong when he says that his legislation wouldn't protect Zimmerman; it has protected people who decide to execute others and claim self-defense without the kind of threat that was previously required to justify deadly force. It has happened over and over and over again in Florida, and it has happened repeatedly as the norm not the exception in every other state that has similar cookie-cutter NRA/ALEC drafted legislation like Florida's. To claim otherwise appears either ignorant or dishonest, or both on the part of Baxley. Trayvon Martin's shooting is only the most recent in a long list of similar violent acts. The responsibility lies squarely at Baxley's doorstep, and squarely at the doorstep of ALEC and the NRA. There are fundamental problems with the legislation that can only be remedied by repeal, and by other states repealing it where it exists, and by rejecting it where it does not currently exist.
From
CBS News:
CBS News correspondent Jeff Glor reports the law at the center of the
shooting was co-sponsored in 2005 by State Representative Dennis Baxley. The
legislator says he doesn't have any regrets about creating the law.
"I think it's been a great protection for our people," Baxley said.
The intent of the law was to expand the right to claim self defense beyond
the home. It allows a person to "stand his or her ground and meet force with
force," "including deadly force" if there's a reasonable belief it's needed to
"prevent death or great bodily harm," even if there's a chance to escape.
"We thought the self defense measures that we were talking about really
should apply to any law abiding citizen who was doing nothing to harm anyone
else," Baxley said.
From Slate, on how the law has functioned prior to Trayvon Martin to allow innocent people to be murdered, and for the killers consistently to get away with their crimes.
Why Trayvon Martin’s Killer Remains Free
Florida’s self-defense laws have left Florida safe for no one—except those who shoot first.
Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman has not been charged.
family handout
The story of Trayvon Martin’s death is heartbreaking. If you have missed the facts: The 17-year-old, who is black, was walking to a friend’s home in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., when a neighborhood-watch volunteer*, 28-year-old George Zimmerman, spotted him. Zimmerman, whose father says identifies as Hispanic, called the cops to report a suspicious person. They told him not to follow. “They always get away,” Zimmerman told dispatch in a
911 call released Friday, and he kept tracking Martin. Zimmerman had a gun. Martin was carrying only an ice tea and the Skittles he’d just bought at the store. The two had a struggle that no one saw. Hearing shots, neighbors called 911. In one call that’s hard to listen to, a woman anxiously says she can hear someone calling for help while in the background, a terrified, wailing voice pleads, "No! No!"
Zimmerman shot and killed Martin, but he said he did so in self-defense. The shocker of this case so far is that the Sanford police say they don’t have enough evidence to dispute Zimmerman’s claim and arrest him. Martin’s mother
told the Today show Monday morning that her son was killed “because of the color of his skin,” and his parents want the FBI to investigate. With these facts, you can see why.
UPDATE, March 20, 2012: On Monday evening, the Justice Department announced it will investigate Martin's killing.
How did we get to a place where Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense, which seems barely plausible, could prevent his arrest? The answer starts with the “Stand Your Ground” law that Florida passed in 2005. The idea was to give people who think they are being threatened the right to use force: They can protect themselves without first trying to retreat. The history behind that controversial idea is actually about gender, not race. It involves the intersection between the fight against domestic violence and the agenda of the National Rifle Association.
Let’s back up, with the help of Jeannie Suk, a Harvard law professor who wrote an
article in 2008 that I’ll rely on for the next few paragraphs. In the 17
th century, English common law held that people whose lives were threatened in a public place could use deadly force to defend themselves only after retreating as far as possible. It was up to the king and his men to keep the peace, and everyone else was supposed to stand aside. There was only one exception: If someone broke into your house, you could kill him without retreating.
Suk says, some courts expanded it. Now someone under attack could "repel force by force" if he was attacked "in a place where he has a right to be." That’s how the Supreme Court put it in 1895. This is amazingly called the “true man” doctrine, from a line in an 1876 case: “A true man, who is without fault, is not obliged to fly from an assailant, who by violence or surprise, maliciously seeks to take his life or do him enormous bodily harm.”
Not all the states adopted the true man doctrine. And 100 years later, courts and legislatures faced a new problem: What to do with women who said they were victims of domestic violence and had killed their husbands to save themselves? Did you have a right not to retreat if the person coming after you lived under the same roof? At first, the answer was no, to the fury of feminists. Then in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court said a woman who shot and killed her husband during a violent fight at home could successfully call on the Castle Doctrine to argue self-defense. “It is now widely recognized that domestic violence attacks are often repeated over time, and escape from the home is rarely possible without the threat of great personal violence or death,” the court wrote.
Suk calls this revision of the true-man rule to encompass domestic violence transformative, and you can see why. The new rules made for more shooting and less retreating. And they set the stage for Florida to ditch the duty to retreat entirely, which the legislature did in passing the nation’s first Stand Your Ground law in 2005.
Florida’s new law did three things: It further loosened the restrictions on using deadly force at home. It scrapped the duty to retreat in public places. And it gave people who use self-defense civil and criminal immunity. Pushing for these changes, NRA President Marion Hammer focused on women and their need to protect themselves. “You can’t expect a victim to wait and ask, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Criminal, are you going to rape me and kill me, or are you just going to beat me up and steal my television?” she said.
Prosecutors opposed the Stand Your Ground law, and they still complain about it. "It is an abomination," former Broward County Prosecutor David Frankel
told the
Sun Sentinel in January. "The ultimate intent might be good, but in practice, people take the opportunity to shoot first and say later they had a justification. It almost gives them a free pass to shoot." The quote comes from a story about a former sheriff’s deputy, Maury Hernandez, who killed an unarmed homeless man in a Haagen-Dazs shop on a Saturday afternoon. Hernandez, who was with his children, said the man aggressively asked for money and then tried to assault him. Witnesses said Hernandez warned the man several times before taking out his gun and firing multiple times. The police said they wouldn’t charge Hernandez for the shooting because he claimed he was under attack.
