In the aftermath of a recent high-profile U.S. murder trial, several new studies have found that the controversial self-defence law at the heart of the case, known as “Stand Your Ground”, is being applied differently depending on defendants’ ethnicity.

The new statistics on this racial disparity have come out as the Stand Your Ground laws, which have been passed in nearly three-dozen U.S. states, have come under review at the state and federal level.“We need to work towards building safe communities where all kids can grow up in prosperous environments and not be worried about being gunned down.” -- Paul Graham of the Centre for Community Change

That includes in Florida, the location of the widely viewed trial of a “neighbourhood watch” volunteer named George Zimmerman, who was accused of the murder of an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman’s acquittal last month, explained by some jurors as being based largely on the legality of his actions under Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute, outraged broad sections of the country.

The state-level “self-defence” statute was first introduced in 2005, and allows someone who feels threatened to use deadly force against an attacker without first trying to get away. For this reason, the law is also known as “No Duty to Retreat” and, by critics, “Shoot First”, and has been increasingly criticised for escalating rather than mitigating conflict.

Yet according to a new study by the Urban Institute, the application of this law has varied significantly according to the ethnic make-up of both the attacker and the victim.

The shooting of a black person by a white person, for instance, has been found to be justifiable under Stand Your Ground 17 percent of the time. On the other hand, the shooting of a white person by a black person has been found justifiable just slightly over one percent of the time.

In the states that have no such statute, white-on-black shootings were found to be justified about nine percent of the time.

“Stand Your Ground clearly has racial implication in communities of colour and black neighbourhoods,” Paul Graham, with the Ohio Organising Collaborative at the Centre for Community Change, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“When you have this kind of disparity and this kind of inequality, it is a devastating blow for all communities.”

Another recent investigation, carried out by the Tampa Bay Times, a Florida newspaper, looked at some 200 Stand Your Ground cases and found that defendants who had killed a black victim went free 73 percent of the time. Yet defendants who killed a white victim went free just 59 percent of the time.

Since 2005, 31 other states have followed Florida’s lead in passing similar laws, while several others are reportedly considering similar legislation. On average, so-called justifiable homicide rose by about eight percent in states with Stand Your Ground laws, amounting to about 600 additional killings.

“We need to work towards building safe communities where all kids can grow up in prosperous environments and not be worried about being gunned down,” Graham says.

Under fire

The Stand Your Ground laws were strongly pushed for by a few high-profile gun-rights groups here, in particular the National Rifle Association (NRA). In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin verdict, these groups have doubled down their support for these laws, including by suggesting that minorities stand the most to gain from such self-defence legislation.

“We all know why it’s come under fire right now, because of that one case in Florida, but that’s just a ruse for attacking self-defence in general,” Erich Pratt, communications director for Gun Owners of America, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“[Changing Stand Your Ground] would adversely affect minorities, if we say that they are not going to be able to defend themselves when they fear for their lives. That’s really what we are talking about.”

Indeed, the Tampa Bay Times study also found that black gunshot victims were more likely than whites to be carrying a weapon when they were killed and were more likely to be committing a crime, such as burglary, at the time of any altercation.

In addition, while blacks make up just 12 percent of the U.S. population, they constitute some 55 percent of its homicide victims, with the majority of those murders committed by other blacks.

Further, black youths have had a high success rate in arguing for justified homicide under Stand Your Ground law in “black-on-black” crimes.

However, there remains significant disparity in the success rate of justified homicide between white defendants and black defendants in white-on-black crimes.

“The bottom line is that it’s really easy for juries to accept that whites had to defend themselves against persons of colour,” said Darren Hutchinson, a law professor and civil rights law expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

This evident racial disparity is now strengthening national calls for investigations into Stand Your Ground laws and their application on the ground.

“[I]f a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario … both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different,” President Barack Obama said last month in unusually personal remarks following the Zimmerman acquittal.

“And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened?”

He continued: “And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

Since then, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a government body, has started an investigation into these laws, while the Senate Judiciary Committee has also stated it would hold hearings on Stand Your Ground in September.

The Florida State Legislature will also be taking another look at the effect, benefits and consequences of the law this fall, the first such move it has made. Still, supporters are girding for a fight.

“I don’t expect that the legislature’s going to move one damn comma,” Matt Gaetz, chairperson of the Florida Criminal Justice Subcommittee and a supporter of the law, said recently. “If the members of the committee support changes, they will be proposed, but nobody can count on my vote.”

The acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has sparked backlash against Stand Your Ground laws. Above, a 2012 protest against Martin's death. Credit: David Shankbone/CC by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jul 18 2013 (IPS)

In the aftermath of the recent acquittal of 31-year-old Florida native George Zimmerman, the state’s so-called Stand Your Ground law has come under national scrutiny, as have dozens of other states that have enacted similar legislation.

The criticism will perhaps be led by whatever the U.S. Justice Department chooses to do with the case. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder denounced the law Tuesday in a keynote address at an annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), an esteemed advocacy group.

During his speech, Holder also pledged to open a full investigation into the death of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African-American youth whom Zimmerman, a Latino, fatally shot in February 2012. Over the past two months, Zimmerman’s case has riveted U.S. audiences and sparked a countrywide discussion of the role of race – and racial profiling – in the United States today.

“It is our collective obligation,” Holder said. “We must stand our ground to ensure that our laws reduce violence and take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.”"We must..take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent."
-- Eric Holder

Florida’s Stand Your Ground law was passed in 2005 with a unanimous vote in the state senate and a 94-20 vote in the house. Five years later, the rate of so-called justifiable homicide in Florida had tripled. And since 2005, 31 other states have followed Florida’s lead in passing similar “self-defence” laws.

Under the Florida law, a person can use “defensive force” that is intended to cause harm to another person if they feel “reasonably” threatened – say, if someone is breaking into their house or if they are beaten or kidnapped. The law does not apply if the person against whom defensive force is used has a right to be on the property or is a law-enforcement officer.

“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 is he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so,” according to the Florida law.

The law also states that if a person is being unreasonably attacked, they have no obligation to retreat. This element has led to increasingly strident criticism from those who worry the law results in escalation, rather than de-escalation, of potentially violent situations.

Such a dynamic appears to have taken place in the ensuing fight between Zimmerman, an armed “neighbourhood watch” volunteer, and Martin in February 2012.

Some suggest the law is a solution looking for a problem and point out that there was no evidence of any such problem prior to the signing of the Stand Your Ground law in Florida.

“It [the law] allows someone to shoot and kill another human being in the fear of great bodily harm. Great bodily harm means a fist fight,” Ladd Everitt, director of communications at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“Even if someone hasn’t sustained any damage, this law allows them to shoot and kill someone based only on a fear.”

Zimmerman’s lawyers did not bring up the law during his trial, but it was included in the instructions to the jury, who acquitted him on Saturday, Jul. 13.

Time to re-examine

“There has always been a legal defence for using deadly force if – and the ‘if’ is important – no safe retreat is available,” Holder noted Tuesday.

The Immunity from Criminal Prosecution clause of the Florida law states that if the person who used defensive force in accordance with the law is granted immunity in court and wins the case, the prosecution is required to pay the defence’s attorney fees, court costs and compensation for any loss of income. Zimmerman did not file for immunity in the criminal court case that ended last week.

“The attorney general fails to understand that self-defence is not a concept, it’s a fundamental human right,” Chris W. Cox, the executive director of the National Rifle Association‘s Institute for Legislative Action, the lobby group’s advocacy arm, said in a statement.

“To send a message that legitimate self-defence is to blame is unconscionable, and demonstrates again that this administration will exploit tragedies to push their political agenda.”

Following the 2005 passage of the Stand Your Ground law, NRA operatives and legislators aligned with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and created a piece of model legislation mirroring the Florida law and which could in turn be passed throughout the country. ALEC encouraged and advocated this passage and initially called the legislation one of its successes.

Subsequently, 49 major corporations, including General Motors, General Electric and Coca-Cola, severed ties with the organisation. ALEC has since abandoned its criminal justice task force that promoted the Stand Your Ground law and has disavowed gun bills.

Thirty-one states, including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana, currently have a Stand Your Ground law. Eight states have related bills in the legislature right now or are expected to have legislation introduced soon, including Alaska, Illinois and Massachusetts.

California, Colorado and Washington do not have a bill, but Stand Your Ground actions have been upheld in their courts, making it a de facto law. Only seven states have no such laws or bills.

The Zimmerman trial may have sparked pushback against this legislative trend, however.

President Barack Obama “urges upon all communities to examine what we can do … to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening in the future; and to reduce gun violence in general”, press secretary Jay Carney said during a press briefing at the White House on Tuesday.

The president is also urging communities “to look at our laws and examine whether those laws that we have serve to reduce gun violence or, in some cases, inadvertently make the problem worse”.

Holder sharpened this growing critique by suggesting on Tuesday that such self-defence laws actually undermine public safety.

“Separate and apart from the case that has drawn the nation’s attention,” he said, “it’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defence and sow dangerous conflict in our neighbourhoods.”

The NRA did not return calls for comment.