Introduction
The Trayvon Martin shooting of 2012, in which George Zimmerman shot a 17-year-old black youth whom he believed was acting in a threatening manner. The controversy surrounding the murder and its subsequent trial brought up intriguing and complicated discussions surrounding Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws, which stated Zimmerman had the right to defend himself with deadly force if he felt threatened. Stand Your Ground laws have encountered a great deal of discussion in recent years due to this case and many others, in which the issue of being able to defend yourself with lethal force is taken into deep consideration. This leads to many different ideas regarding American gun rights, racial profiling, and much more. Despite the ostensible need for Stand Your Ground laws as an effective means of self-defense, the issues and complications related to their implementation are far too problematic to be workable.
Stand Your Ground Laws
Stand Your Ground Laws are evolved from English Common Law, specifically the Castle Doctrine – in which people’s homes are a place in which they are protected and immune from certain behaviors, including the extent to which they want to keep out or expel unwanted people in their home (Wallace 37). As an expansion of that, Florida-based Stand Your Ground laws provide protections from prosecution if a citizen defends themselves from “presumed criminal attack” (Wallace 37). If a person is not currently involved in unlawful act, and is attacked, they are given the right to fight back with deadly force (Roberts, 2012).
As the Stand Your Ground statute is written, home protection is legally protected in the event that a person “is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm,” and the intruder in question is attempting to enter one’s home (Wallace 38). Granted, there are some protections and exceptions, noting that this presumption of justifiable action is mitigated when the person receiving the defensible force is a family member, otherwise lawfully given the right to be in the residence, or the defender is themselves in the middle of an unlawful act. Outside of the home, citizens are able to use deadly force in certain contexts that they deem necessary. With these combined elements, Stand Your Ground laws create a legal framework by which people are permitted to kill other people while in fear for their lives in their home, if operating within these guidelines.
Benefits of Stand Your Ground
Stand Your Ground laws certainly have their fair share of benefits, and the appeal of such a law is easily understandable. Stand Your Ground Laws permit people who practice self-defense to be acquitted for taking actions they believed would save their life; in the process of fearing for one’s life, people desire the ability to definitively and completely defend themselves. In many ways, Stand Your Ground is an extension of the general right to self-defense, which is rooted in American citizens’ constitutional right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” (Fair, 2014). Furthermore, the 2nd Amendment allows for the right to keep and bear arms, thus providing American citizens with a means to defend themselves by way of deadly force (Fair, 2014). Many of these statues and rights follow the concept of natural law, which also justifies the ability to kill in self-defense, safeguarding the fundamental right for each American citizen to live and defend themselves against threats to that continued life. To that end, Stand Your Ground laws are simply an extension of the existing right to self-defense.
Even aside from the practical implications, the psychological impact of the presence of the Stand Your Ground law is thought to be sufficient justification for its existence. The punitive element of Stand Your Ground theoretically deters aggressors by presenting the possibility of deadly consequences for their unlawful actions – the knowledge that their victim has the lawful right to kill them if they are meant to feel unsafe can lessen the likelihood that a criminal will perform a violent or invasive action, for fear of reprisal.
What’s more, Stand Your Ground ideally encourages victims to play an active part in ending the cycle of criminal activity (Fair, 2014). Without legally-binding defenses of people defending themselves in criminal altercations, the criminal dominance of law-abiding society can be curbed, with average citizens having a role in minimizing crime by increasing their own right to protection (Fair, 2014). Rather than rely on the availability and effectiveness of law enforcement alone, individual citizens can be more assertive in the defense of their own right to live in safety and peace if they are given the legal right to defend themselves with deadly force. This places the emphasis of criminal law enforcement on the perpetrator rather than the victim, which can also be a relief to victims hoping to find greater psychological help in the wake of a deadly attack (Fair, 2014).