It’s that decision not to press charges that makes Stand Your Ground laws, which a bunch of other states have adopted, a crazy departure from the past. It’s one thing to raise self-defense at trial. It’s another to have what the Florida Supreme Court calls “true immunity.” True immunity, the court said, means a trial judge can dismiss a prosecution, based on a Stand Your Ground assertion, before trial begins.
At least there’s supposed to be a hearing before that happens, at which the defendant has the burden of proof. And yet as the Hernandez and Martin’s case shows, Stand Your Ground laws often lead prosecutors to decide against so much as bringing charges.
According to the Sun Sentinel, “In case after case during the past six years, Floridians who shot and killed unarmed opponents have not been prosecuted.”
Now the death of Trayvon Martin is the latest in that line. Maybe this is the kind of case that is so sad and so tinged with racism that Florida will think hard about the very scary place where their self-defense laws have taken them. Maybe.
*Correction, March 20, 2012: This article originally stated that George Zimmerman is white, but his father says he identifies as Hispanic.
From the New York Times:
Trevor Dooley testified last month that he killed a man in self-defense, invoking Florida’s so-called Stand Your Ground law.
Trevor Dooley stood his ground, brandished his gun and killed a man after an argument over local skateboarding rules in a Florida town.
He argued in court last month that he had a right to do so under the state’s Stand Your Ground law.
Outrage over the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, killed by a crime watch volunteer, has focused new attention on the law, which permits those in Florida “to meet force with force, including deadly force” when attacked.
As my colleague Lizette Alvarez reports, the Justice Department is pursuing an investigation into Trayvon’s case.
As that investigation goes forward, the law is currently being invoked as a key defense by Mr. Dooley.
The man he killed, David James, had been playing basketball with his 8-year-old daughter in September 2010 when he and Mr. Dooley began arguing over whether a boy on a skateboard had a right to ride on the court,
according to an account in The St. Petersburg Times. There was a “physical confrontation,” the police said, during which Mr. Dooley fired the weapon he was carrying, killing Mr. James in front of his daughter.
“You agree you do not want to go to prison for killing David James?” he was asked at the trial, according to
televised footage from the courtroom.
“I don’t think I should,” responded Mr. Dooley, who has been charged with manslaughter but says he feared for his life during the altercation with Mr. James.
His lawyers
are seeking to have the case dismissed by a judge on the grounds that the Stand Your Ground law permitted him to defend himself with deadly force.
The law extends what has been called
the Castle Doctrine — that a person has the right to defend his or her home with force — to apply to people outside of the home, removing the so-called “duty to retreat.” The Florida law explicitly states that no such duty exists in the state. The provision appears as part of the
Florida law on the justifiable use of force by citizens.
A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.
The National Rifle Association lobbied strongly for the change to state law,
which was adopted in 2005 and signed by Gov. Jeb Bush. Mr. Bush said at the time that he supported the measure because, faced with a serious threat one’s life, “to have to retreat and put yourself in a very precarious position defies common sense.”
In the years since the law was amended in 2005, there has been a surge in the number of cases like Mr. Dooley’s and that of Trayvon Martin, killed by the neighborhood volunteer, George Zimmerman, last month.
A 2010 review by The St. Petersburg Times found that rates of justifiable homicide tripled since the law was passed and that “twice a week, on average, someone’s killing was considered warranted.”
The paper reviewed press accounts of 93 cases involving 65 deaths in confrontations in which the new law could be applied and found that 57 of them resulted in no criminal charge or trial. In seven others that went to trial, the defendants were then acquitted.
In these cases, the Florida Supreme Court recognizes something called “true immunity.” That means,
according to Emily Bazelon in Slate, that the assertion of the Stand Your Ground law can be enough for a judge to dismiss a case before trial even starts.
A columnist
writing in The Orlando Sentinel said the law made Florida feel “more and more like the Wild West.” But it is far from unique;
more than a dozen states have similar Stand Your Ground provisions.
The Orlando Sentinel
published a primer on the law last weekend, answering some frequently asked questions including:
Q: How did law enforcement respond to the law?
A: Prosecutors across the state opposed the law before it was enacted Oct. 1, 2005. In the following five months, there were at least 13 shootings in Central Florida where self-defense was claimed. Out of six men killed and four more wounded in the cases, only one was armed. Some Orlando-area police agencies simply stopped investigating shootings involving self-defense claims and referred them directly to state prosecutors to decide.
Q: Can an unarmed person legally pose a deadly threat?
In case after case during the past six years, Floridians who shot and killed unarmed opponents have not been prosecuted. Former National Rifle Association President Marion Hammer, a major force behind the law’s passage, cited her own size and age in 2006 interview with the Sentinel about what she would do if confronted by a younger and larger aggressor.
“I’m 4-foot-11. I’m 67 years old,” she said. “If you came at me, and I felt that my life was in danger or that I was going to be injured, I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot you.”
The law may explain why local police did not charge Mr. Zimmerman for killing Trayvon. But further details may cast doubt on the circumstances of their encounter and whether it would fall under the law’s provisions.
A female friend of Trayvon talked to him by cellphone moments before he died. “He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on. He said he lost the man,”
the girl told ABC News. “I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run but he said he was not going to run.” A call to 911 by Mr. Zimmerman also appeared to indicate that
he followed Trayvon.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
wrote on his blog for The Atlantic magazine that “the more I see of this, the less I think ‘Stand Your Ground’ will save Zimmerman.”
If Coates is correct, it will only be because the law doesn't stand up well to the kind of scrutiny it is currently receiving. The outrage is long past overdue.
