Stand Your Ground Laws: Ethics, Racial Impact, and Reform

Introduction

The 13th of July 2013 marked the peak of controversy surrounding Stand Your Ground laws — statutes that grant people the right to use lethal force in self-defense without any obligation to retreat, and which "have proliferated since the NRA successfully lobbied the Legislature to pass the first in 2005" (Mayors against Illegal Guns 2). On that day, a Florida court acquitted George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, of all charges relating to the controversial killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old he had shot on the 26th of February the previous year. The jury held that, in accordance with Florida's expansive self-defense statute, Zimmerman had exercised his right by standing his ground and using force to meet force, and had therefore committed no unlawful act. The acquittal sent the public and civil society groups into a frenzy, prompting stakeholders in the 24 states that operate Stand Your Ground laws to embark on repealing or scaling back those statutes.

What stands out in Martin's case, and in others discussed throughout this paper, is that Stand Your Ground laws function more as an invitation to kill than as a protective measure. They impede justice and public safety, increase rates of justifiable homicide, and — most troublingly — cause minority groups to disproportionately bear the brunt of that increase.

Historical Background of Stand Your Ground Laws

The Duty to Retreat: Wible (124–125) notes that the duty to retreat, embedded in America's common law, provided the basis for all self-defense laws in existence today. It requires an individual under threat to retreat before justifiably killing their attacker (Mayors against Illegal Guns 3).

The Castle Doctrine: This was an exception to the duty to retreat. Under it, people were not required to retreat when threatened inside their own homes (Mayors against Illegal Guns 2).

Under these two principles of self-defense, Americans had the "legal right to 'stand their ground' and use non-deadly force to protect themselves from an attacker, as long as their use of force was reasonably necessary" (Mayors against Illegal Guns 3). The duty to retreat encouraged the use of measures other than lethal force; and while deadly force could be justified in certain circumstances, it was to be used only as a last resort (Wible 124).

Stand Your Ground laws effectively inverted these traditional self-defense principles, allowing people to make use of lethal force even in public spaces. Havis (120) points out that there have been numerous instances in which defendants raised claims of self-defense even when it was apparent that the death in question would not have occurred had the defendant safely left the area.

Stand Your Ground laws are often falsely labeled "Castle Doctrine provisions," but as Mayors against Illegal Guns (3–4) explain, the former go far beyond home defense. These laws are applicable anywhere, making them the rule rather than an exception to the Castle Doctrine. Today, it is common for confrontations in entertainment venues, playgrounds, or on highways to escalate into dangerous shootings; and it is equally common for those responsible for the resulting deaths to evade "prosecution and conviction by asserting that they acted in self-defense" (Mayors against Illegal Guns 3). Stand Your Ground rules, unlike the traditional self-defense principles, therefore raise serious ethical and justice-related concerns, as discussed in the sections that follow.

Works Cited

Gardner, Thomas, and Terry Anderson. Criminal Law. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2014. Print.

Havis, Devonya. Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics. Ed. George Yancy and Janine Jones. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. Print.

Lee, Suevon. "Five 'Stand Your Ground' Cases You Should Know About." ProPublica, 2012. Web.

Mayors against Illegal Guns. "Stand Your Ground Laws and Their Effect on Violent Crime and the Criminal Justice System." Mayors against Illegal Guns, 2013. Web. 8 May 2014.

Wible, Dan. Halftime in America: The Challenge Years — Fighting to Stop Progressive Tyranny in the United States. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2012. Print.