Can police officers invoke Stand Your Ground laws?

Last month I started an MPSIMS thread about an officer shooting an unarmed man in North Carolina. Officer Randall Kerrick was quickly charged with manslaughter in Jonathon Ferrell’s death.

Details of the case (as much as we know right now, anyway) can be found in that thread; I’ll offer a quick recap here:

Ferrell was driving alone late at night when he ran his car off the road and into an embankment. He freed himself from the wreckage and approached a nearby house. He pounded on the door, waking the homeowner who happened to be a mother with a baby. She thought it was her husband, so she opened the door, only to see a stranger on her doorstep. She slammed the door and made a panicked 911 call. Three officers responded. Mr. Farrell was located nearby and while approaching the officers, Officer Kerrick fired 12 shots at Mr. Farrell, striking him 10 times and killing him.

You can listen to the 911 call here.

Ok, so now some people are saying that Officer Kerrick should not even be charged, since he should be covered under North Carolina’s SYG laws.[

](http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/randall-kerrick-cop-who-killed-unarmed-jonathan-ferrell-may-be-covered-stand-your)
Here is North Carolina’s SYG laws.

Can police officers invoke SYG laws in their defense? Should they be able to? Or are SYG laws clearly intended for civilians only? Does the language in SYG laws reflect your conclusions, and if not, how should they be re-written to accurately reflect what you see as their intent?

I don’t know how the courts will rule, but it seems to me that SYG laws are definitely NOT written for the police, but rather for civilians. I think that most of them (well, all of the ones I have personally looked up) are poorly written and don’t make that point explicitly clear. I’d like to see them re-written to clarify the circumstances under which force, especially deadly force, can be used so that a person’s fear has to be justified with some qualifier, i.e. the fear should be supported by reasonable facts and a reasonable interpretation of them, lest we allow any fearful person, or person claiming fear, to simply kill whoever they want to kill.

I don’t see how it wouldn’t apply to police officers. All it says is “a person.” A police officer is pretty obviously a person.

Well, no. Not so obviously.

That is how they are written, the fear or belief must be reasonable.

Michigan:

Kentucky:

Arizona:

And, North Carolina:

Bolding mine.

As far as I can tell.

I don’t see why not, a police officer has just as much right to defend himself as a civilian does.

If if were clear, the law would indicate. Plenty of states, if not all, have laws barring the use of force against police officers, like this from from North Carolina:

So, the intersection of self-defense and law enforcement was obviously contemplated. If the intent was to have different rules for police officers, the law would create different rules for police officers.

Yes, it does.

Police do not assert SYG as a defense, they always have the right to retreat to minimize harm to them, but that is a personal decision.

They have authority and absolute power from the state to use that force which is necessary to effect an arrest.

Well a corpse rarely resists being cuffed.

Right, cops have no duty to retreat when faced with a threat. (Nor are they obliged to place themselves in greater danger.) That would be pretty dumb. It may be the smart thing to do, depending on the circumstances, but its certainly not required.

In this case, it is being discussed as a possible defense in the killing of Mr. Farrel by Officer Kerrick, tho. I’m not aware of any effort to arrest Mr. Farrell, nor am I aware of any claim, other than by the cartoonishly-panicked 911 caller, of any possible crime that Mr. Farrell is suspected of committing. And even the evidence doesn’t support the caller’s claim that Mr. Farrell was trying to enter her house illegally.

An officer killing a person is subject to Constitutional scrutiny, the specific facts are cruial in ascertaining any liability.

I’m not sure what you mean by “Constitutional scrutiny” but in practice it’s extremely rare that officers are convicted of a crime or found to have any civil liability for on-the-job shootings.

And to the OP, LEOs have no more duty to retreat than any other citizen when facing a threat. In other words, SYG applies to them too. Whether their fear was reasonable or not is the sort of grist that our judicial process deals with, but in past cases, LEOs have been given pretty broad deference when it comes to their perceptions of threats (too broad, imho).

Also, many SYG laws have special exceptions designed to protect LEOs from citizens who might be inclined to SYG against them. It usually says something along the lines of ‘Joe Citizen has no duty to retreat and can stand his ground unless the person who he uses force against is an on-duty / uniformed LEO.’

Thanks for the replies.

I guess what I’m having trouble with is the notion that these laws would apply to the police since I never knew that the police would ever have NOT been justified in using reasonable force (including deadly force when necessary) to prevent crimes. I thought the whole purpose of SYG laws was to clarify that ordinary citizens have a right to defend themselves and others (and/or their property in the form of so-called Castle Doctrine laws).

Is my perception there incorrect?

Just doing a quick read of the law, it seems to say that someone may stand their ground if they are located in their home, a motor vehicle, or their workplace. A workplace is defined as a place with a roof on it where someone works.

I’m not understanding how the police officer can claim he is covered by this law when the news clip seems to indicate that the officer was standing on a road when the shooting occurred. (I’m not even getting into the question of whether someone running up to (or at?) the police is presumed to be an aggressor.

The link in the OP is a bit hard to read, since it’s the actual bill and contains all sorts of strikethroughs and such. Here is a direct link to the relevant law in North Carolina:

Calling it “Stand Your Ground” is a reference to the “does not have a duty to retreat” portion; SYG laws remove a duty to retreat if possible before using force, though, based on other replies, it seems that police officers didn’t have that duty anyway.

You seem to be referring to GS 14-51.2:

This is the “Castle Doctrine”, unrelated to Stand Your Ground, which states that an intruder being in one’s home, vehicle, or workplace automatically constitutes reasonable fear for the purposes of self-defense, regardless of the exact conduct of the intruder. That is, if someone breaks into your house, you can legally use deadly force even if they surrender, have their hands full with your TV, or try to flee. Outside the home, you could not, you’d have to have a reasonable belief that deadly force was necessary to prevent immenient death or serious injury or you’d be guilty of a crime.

Ah – it sure seemed that I was missing something. Thanks for clarifying.

Killing a person by a police officer is a SEIZURE and must be reasonable, cf. Tennessee v. Garner.

What you seem to be saying is that SYG laws cannot be invoked by LEO since they are already held to a higher standard than ordinary citizens. Do I understand you correctly?

What exactly do you mean by “invoke Stand Your Ground laws”? I think there’s confusion because “Stand Your Ground” seems to get applied to different laws. In one sense it means having no duty to retreat if you’re in a place where you’re allowed to be, but it also seems to be used to refer to laws that allow people to have separate hearings on whether a prosecution or lawsuit should even be allowed to continue.

Removing the duty to retreat probably doesn’t even make sense when talking about the police, unless police officers had a duty to retreat before SYG was around.

I don’t understand your question; did you read the OP? Here, I’ll quote again the relevant quote, and bold the important part:[

](http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/randall-kerrick-cop-who-killed-unarmed-jonathan-ferrell-may-be-covered-stand-your)

Perhaps you thought it was unclear somehow (:confused:) when I then asked:

I understand his confusion. All “Stand Your Ground” does is remove the duty to retreat before using force in self-defense. According to lawbuff, MikeF, and [url=Duty to retreat - Wikipedia]Wikipedia](http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/randall-kerrick-cop-who-killed-unarmed-jonathan-ferrell-may-be-covered-stand-your), on-duty police officers already had no duty to retreat. Therefore, “Stand Your Ground” shouldn’t affect this case, unless it’s referring to the pre-trial immunity hearing that some states offer to those who’ve used force in self-defense.