Rolling Stone is reporting that the Stand Your Ground law was used in the Trayvon Martin case. It wasn’t. Indeed, if you see my post here you’ll see that even after Stand Your Ground laws came into effect in Florida it didn’t change self defense law at all. LISTEN TO THE PROSECUTORS WHO SAID THIS VERY THING AFTER THE TRIAL!!
Prosecutor Angela Corey: “Well, justifiable use of deadly force has changed to a certain extent. Stand Your Ground is a procedural mechanism as we call it where we fully expected it because of what we were hearing that the defense would request a Stand Your Ground hearing, we would have put on the same evidence. It would have been front of just a judge instead of a jury.
Reporter: What about the duty to retreat aspect?
Prosecutor Corey: Well the duty to retreat aspect had sort of disappeared before Stand Your Ground kicked in.
And at 18:45 we have this question asked of Prosecutor De La Rionda,
“Could I get your impression of the 2005 expansion of the Florida self defense statutes? Does this make your job harder?”
Prosecutor Bernie De La Rionda, “You know self defense has existed for a long time. And we’ve dealt with it in Jackson for a long time. We’ve tried a lot of self defense cases; I’ve personally tried ten-15 self defense cases. They’re tough cases, but we accept it so… The law really hasn’t changed all that much. Stand Your Ground was a big thing, but really the law hasn’t changed. We have a right to bear arms and a right to self defense.”
Then we have this excellent piece in Reason Magazine here which also discusses the use of Stand Your Ground in the Zimmerman trial, which is to say, it wasn’t.
The story that George Zimmerman told about his fight with Trayvon Martin, the one that yesterday persuaded a jury to acquithim of second-degree murder and manslaughter, never had anything to do with the right to stand your ground when attacked in a public place. Knocked down and pinned to the ground by Martin, Zimmerman would not have had an opportunity to escape as Martin hit him and knocked his head against the concrete. The duty to retreat therefore was irrelevant. The initial decision not to arrest Zimmerman, former Sanford, Florida, Police Chief Bill Lee said last week (as paraphrased by CNN), “had nothing to do with Florida’s controversial ‘Stand Your Ground’ law” because “from an investigative standpoint, it was purely a matter of self-defense.” And as The New York Times explained last month, “Florida’s Stand Your Ground law…has not been invoked in this case.” The only context in which “stand your ground” was mentioned during the trial was as part of the prosecution’s attempt to undermine Zimmerman’s credibility by arguing that he lied when he told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he had not heard of the law until after the shooting. During his rebuttal on Friday, prosecutor John Guy declared, “This case is not about standing your ground.”
Boom.