It's the law, like it or not

Rico says the problem is not standing your ground, it's shooting someone who's moving away...



J. David Goodman has an article on the subject in The New York Times:

Trevor Dooley stood his ground, brandished his gun and killed a man after an argument over local skateboarding rules in a Florida town. He argued in court last month that he had a right to do so under the state’s Stand Your Ground law.
Outrage over the death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, killed by a Crime Watch volunteer, has focused new attention on the law, which permits those in Florida “to meet force with force, including deadly force” when attacked. As my colleague Lizette Alvarez reports, the Justice Department is pursuing an investigation into Trayvon’s case.
As that investigation goes forward, the law is currently being invoked as a key defense by Dooley. The man he killed, David James, had been playing basketball with his eight-year-old daughter in September of 2010 when he and Dooley began arguing over whether a boy on a skateboard had a right to ride on the court, according to an account in The St. Petersburg Times. There was a “physical confrontation”, the police said, during which Dooley fired the weapon he was carrying, killing James in front of his daughter.
“You agree you do not want to go to prison for killing David James?” he was asked at the trial, according to televised footage from the courtroom.
“I don’t think I should,” responded Dooley, who has been charged with manslaughter, but says he feared for his life during the altercation with James.
His lawyers are seeking to have the case dismissed by a judge on the grounds that the Stand Your Ground law permitted him to defend himself with deadly force.
The law extends what has been called the Castle Doctrine— that a person has the right to defend his or her home with force— to apply to people outside of the home, removing the so-called “duty to retreat”. The Florida law explicitly states that no such duty exists in the state. The provision appears as part of the Florida law on the justifiable use of force by citizens:

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.

The National Rifle Association lobbied strongly for the change to state law, which was adopted in 2005 and signed by Governor Jeb Bush, who said at the time that he supported the measure because, faced with a serious threat one’s life, “to have to retreat and put yourself in a very precarious position defies common sense”.
In the years since the law was amended in 2005, there has been a surge in the number of cases like Dooley’s and that of Trayvon Martin, killed by the neighborhood volunteer, George Zimmerman, last month. A 2010 review by The St. Petersburg Times found that rates of justifiable homicide tripled since the law was passed and that “twice a week, on average, someone’s killing was considered warranted.”
The paper reviewed press accounts of 93 cases involving 65 deaths in confrontations in which the new law could be applied and found that 57 of them resulted in no criminal charge or trial. In seven others that went to trial, the defendants were then acquitted.
In these cases, the Florida Supreme Court recognizes something called “true immunity”. That means, according to Emily Bazelon in Slate, that the assertion of the Stand Your Ground law can be enough for a judge to dismiss a case before trial even starts.
A columnist writing in The Orlando Sentinel said the law made Florida feel “more and more like the Wild West.” But it is far from unique; more than a dozen states have similar Stand Your Ground provisions.
The Orlando Sentinel published a primer on the law last weekend, answering some frequently asked questions including:

Q: How did law enforcement respond to the law?
A: Prosecutors across the state opposed the law before it was enacted on 1 October 2005. In the following five months, there were at least thirteen shootings in Central Florida where self-defense was claimed. Out of six men killed and four more wounded in the cases, only one was armed. Some Orlando-area police agencies simply stopped investigating shootings involving self-defense claims and referred them directly to state prosecutors to decide.
Q: Can an unarmed person legally pose a deadly threat?
In case after case during the past six years, Floridians who shot and killed unarmed opponents have not been prosecuted. Former National Rifle Association President Marion Hammer, a major force behind the law’s passage, cited her own size and age in 2006 interview with the Sentinel about what she would do if confronted by a younger and larger aggressor: “I’m 4-foot-11. I’m 67 years old,” she said. “If you came at me, and I felt that my life was in danger or that I was going to be injured, I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot you.”

The law may explain why local police did not charge Zimmerman for killing Trayvon. But further details may cast doubt on the circumstances of their encounter and whether it would fall under the law’s provisions.
A female friend of Trayvon talked to him by cellphone moments before he died. “He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on. He said he lost the man,” the girl told ABC News. “I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run but he said he was not going to run.” A call to 911 by Zimmerman also appeared to indicate that he followed Trayvon.
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his blog for The Atlantic that “the more I see of this, the less I think Stand Your Ground will save Zimmerman.”