DAs Can’t Stand “Stand Your Ground” Defense?

Letter to Ephesians: Protecting those in one’s home has historically been a sacred duty. So, why the surprise over “justifiable homicides are up in 30 states that give people more leeway to kill in self-defense”? Was extending the stand-your ground defense to “public” spaces overkill? 

The question is raised after a recent WSJ story titled, “Six Words Every Killer Should Know: ‘I Feared for My Life, Officer,” suggested there was something wrong in the new “stand-your-ground laws” plainly recognizing the old Common Law principle of self-defense & “justifiable homicide” when threatened, especially in one’s own home. When I was in law school during the 1970s, it was generally ASSUMED by the vast majority of legal authorities (and precedents) that a burglar breaking and entering one’s home could be taken down with whatever means at the victim’s disposal, so long as an ordinary person would have had reason to feel they or their loved ones were in imminent danger of physical harm. And, in response to repeated instances of tragedy over home invasions, the stand-your-ground laws were passed to codify the common sense Common Law.

Yet, as the WSJ noted, many of those enacted laws argaubly expanded the defense to include “public spaces.” They cited FBI’s NIBRS nationwide statistics indicating at least 2K justifiable homicides over 6 years studied. If so, they far exceed the roughly 100 such tragedies reported yearly before the state defense laws were amended. Still the WSJ noted: “The so-called stand-your-ground laws in those 30 states extend legal protections to public places” and in he said, she said scenarios now “make it difficult for prosecutors to file homicide charges against anyone who says they killed in self-defense.” But wasn’t & isn’t that still always the problem for DAs when there are no witnesses, regardless of geography?

Davd Soul