The Trayvon Martin shooting is, without a question in my mind, a terrible tragedy. It should never have happened. It is all the more tragic because of a very bad law. The “stand your ground” statute in Florida actually permits someone to provoke a violent reaction but, if the reaction is life threatening, to respond with deadly force. That means if two gunslingers meet in the middle of a Florida street, whoever kills first wins the justified homicide race. For proof that his life was in danger, he can point to his slain foe with a gun in his hand.
Yes, Mr. Martin was unarmed, but one eyewitness says he saw Mr. Martin beating Mr. Zimmerman, the shooter. Another eyewitness saw the opposite happening, so all we have left is Mr. Zimmerman’s testimony, and he did have injuries to his face and head consistent with his account of Mr. Martin attacking him. So why did Mr. Martin attack, if that’s what he did?
Maybe it was the same stupid law. The law allows for people to stand their ground, instead of requiring a duty to retreat. A duty to retreat means a person needs to get away from a confrontation and let police handle the situation. In a stand your ground law, one can stand and engage an opponent based upon one’s judgment.
In this case, imagine what has to be going through the mind of a 17-year old walking home in the dark on a rainy night when some strange guy in a truck pulls up beside you and demands that you come talk to him. That’s a terrifying situation, and I can understand why Mr. Martin would not want to give any information to or comply with Mr. Zimmerman’s commands. We tell our children that strangers could kill them – and that is exactly what happened here.
Had Mr. Martin killed Mr. Zimmerman, the same law would have justified the homicide. Without a duty to retreat and let potentially cooler heads prevail, or at least heads that can be identified as policemen – and I’m leaving the racial controversy with the local force aside – the Florida law as written allows any pair of individuals that doesn’t understand each other completely to open fire, rather than try to understand what’s really going on.
Bad laws make for bad situations. Not only has this law contributed to the Martin shooting case, it’s also used by criminals to justify murders of rivals. Is that really what Florida wants on its hands?
The intent of the law was good and proper, although perhaps it could use a tweak. If a person initially provokes the confrontation, he should lose any ‘presumption’ that he was entitled to stand his ground in favor of deadly force. He might still prevail but he should not automatically be ‘presumed’ to be in the right. I’ll still take Florida’s environment over that say, in NYC, where even thinking about carrying a gun gets your booty thrown in the clink.
I agree that the intent of the law was for situations completely other than this one. The law should have been more carefully written to prevent people from hiding behind it after a shooting.
And, in an update, Zimmerman showed no sign of injury on the police video recording of his intake at the station house.