A ‘Stand Your Ground’ Expansion That Expands Inequality - The New York Times

"The Florida Senate recently passed a bill intended to make its already robust Stand Your Ground law even more friendly to people who say they killed in self-defense.



Under the current law, someone in this situation can avoid a trial if he proves at a pretrial hearing that he was acting in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm. The new Republican-sponsored bill would flip the burden of proof. It would make the prosecution responsible for proving that someone who used deadly force instead of retreating from an attack was not behaving reasonably. If the prosecution could not do so, the killer would walk free.



Supporters say this legal innovation will give important extra protection to Floridians who defend themselves from an imminent danger. But it’s not that simple.



We live in a nation in which the legal boundaries of civilian self-defense are expanding, but in ways that, because of biases, benefit some groups and leave others behind. The Florida Senate bill and a companion bill that the Florida House is considering would contribute to that pattern.



The American legal system’s handling of violent self-defense has long favored white, property-owning men. Nonwhite, female, poor or gender-nonconforming people have always been more likely to be punished for defending themselves and less likely to see the courts come to their aid when they are harmed.



We do not have to look too deeply into the past to find examples: Many states disarmed freed black people in the wake of the Civil War. Many “race riots” involved heavily armed whites wreaking havoc on black communities. Although more than 4,000 black men, women and children were lynched from 1877 to 1950, Congress failed to pass a bill that would have specifically punished lynching and mob violence. Many whites on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line believed that lynching was necessary to protect white women from predatory black men.



The attitudes that fuel these injustices are not relics of the past. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology recently published a study documenting the way in which people perceive black men as larger and stronger and thus more threatening than they actually are.



Here’s how these biases, well documented in contemporary social science research, play out in a courtroom: The legitimacy of a defendant’s claim of self-defense depends on the average person’s perception of the “reasonableness” of that claim. This means defendants must convince the court that they were truly — reasonably — in fear for their lives in the moment when they used violence. But the concept of “reasonable fear” is anything but value-neutral. Courtrooms are filled with people — judges, jurors, lawyers and witnesses — whose perceptions are shaped by the prejudices and implicit biases of our culture."



A ‘Stand Your Ground’ Expansion That Expands Inequality - The New York Times