Day: July 15, 2013
It’s Not Just the Zimmerman Jury That’s Messed Up; It’s Also the Stand Your Ground Law
For the people out there wondering what the Zimmerman jury was smoking, I have a partial explanation, thanks to former Florida state Rep. Dan Gelber.
As Gelber explained on his blog, before the Stand Your Ground (SYG) law was passed, convicting Zimmerman would have been a slam-dunk.
Under Stand Your Ground, the George Zimmermans of the world can get themselves into all kinds of ridiculous messes and shoot their way out under no penalty of law
In 2005 the Florida Legislature fundamentally changed the analysis used by juries to assign blame in these cases. When the legislature passed the Stand Your Ground law it changed the rules of engagement. It eliminated the duty to avoid the danger and it eliminated any duty to retreat…
Here is the actual jury instruction read to Florida juries prior to the legislature’s enactment of Stand Your Ground.
“The defendant cannot justify the use of force likely to cause death or great bodily harm unless he used every reasonable means within his power and consistent with his own safety to avoid the danger before resorting to that force.
“The fact that the defendant was wrongfully attacked cannot justify his use of force likely to cause death or great bodily harm if by retreating he could have avoided the need to use that force.”
Flashback 2007: Black Homeowner Convicted of Second Degree Manslaughter after Shooting Trespassing White Teenager
If the confessed killer of a white teenager had been a black man, would it have taken 45 days — or 45 minutes — to charge him with a crime? Would it have sparked serious outrage if this African-American self-confessed killer had asserted on, say, MSNBC that he had no regrets about murdering his young white victim?
And now, in the wake of the jury verdict Saturday night, there is a new question. Would Zimmerman have been acquitted by a predominantly white jury in Sanford, Fla, if he had been black and his teenaged victim had been white?
We can only speculate about how the race reversal might have played out in Florida, but there is an analog to it from 2007 in a white enclave of suburban Long Island that suggests that the Zimmerman trial would have had a different outcome if the races had been reversed:
Haters Got to Keep on Hating: Prop 8 Defenders Try to Kill Marriage Equality in California One More Time
Despite having been slapped down by the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, the hate groups and Republican activists behind Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment that outlawed same-sex in California, have not given up. They announced last week that they will waste more of the taxpayers’ money with an appeal to the California Supreme Court to once again halt gay weddings in the state:
