Stand your ground’s spread has been relentless even during the pandemic, amid mounting concerns that such laws encourage vigilantism and exacerbate racial injustice. Women in abusive relationships and people of color have tried and failed to invoke stand your ground in many cases, showing that these laws perpetuate inequities that are baked into the legal system.
Prosecutors have cited stand your ground laws as a reason not to pursue charges against law enforcement officers and jail guards for in-custody deaths. Stand your ground laws are being successfully invoked in cases in which the shooter was the aggressor and in situations that could’ve been de-escalated. Expanded self-defense laws are being used to justify the use of deadly force against roommates, in road rage incidents and child custody disputes, and against vulnerable groups such as people with mental illness or who are unhoused. Reveal has reviewed more than 150 cases from the last decade that involved a claim of self-defense under stand your ground-type laws. Utah also enacted a law modeled explicitly after Florida’s last year. The legislation Noem touted in South Dakota was nearly identical to Florida’s law. Now, 38 states have such laws, an increase of nearly 60%.įlorida, which enacted the first stand your ground law in 2005, passed a law in 2017 that forces prosecutors to disprove claims of self-defense. In February 2012, when Martin was shot, 24 states had some type of stand your ground law, a result of either legislation or court rulings. A decade after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s killing in Florida brought a groundswell of public criticism of stand your ground as a legal and moral concept, laws that expand the rights of individuals to kill in self-defense have proliferated across the U.S., a new analysis by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found. The South Dakota law may be extreme, but it’s not an aberration. “You have a right in South Dakota to protect yourself and your family,” Noem told the fired-up audience. According to legal experts, that’s an almost impossible standard to meet, meaning that many shooters won’t face charges for crimes as serious as murder. Now police and prosecutors must prove a negative – that a shooter was not in fear for their life – to even bring a case. The new law shifts the burden of proof to the state. Under traditional notions of self-defense, it’s up to the person making such a claim to prove it. It’s a procedural change with momentous implications, effectively undoing hundreds of years of legal precedent. DEFEND YOUR CASTLE LAW NC TRIAL
Under the law passed in March, if a shooter in South Dakota claims self-defense, police and prosecutors can’t make an arrest, bring criminal charges or take a case to trial unless they can first show, with clear and convincing evidence, that the claim was false. Kristi Noem bragged about how she was making her state even more gun friendly.Īlong with repealing permit fees for concealed-carry licenses and loosening restrictions on carrying loaded guns, Noem and her fellow Republicans had found a way to dramatically expand the power of “stand your ground” laws. Outside the National Rifle Association annual meeting in May, protesters demanded sweeping reforms to the type of lax gun laws that contributed to the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, earlier that week.īut inside the Houston convention center, South Dakota Gov. Want more Reveal? Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigations delivered straight to your inbox.
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