Disadvantages of Stand Your Ground
Despite these advantages, Stand Your Ground also has many controversial and problematic elements to its application, especially in the context of today’s racial and political climate. In addition to that, the onus is placed on law enforcement to discern the difference between reasonable fear and deadly force in Stand Your Ground cases like the Trayvon Martin shooting, which can be extremely difficult to work out in scenarios where only the defending party is present to tell their side of the story (Wallace, 2006). There are also forensic difficulties in determining the difference between a justifiable self-defense and a criminal homicide for this reason.
Even in the context of self-defense, there are many moral questions that exist regarding the justification for killing another human being. Stopping intruders from imposing one’s will on another citizen does not necessarily require the use of lethal weapons, as non-lethal methods such as martial arts, tasers, pepper spray and the like may be more ethical methods of preventing personal harm. The idea of taking another person’s life in the first place is controversial enough, and the legality of killing someone under certain circumstances opens up all manner of questions. Many of these relate to the prevalence of guns in American life; while the Second Amendment offers the right to bear arms, this also creates the possibility for many more lives to be taken than would be otherwise. With the psychological freedom to kill someone in the right circumstances, mistakes can be made: shooters can panic and kill someone innocent, or someone they know, attempting to get into their home. Stand Your Ground laws also provide the likelihood that otherwise-muted conflicts to escalate to the point of death (Megale, 2014). In these instances, people involved in disputes are much more likely to stand their ground on their side of the issue, immunizing offenders from prosecution under these particular circumstances (Megale, 2014).
The Sociopolitical Climate Surrounding Stand Your Ground
When viewing the pros and cons of Stand Your Ground laws, it is important to understand how they operate under the current sociopolitical climate in America. Take, for instance, the aforementioned case of State v. Zimmerman, which addresses the Trayvon Marton shooting. Stand Your Ground laws were used to acquit Zimmerman, a measure which many people felt were unfair, as there was evidence that Zimmerman gunned down an innocent African-American man due to racial fears of young black men inherently being criminals (Fradella, 2013). Young black men are, at all turns, uniquely underserved by the criminal justice system, due to strong cultural associations with gang violence, poverty, and discriminatory stereotypes of black men as more aggressive and violent than whites. These kinds of overt and covert cultural factors can play substantial roles in bringing about verdicts like these, with laws like Stand Your Ground forming the basis for the acquittal of men like Zimmerman. When viewing the case through this particular lens, Martin was denied justice due to Stand Your Ground laws, which protected Zimmerman simply because he feared for his life, however unjustified that fear may have been (Fradella, 2013).
This speaks to the role of race relations in the American justice system, and American gun culture in general. On the whole, the American justice system disproportionately affects African-Americans, who are given longer, harsher sentences and more punitive measures in greater numbers than white people who commit the same offenses (Fradella, 2013). When Zimmerman asserted that Martin was a threat, critics argue that he suffered from racial bias and thus exhibited racial profiling against Martin. In essence, if Martin were a white man of the same age wearing a hoodie and performing the same behaviors, Zimmerman may not have had the same hostility or feelings of threat, exposing the different cultural expectations and discriminations held against blacks (Li, 2014). Furthermore, Stand Your Ground laws further encourage the use of guns in self-defense, which then makes these aforementioned misunderstandings have deadly, permanent consequences (Fradella, 2013).
International Self-Defense and the Efficacy of Stand Your Ground
Another factor to consider in the application of Stand Your Ground laws is that foreign countries who have similar laws do not run into these kinds of ethical dilemmas with such regularity. In the United Kingdom, the Crime and Courts Act of 2013 allows citizens to use disproportionate force to dispatch intruders, similar to the Stand Your Ground laws in America (Dobinson and Eliot 96). Both UK and Australian jurisdictions allow for a complete defense of murder charges in cases of “disproportionate, but not grossly disproportionate force” (Dobinson and Elliot, p. 96). What sets these laws apart, however, is that their amendments are open to uncertainty and interpretation, as compared to the relatively clear-cut Stand Your Ground statutes.
