Is it time to retreat from 'stand your ground'?
By Caroline Light / For The Conversation
In one key respect, Ralph Yarl was fortunate. The wounds the 16-year-old suffered after being shot twice on April 13, by the owner of the house whose doorbell he rang, thinking it was where he was due to pick up his two younger brothers, did not prove fatal.
Others who have made similar mistakes have died. Take Renisha McBride, who sought help after wrecking her car in a Detroit suburb in 2013, or Carson Senfield, who entered the wrong car in Tampa — thinking it was his Uber — on his 19th birthday. And then there is the case of 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, a passenger in a car that turned around in a driveway in upstate New York two days after Yarl was shot. What these young people have in common is that they were killed in accidental encounters with armed property owners.
As a scholar who has studied America’s love affair with guns and lethal self-defense, I have explored the history of laws that selectively shield citizens from criminal responsibility when they use force and claim self-defense. Since 2005, these “stand your ground” laws have spread to around 30 states, transforming the United States’ legal landscape.
While preexisting laws regarding justifiable use of force allowed the use of lethal force for self-defense in some circumstances, they required that people first try to retreat from a perceived threat if it was safe to do so or to seek a nonlethal solution to a hostile encounter. Stand your ground laws, meanwhile, authorize defensive violence without a duty to retreat, wherever a person may legally be. Some also expand the circumstances in which someone could use lethal force to defend property.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-is-it-time-to-retreat-from-stand-your-ground/
= new reply since forum marked as read
