The Florida law that allowed five white jurors and one Latina juror to exonerate George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin is called the Justifiable Use of Force Statute. It sounds harmless enough. Every state has a law that defines when the use of force is justifiable. These are commonly known as self-defense laws, except when they have a clause that removes a person’s obligation to retreat. This clause, which was first suggested by the National Rifle Association and later backed and promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, is responsible for turning Florida’s self-defense law into Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law.
Here’s the part of the law that was relevant in Zimmerman’s case:
A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.
It’s clear to me that this stand your ground clause should have applied to Trayvon Martin and not to the man who stalked and then murdered him. It’s clear also to Jose V-quez, who posted this video on Facebook.
The defense didn’t present it the way Jose does and certainly Juror B37 didn’t see it that way. The case will not be heard again in the criminal court, so there’s not much point in retrying it except perhaps in an examination of the law itself. Is the verdict bad or is the law itself bad? If the verdict is bad then the judge has the right and should have overturned the verdict. If the verdict meets the requirements of the law then the law itself is defective.
In Florida and other states that have added the stand your ground clause to their self-defense laws, it’s legal for person A to kill person B if person A is “reasonably” afraid that person B might be capable and intending to kill them first. This should be good news for victims of domestic violence whose abusers repeatedly threaten to kill them and quite often do. In the US, at least three women are murdered everyday by their husbands or boyfriends. But this law is not helping victims of domestic violence because (surprise, surprise) Florida’s judges don’t apply the law evenly. The case of Marissa Alexander, the domestic violence victim who defended herself from her abuser by shooting a warning shot in the air, is a clear example of this. This law is helping white people who are persistently afraid of “the other.”
We live in a nation where it is commonly believed that people with dark skin are unjustifiably and spontaneously violent. This is of course a stereotype and cannot be applied to all dark-skinned people, but racists are notoriously unable to recognize their racists beliefs as inaccurate. Because of this, when person A is a light-skinned person and person B is a dark-skinned person juries (whose members are not immune to commonly held racist beliefs) are likely to conclude that person A has a “legitimate” reason to fear that person B is a homicidal maniac; therefore, person A is acting reasonably when he pulls out a gun and shoots person B in the the chest even if person B is completely unarmed.
Juries don’t check the statistics, they check their guts. “Would I be afraid of that scary Black man?,” they ask. “Would I be afraid of that scary Muslim, that scary transgender person… Yes, I would be afraid. I’ve seen on television and in the news how those people are violent and they hate people like me. So, I’d be afraid.” As PR Watch makes clear in their report, Seven Faces of NRA/ALEC-Approved “Stand Your Ground” Law, the stand your ground defense is very effective when used by white defendants. African-Americans are not the only victims but they are the most common. In other words, it’s Open Season on Black Boys After a Verdict Like This.
If applied evenly, self defense laws with a stand your ground clause might work but they are not applied evenly. Like Jim Crow and voter suppression laws, they provide a legal framework for the oppression of African-Americans. The Justice Department should bring civil rights charges against Zimmerman as there is no doubt his actions were motivated by race. But we must go much further than a prosecution of George Zimmerman. As long as there are laws in place that can be used to justify the prejudices and biases of the majority population then there will be no “equal protection under the law.” The legal system in the United States is designed to protect white, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon protestant, men only. The problem is not just with Zimmerman or the members of the jury or the judge who refused to overturn the verdict; The problem is system-wide and its the entire system that needs to be examined, reformed or (dare I say it) overturned.