The effectiveness of Stand Your Ground laws as a deterrent is also somewhat questionable. To date, there is no empirical support for the assertion that Stand Your Ground laws increase public safety, some statistics claiming that Stand Your Ground laws actually lead to an 8% increase in homicides on average, despite the nation seeing an overall downturn in homicide rates (Laird, 2015). The racial disparities in defense outcomes for cases evoking Stand Your Ground laws also keys into the aforementioned inequalities between race in the American justice system: Whites have a 350% higher likelihood of receiving an acquittal for shooting an African-American victim than in cases involving white-on-white Stand Your Ground defenses (Laird, 2015). Conversely, a black person shooting a white person in alleged self-defense is only found justified in 3% of these cases (Laird, 2015). With these statistics, it is clear that Stand Your Ground provides only a true, secure defense for a certain subset of the American population: while whites enjoy Stand Your Ground protections and acquittals, blacks are both disproportionately the victims of Stand Your Ground defenses, and those laws do not work for them as well if the situations are reversed.
Recommendations
As Stand Your Ground laws are likely here to stay, it is necessary to find ways to work within them until such time as more honest and overt interventions can be made to address their inherent problems. Chief among these is education and development among American citizens in Stand Your Ground states regarding the responsible use of firearms, as well as the need to cultivate racial sensitivity and tolerance, in addition to conflict resolution. A combination of interventions in these factors and more may be able to address the root problems at the heart of cases like the Trayvon Martin shooting, for instance. With the help of gun safety and better race relations, it may be possible to use Stand Your Ground in a more productive and safe way. In the meantime, however, Stand Your Ground laws appear to facilitate an ugly undercurrent of American life in which racial minorities are disproportionately under threat from justified homicide by a racial majority who can fall back on racial stereotypes to cite Stand Your Ground.
Conclusion
Despite their good intentions, and the ostensible right for people to defend themselves in cases of assault or home invasion, Stand Your Ground laws ultimately do more harm than good, as they provide greater license and leeway for accidental homicides to occur. In the years since these laws have been passed, homicide rates have increased, and a significant proportion of stand Your Ground-related homicides involve white-on-black violence. Sociocultural factors such as the inequality of the justice system and the structural, institutional racism African-Americans experience on a daily basis make it easier for blacks to be killed without white shooters facing justice. In essence, Stand Your Ground laws showcase the prevalence of gun culture in America, which leads people to have an increased willingness to kill because of perceived slights and feel more justified in doing so.
Works Cited
Cavell, H. G. (2014). Reasonable Belief: A Call to Clarify Florida's Stand Your Ground
Laws. Criminal Law Bulletin,50(1), 153-187.
Dobinson, I., & Elliott, E. (2014). A Householder's Right to Kill or Injure an Intruder under
the Crime and Courts Act 2013: An Australian Comparison. Journal Of Criminal
Law, 78(1), 80-97. doi:10.1350/jcla.2014.78.1.894
Fair, M. (2014). Dare Defend: Standing for Stand Your Ground. Law &
Psychology Review, 38153-176.
Fradella, H. F. (2013). Thoughts on the State V. Zimmerman Verdict:
Everything That’s Right and Wrong with the U.S. Justice
System. Western Criminologist, 5-8.
Laird, L. (2015). ABA opposes controversial 'stand your ground' laws. ABA Journal, 1.
Li, V. (2014). Report links stand-your-ground laws to higher homicide rates. AB
A Journal, 100(10), 1.
Megale, E. B. (2013). Disaster Unaverted: Reconciling the Desire for a Safe and Secure State
with the Grim Realities of Stand Your Ground. American Journal Of Trial
Advocacy, 37(2), 255-314.
ROBERTS, J. K. (2012). Deadly Force and the Right of Self-Defense
Stand Your Grand Laws. Forensic Examiner, 22(1), 89-92.
Wallace, P. A. (2008). Stand Your Ground, Revisited: Measuring Reasonable Fear. Forensic
Examiner, 17(1), 74-77.
Wallace, P. (2006). Stand Your Ground: New Challenges for Forensic
Psychologists. Forensic Examiner, 15(3), 37-41.
