Standing Your Ground: What it means for Louisianians vs. Floridians

24th March 2014   ·   0 Comments

State Rep. seeks to repeal state law

By Michael Patrick Welch
Contributing Writer

Stand Your Ground laws – called “license to kill” laws by their detractors—have been adopted so far, in more than two dozen American states. Not all of these relatively new laws offer an immediate get-out-of-jail-free card to whoever kills someone out of fear. Louisi­ana’s versions are distinctly different from those in Florida, where on October 1, 2005 the very first Stand Your Ground laws were sponsored by Florida state Representative Dennis Baxley and state Senator Durell Peadon, and approved by then Governor Jeb Bush.

Other self-defense laws hold that one can use deadly force when threatened, but only after retreating from the danger as far as possible. Before 2005, most states also already had a “Castle Doctrine,” with roots in 17th-century Eng­lish common law, stating that victims can use deadly force during a break-in to their home. Stand Your Ground laws were eventually designed specifically so that the victim of a robbery or attack anywhere at all is not legally obligated to attempt an escape before they are allowed to use force on their aggressor. Stand Your Ground laws, as Slate.com put it, “essentially provide that you can bring your castle wherever you go.”

State Rep. Wesley Bishop has introduced a bill to repeal the Stand Your Ground law here in La. Though he has neither worked with nor knows anyone who’s been negatively affected by the law, and doesn’t know how many Louisiana residents it has harmed, he is nonetheless opposed out of empathy.

“I represent the Lower 9th Ward, and I am the father of two young Black boys,” says Bishop, “and this law is putting the lives of young Black men in harm’s way.” He points over and over again to Florida, where the law’s effects have been more specifically quantified. “African-American men are being disproportionately affected,” he says. “We can’t let young Black men lose their lives because someone else was in fear that a young Black man would harm them, whether that was true or not.”

Statistics on the effects of Stand Your Ground laws in Louisiana are hard to come by. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement suggested that the number of justifiable homicides tripled between 2007 and 2012. Then in June of 2012, the Tampa Bay Times published a dense story documenting 200 cases wherein Stand Your Ground was invoked in Florida. The report admits up front that, “comprehensive analysis of ‘stand your ground’ decisions is all but impossible. When police and prosecutors decide not to press charges, they don’t always keep records showing how they reached their decisions. And no one keeps track of how many ‘Stand Your Ground’ motions have been filed or their outcomes.”

With that in mind, the Times did determine that, in Florida, the law had helped defendants walk free almost 70-percent of the time – despite that in nearly one-third of the cases the Times analyzed, defendants initiated the fight, shot an unarmed person or pursued their victim. The Times’ report also stated that defendants claiming “stand your ground” are more likely to win against a Black victim, and that 73 percent of those who killed a person of color faced no penalty versus 59 percent of those who killed a white.

The National Rifle Association very publicly helped birth Stand Your Ground in Jeb Bush’s Florida, with the stated hope of using that success to enact changes in self-defense laws across the country. The Nation reported that Florida Reps. Baxley and Peadon also served as active members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a controversial right-wing corporate interest group that writes and very successfully pushes readymade conservative bills, such as Stand Your Ground.

In 2006, Louisiana added to its Castle Doctrine three Stand Your Ground clauses: Any person in a place where they have every right to be, including public spaces, “may stand his or her ground and meet force with force;” in court, a judge or jury can’t consider the “possibility of retreat” when determining whether force was lawfully used in self-defense; and lastly, those acting in self-defense under these laws cannot be civilly prosecuted for the use of force.

Since then, Stand Your Ground has made news in Louisiana, most notably in 2012, when 21-year-old Lafourche Parish resident Byron Thomas fired into a fleeing SUV filled with teenagers following a brief random altercation, killing 15-year-old Jamonta Miles. It was later determined that no one in the car had a gun. Still, the body was barely cold when Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre told the local media Thomas had “decided to stand his ground.” The court ruled that Thomas was somehow acting in self-defense and in February 2012 he was cleared.

This would seem to go against the specific language of Louisiana’s law, which states that an aggressor cannot claim self-defense if they are the only ones using force. Nor does Stand Your Ground apply to cases where parties are committing a crime together, such as in a drug transaction or a gang fight.

Unlike Florida’s version of the law, if someone in Louisiana starts a fight, then begins losing that fight, they can’t kill the other party and claim self-defense unless they first clearly attempted to withdraw from the fight. Florida also has such an “aggressor clause” but the aggressor can still claim self-defense if they believe they are in danger of great bodily harm or death and if they have attempted to also escape.

Stand Your Ground reached celebrity status after George Zimmerman shot unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in Florida—though technically Stand Your Ground did not determine the verdict in that case. What the law did do, at first, was keep Zimmerman out of court and jail.

Unlike Louisiana’s, Florida’s Stand Your Ground law includes an immunity provision that protects a person from prosecution if he can make a reasonable claim of self-defense – that includes immunity from the entire process of arresting, taking into custody, pressing charges and prosecuting the defendant. It’s up to law enforcement to investigate the self-defense incident but – as with the Zimmerman case—they can’t arrest anyone immediately for using force unless they first find probable cause that use of force was unlawful.

“Rather than arresting that person so that the case can ultimately be decided by a jury,” reads a paper entitled, A Comparison of Louisiana and Florida Stand Your Ground Law by Associate Professor S.L. Grey at the Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, “a ‘law enforcement agency’ must determine whether the force used was justifiable under the circumstances using ‘standard procedures for investigating’ rather than at a trial.” Therefore, Zimmerman’s “reasonable” claim of self-defense meant he was arrested only after it was justified by a police investigation.

Florida’s version also gives a strange financial incentive for not arresting an overly aggressive defender: If a defendant is later found to have been justified, then the police department is required to pay all fees associated with the case. Louisiana does not have this provision and even passed a law in 2012 legally requiring police and coroners to investigate all cases wherein self-defense leads to bodily harm or death.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, Stand Your Ground has so far been responsible less for protecting the innocent, and more for cases like that of Michael Dunn, who shot and killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis because the music coming from the teen’s car was too loud. Though no gun was found at the scene, Dunn claimed he thought he saw one in the car, and so, while Dunn was found guilty on other charges, the jury acquitted him of at least the first-degree murder charge.

Which is why State Rep. Bishop says that, if his recent repeal of Louisiana’s Stand Your Ground Law doesn’t take, he will keep on fighting. “We can then try to reform it with a total of five additional bills that we can bring up after the session starts in the latter part of this month,” says Bishop. “But whether we win or not, it’s worth it to keep going, and we will keep going.”

This article originally published in the March 17, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.