Stand Your Ground supporters should favor special session

MIAMI – For the past several weeks, Dream Defenders, Power U and hundreds of others outraged by the verdict in George Zimmerman’s murder trial have occupied the Florida State Capitol calling for a special session of the state legislature to consider “Trayvon’s Law.” Governor Rick Scott has steadfastly refused. In response, the young women and men who have made a temporary home of the Capitol’s cold marble floors have called their own “People’s Session” to examine Florida’s extreme school discipline policies, racial profiling practices and of course, its Stand Your Ground laws.

As one of the few voices that has both stood for Justice for Trayvon and openly questioned the usefulness of the Stand Your Ground debate, I’ve been asked several times this week why I firmly support Dream Defenders’ call for a special session. My response is simple. Everyone, even Stand Your Ground supporters, need to stand with Dream Defenders in calling for a special session that can move our state forward.

To be clear, “Trayvon’s Law” is not a knee jerk response to the verdict. The proposal links a demand to repeal or reform Stand Your Ground with demands to stop the school-to-prison pipeline and prohibit racial profiling. But even if a special session were to only focus on Stand Your Ground, the discussion arising out of it is sorely needed and would fundamentally bring us all to a better place.

While polls show that half of Florida supports stand your ground, 43% want it changed or repealed (13% support a full repeal). But neither the Stand Your Ground that the slim majority of Floridians support nor the Stand Your Ground that a massive minority of Floridians want to see changed exists any longer. What we have now is a policy on self defense based on a public perception of a law that few have read, even fewer understand and an even smaller number know how to enforce, interpret or implement. When the policies that determine who should or shouldn’t go to jail for killing someone are mired in mass confusion, most of us should be afraid.

The gross negligence by our legal experts, public figures and elected officials in explaining what our laws mean, who they affect and how they should be enforced is only adding to the confusion. The original authors of Florida’s Stand Your Ground provisions, statutes sort of meant to protect victims of carjacking and home invasion, swear they never meant it to protect people who “follow someone with a damn gun.”

The people that oppose Stand Your Ground swear that it allows someone to pick fights and get away with it, even though Florida law explicitly says the opposite. Supporters of Stand Your Ground swear it doesn’t apply to George Zimmerman’s trial because his lawyers never brought it up, although it made it into the jury instructions. And no one on the planet can explain why jurors in the case were not instructed to determine if Zimmerman started the fight, possibly prohibiting him by law from claiming self-defense. The fact that some of the law’s harshest critics actually voted for it when it was first introduced doesn’t help matters much either.

The facts on who is helped and hurt by Stand Your Ground make things more confusing. A month before Trayvon Martin’s murder, the law helped two African American men from Miami avoid jail-time after defending themselves from being run over by a man who admitted having deep “resentment for Black people.” But the courts also acquitted a man who stabbed a car radio thief to death after chasing him down for several blocks and then failing to report any of this to the police.

The Tampa Bay Times’ detailed report on Stand Your Ground found that the law freed Black defendants at a slightly higher rate than White defendants (66% vs. 61%), but also found that defendants who killed Black folks were far more likely to go free than defendants who killed White folks (73% vs. 59%). Notably, in a state where 20% of the population is Latino, an author of the report confirmed for me that none of the data measures how the law affects Latinos because most law enforcement agencies just lump them into the “White” category!

In theory, communities that are more likely to be victims of crime, less likely to call the police, less likely to live in areas with effective 911 response rates and more likely to be confused for a suspect when they are a victim should benefit from robust, well defined, self-defense laws.  In practice and perception, those communities are not feeling those benefits.

Similarly, Florida law as it exists now, in theory, weighs a person’s right to defend themselves with their responsibility to not provoke a fight. In practice, police, prosecutors, judges, jurors and jury instructions are not weighing any of that uniformly.  There doesn’t even seem to be standard common sense definitions of  “provoking a conflict” or “imminent” threat. Regardless of what the law says, it is unclear what effect the public perception of the law is having on the decisions of people like Michael Dunn, who shot and killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis after an argument over loud music, fled the scene and is now in jail facing first degree murder charges. In matters of life and death, self-defense and murder, none of those things should be as vague, confusing or inconsistent as they are.

Nothing bad can come out of our elected officials having an earnest and honest airing out of what is right/wrong with our self-defense policies and practices. You do not have to believe in a full repeal of Stand Your Ground to want clarity on who can and can’t claim self-defense. Considering that George Zimmerman may have been acquitted even under Florida’s pre-Stand Your Ground laws, you do not have to believe they played any role in his trial to ask if current practice is emboldening the actions of people like Michael Dunn. You don’t need to have an opinion on Trayvon Martin’s murder to believe that it is important for politicians to restore Floridians’ faith in the institutions that determine their fate.

Trayvon Martin’s murder and George Zimmerman’s acquittal have created a massive rupture and a fundamental loss of faith in the system that have to be repaired.  Florida’s politicians can either lead the way in that repair or allow our state to be the butt of calls to boycott, unfair jokes and more mass confusion via the needless loss of life.

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Subhash Kateel is the newest addition to the roster of Progreso Weekly columnists. He lives in Miami and often comments for his own blog, Let’s Talk About It. Subhash also hosts a weekly talk show on radio also called Let’s Talk About It. You can listen to Subhash every Monday evening (7 to 8 p.m.) on 880 AM radio in Miami.