This is correct. There is some confusion about these terms, so perhaps it is good to understand them as ordered in a hierarchy.
Rule of retreat. Wherever the victim is, before using deadly force, all avenues of safe retreat must be foreclosed.
However, there a certain places (places we ordinarily imagine a person retreating to) that we think a person should not be compelled to retreat from.
This produced the Castle Doctrine, which states that no retreat is required (even if it could be done in perfect safety) from the victim’s home.
Over time, a few more places got added to this jurisprudentially or by statute. A sort of Castle Doctrine Plus, which holds that retreat is also not required from one’s workplace or one’s car.
Before going further, one should note that the rule of retreat is not a sanction for the activities of the assailant, but prophylactic. Knowing that it can be difficult to prove what occurred during an encounter between two people when, because of that encounter, one of them ends up dead, the rule of retreat operates to disfavor the creation of those scenarios.
Anyway, within the last several years, Castle Doctrine Plus has been thought to be inadequate to protect law-abiding folks (an assessment with which I do not agree) and Stand Your Ground has come into vogue. SYG states that one never has to retreat from a place in which one is lawfully located.
This rule allows (to its supporters) the swift administration of natural justice. But to those of us who are not prepared merely to take a shooter’s say-so, it creates an evidentiary lacuna. The question is: Does the benefit of relieving people from having to retreat from places they have a right to be (in the still very uncommon circumstance of being threatened with deadly force*) outweigh the tendency of this situation to present, after the fact, with these evidentiary gaps.
- This is a difference in worldview. SYG supporters seem to perceive the world as fundamentally hostile and our ability to punish lawbreakers as hopelessly inadequate. Thus SYG is needed to parry a menacing world. Suffice it to say, I think this is overblown (and more the consequence of internal psychodramas) than a reflection of just how often people are genuinely imperiled with death.
Florida then adopted a Stand Your Ground Plus, which not only incorporates SYG, but also immunizes those asserting SYG from prosecution. This is an inversion that approaches lawlessness, in my view. The trial is precisely what separates the real-deal SYG wheat from the pretextual chaff.
SYG Plus was the cause of what first made this case so galvanizing: that Zimmerman could say “Yeah, I shot him. But I was defending myself. And therefore you cannot arrest me and try me and examine this claim.”
Now, ultimately, that was undone. But all those who wonder “Why is this run-of-the-mill self-defense case engendering so much angst?” might want to inquire whether sparing a self-defender the outrage of raising his allegations at trial and having them challenged is worth the social ill of the perception that people are being permitted to get away with murder without even having to at least subject his claim of self-defense to prosecutorial challenge.
Again, this depends on worldview. If you think “Well, yeah, it’s not all that unlikely that maybe one day I’ll have to kill someone in self-defense and I would hate to have to go to trial over it,” you’ll see it one way. If you rather (the less unhinged view, as I see it) understand killing in self-defense to be an extraordinary event that a few people are unlucky enough to have to experience, you may be more inclined to consider a trial a necessary (social peace preserving) ordeal.
But, to answer you question: No my proposal does not alter any of the rules of retreat or exceptions thereto. It simply addresses the party who bears the burden (and the quantum of proof in meeting that burden) of showing that the applicable have been complied with.