Are you honestly unaware that you don’t have free license to aggressively lay hands on someone with no repercussions, or are you being ironic? In my State it’s battery - I know because I pressed charges against someone for doing just that. I would hazard it’s either assault or battery in a majority of States.
I’m a little late to this, but I will say this:
I fully support Stand Your Ground laws, but the name defines its application. The law should no longer apply to you the moment you begin actively pursuing somebody. Unless you are a police officer, once your safety or that of your family is not at risk you need to call the police and have them handle it. The cases at hand seem to be severe misapplications of the law.
There is a lot of potential for gray area, but if you take the name of the law for its true purpose it should eliminate most of the controversy it’s currently facing. My impression of the current case is that the man overstepped his bounds by actively pursuing and personally confronting the man who was shot. Self-defense does not imply that you can do anything, put yourself in a position that may require deadly force, then use it and claim that you had no other choice. The totality of your actions, including those that came before the shooting, should be considered.
I don’t oppose the text in the Florida stand your ground law, I think it’s a good principle, actually. What I’m seeing though is the text in that statute isn’t working out in the real world as I, a layman, would have expected. It ends up it’s causing at least some problems in a dozen or so cases I’ve seen mentioned on various news articles. Potentially there are more out there, too.
A good point was made in this thread of course that if only a very small number of bad results come about due to this law, we could be making mountains out of molehills. However we have to identify what the positives are from this law.
Just as an interesting side note, my understanding is that under traditional common law, and as is still the case in the UK, there was never a duty to retreat. Wiki’s article on Duty to Retreat provides an interesting comparison to England’s law.
This is what I see as the nub of the problem – the “stand your ground” defense can legally come into effect at any time during a prolonged event or confrontation. Yes, Zimmerman could follow Martin against police advice, yes he could confront him and scream accusations and questions at him and yes he could act like a complete asshole the entire time. And yes, he could make Martin scared for his own safety in the process – so scared that Martin might have decided he needed to defend himself and take a swing at Zimmerman or push him out of the way or initiate some other physical exchange. At which point Zimmerman decides he’s the one who’s now in fear of his safety, and pulls out his gun and shoots.
I’m not saying it did happen this way, but it could have, and as far as I can tell from the language of the law, Zimmerman may have been totally within the bounds of the law – so long as he himself did not commit a crime in the final stages of this confrontation. And if he did, there were apparently no witnesses to it, so he may be legally in the clear.
I have no idea if the law can be amended in a way to eliminate a possibility like this, but I am skeptical. As I understand it, this new law expanded the “castle doctrine” to public spaces. If you have no duty to retreat anywhere, you can kill anyone you can goad into a physical response, even if there are witnesses. And if there aren’t witnesses around, then it is a virtual license to kill.
Another thing about the scenario I laid out-- Zimmerman could have been an idiot who stumbled his way into a bad situation of his own making “innocently”, or a clever wanna be killer who wanted to kill. IMO more likely the former than the latter, but that’s just a WAG. I don’t think the law can distinguish the two situations without a lot of evidence that isn’t likely to be forthcoming.
I’m getting facebook updates from conservative friends this morning claiming that Martin was on top of Zimmerman, punching him in the face, according to eyewitness testimony. Does anyone know where this is coming from, and whether it is credible?
Perhaps someone could do that. I don’t see what they would be.
I guess a positive would be that someone who did defend themselves couldn’t be prosecuted for murder because they didn’t make an attempt to flee first.
I have my doubts over this. But even if it’s true, so what?
Martin was being pursued. In case you’re unaware, Florida has a law that says you don’t have to retreat when somebody attacks you. It’s called “stand your ground”. So when Zimmerman attacked Martin, Martin didn’t have to run away. He had the legal right to defend himself by punching Zimmerman.
As I’ve asked, though, how did previous self defense laws fail in this way? I can’t think of any case that has ever been raised where, once you actually examined the facts, a person who was legitimately defending themselves was prosecuted for murder.
Every now and then there’s outrage over someone being charged for shooting a would-be attacker, a la Bernard Goetz, but then when you looked into the fact of the case, the guy always blew the attacker away as they were fleeing or they were chasing them down the street or something. If there were all kinds of cases of people going to prison when they were truly defending themselves from reasonable apprehension of serious injury I have never, in my life, heard of a single case.
