Stand Your Ground Laws: The New Jim Crow

Excellent piece from Bouie about how stand your ground laws legalize white supremacist violence:

This wasn’t the first time Drejka confronted someone over the parking space. “He basically threatened to shoot me that day, too,” said one regular customer to the store, who had a similar experience with the shooter. Police declined to arrest Drejka—who said he feared for his life—and on Monday, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office said it would not press charges, citing Florida’s “stand your ground” law.

“He had to shoot to defend himself,” said Sheriff Bob Gualtieri. “And those are the facts and that’s the law.” He continued: “Markeis wouldn’t be dead if Markeis didn’t slam this guy to the ground. … So Markeis has got skin in this game, too.”

“If they hadn’t done what I told them not to do, they’d still be alive.”

This is the world of “stand your ground,” where people can use deadly force, with no duty to retreat, if they fear “imminent death or great bodily harm.” While it’s impossible to say if race shaped this particular incident, it has undeniably shaped how the system responds. “Stand your ground” not only redistributes police power to ordinary citizens, it takes the usual impunity granted to police—who can essentially kill black people without consequence—and extends it to white citizens, and few others.

[…]

Those were unresolved, but later analysis of outcomes in “stand your ground” states uncovered significant evidence that white and black citizens are treated differently under the law. A 2013 study by the Urban Institute found “substantial racial disparities in the outcomes of cross-race homicides.” Homicides with a white perpetrator and black victim were 10 times more likely to be ruled justified than the reverse. Further examination affirmed the finding: in “stand your ground” states, whites who kill blacks were 354 percent more likely to be found justified versus whites who kill other whites.

A 2015 study of “stand your ground” cases in Florida found similar results. After examining 204 incidents where the law was citied—and controlling for multiple variables, including “whether the defendant could have retreated from the situation, whether the defendant pursued the victim, if the victim was unarmed, and who was the initiator of the confrontation”—researchers found that the “race of the victim” was a strong “predictor in the conviction of a suspect” and that “a suspect is twice as likely to be convicted of a crime if the victim is white, compared to when the victim is not white.” This, they note, is “similar to pre-civil rights era statistics, with strict enforcement for crimes when the victim was white and less-rigorous enforcement when the victim is nonwhite.”

The most recent study of “stand your ground,” published in 2017, confirms the view that the laws are racially biased. After reviewing 237 cases in Florida from 2005 to 2013, researchers found that the odds of conviction for a black defendant against a white victim were nearly 100 percent, with little margin of error, versus 90 percent with a modest margin of error for white defendants and white victims. The gender bias was even more pronounced, with low conviction rates for men in domestic violence cases. An infamous case was the prosecution of Marissa Alexander, a 29-year-old black woman who, facing deadly assault from her estranged husband, fired a warning shot to defend herself. She was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Callie Adams, another black mother, shot and killed her husband while defending herself from assault. She was charged with second-degree murder.

Whatever the intent in individual cases, the systematic effects are pretty clear.