On the other hand, “SYG” homicides have, according to some sources, TRIPLED since SYG was passed on Florida. So in terms of the cons of SYG we have a pile of dead bodies shot in extremely questionable circumstances, like Trayvon Martin. On the other, we have what appears to me to be a completely imaginary problem. I am open to evidence to the contrary. So where’s the plus side?
According to Zimmerman, Martin pursued Zimmerman to his truck.
According to the girlfriend, Martin reported being pursued over the phone.
If that’s all the information available, I admit I don’t know what to believe about who was pursuing who. But is it all the information available?
But I was retreating. It just happened to be in the same direction as the guy that stole my radio.
It depends on what you consider a defense. Some areas say that if you’re able to escape from danger, that’s a form of defense. So if you were able to escape but choose not to, then part of the responsibility for any subsequent force falls on you. This is the “duty-to-retreat” principle.
The other argument says that if you’re sitting there, minding your own business and doing nothing wrong, you shouldn’t have to run away because somebody else chooses to commit a crime. You should be able to keep doing whatever it was you were doing and if somebody tries to commit a crime against you, you can defend yourself. This is the “stand-your-ground” principle.
And there is a third theory that says you can go out looking for criminal activity and use force to resist it. This is the “read-too-many-comic-books” principle.
From what we have been told, Martin’s body was not near Zimmerman’s truck. Based on the evidence we have at hand, Zimmerman’s claim of being pursued frankly defies belief.
I can certainly believe Martin hit Zimmerman at some point and might have had the upper hand in the fight. I absolutely do not believe Martin pursued Zimmerman to his truck; it does not fit the evidence at hand and, frankly, it’s just bullshit.
I understand the concept of duty to retreat; it’s enshrined in Canadian law, in fact, albeit with a considerable body of common law modifying it. With due respect, what I asked for was evidence that the law failed in this regard. Show me some cases in the USA, preferably in Florida, where a person who responded with force to a genuine, reasonably apprehended threat was convicted of murder, and then I will believe the law needed changing.
Zimmerman was reportedly bleeding from the nose and the back of the head. The obvious conclusion is that Martin punched him in the nose, and Zimmerman fell hard enough on his head to make it bleed. These injuries are certainly consistent with him being in danger of getting the shit kicked out of him, and that is enough to justify deadly force.
Linking with an iPad is not something I’m good at, so you’ll have to look it up yourself, but check out the story of Harold Fish. He actually ended up doing time while his appeal went through, and the basis of his conviction is that he shot a guy with a 10mm, which nobody would carry unless they really wanted to kill somebody. Seriously.
First you have to demonstrate that the increase is due to shootings under questionable circumstances and not people defending their homes, families, or selves where once they had a duty to retreat. That has not yet been done.
At any rate, Zimmerman’s lawyer has sent his client would not be using the “Stand Your Ground” law as a defence-he would be using the far more uncontroversial one of simple “self-defence”.
I’ve never been able to reconcile the duty to retreat with the right/power to detain a person who commits a felony in your presence.
So, I see Ted Bundy II kill my neighbor. I pursue him in order to detain him until the police can arrive. He pulls a gun on me. I then must attempt to retreat and by doing so let him get away?
Further, there is a severe misunderstanding about the law in this thread. If you corner someone in the alley, murder them, and claim self-defense, the police will investigate it like any other homicide. Why were you in the alley? Why did you feel your were in danger of death or serious bodily injury? SYG doesn’t mean you say “self-defense” and the police let you go home.
It simply eliminates the after-the-fact thinking of a liberal prosecutor who believes that you might have, in some way, been able to retreat. And, dammit, as a general principle I don’t think a law abiding citizen should have to give ground to someone acting unlawfully.
The current case is simply one of “did the killer fear death or serious bodily injury?” If it’s true that the dead guy was eating skittles and out for an evening jog, then killer has some splanin’ to do. The only thing that SYG means is that he didn’t have to run shrieking like a little girl. Which is fine with me.
That statistic does seem a little questionable. How could the amount of SYG homicides have tripled since the SYG law was enacted? Wouldn’t the amount prior to the law being enacted have been zero?