Good Laws Don't Need Lies

I am back home in Tampa Bay. Currently I am in the backyard of my Aunt's home in Crystal Beach in a hammock while catching up on my reading and waiting for my Crim Law grade to come in. That's when I come across this article about incoming Florida Senate Dem leader Chris Smith's concerns about Stand Your Ground.

Stand Your Ground has already been talked about by people smarter than me for months, but what really made me take notice was a quote from incoming Senate President Don Gaetz and his son Rep. Matt Gaetz:

Consider an elderly woman in a dimly lit parking lot or a college girl walking to her dorm at night," they wrote in the May 2 Northwest Florida Daily News in Fort Walton Beach. "If either was attacked, her duty was to turn her back and try to flee, probably be overcome and raped or killed. Prior to Stand Your Ground, that victim didn’t have the choice to defend herself, to meet force with force.

 Now, I am sure that the Gaetz family believe this is accurate. They have probably been told that this was the case either by staff or lobbyists or someone else they trust. Because that is the problem with politics today. There is too much information and nobody can be an expert on all of them so they have to trust their staff or lobbyists for the truth. And sometimes those people have their own agendas that they place before the truth. I am sure that is what happened because, the truth is, that there was not a total duty to flee. Pre-2005 you could not use deadly force if they could retreat without increasing his danger, but the key is "retreat without increasing the danger". It would be up to a prosecutor to decide if the person who used deadly force could have retreated with a jury ultimately deciding what would have been reasonable in the circumstances. However, it is almost impossible to imagine a world where the Gaetz hypothetical would have led to charges. The old lady or young co-ed didn't have to retreat to the wall before shooting. However, if they were already in their secure car and someone outside the car threatened them they would have to drive away instead of getting out of the car and shooting them.

In Florida victims had the ability to meet force with force as long as it was reasonable to do so. The problem with Stand Your Ground is that it switched the burden from the victim having to show that it was reasonable to the Prosecutor needing to show that it wasn't. By taking away the duty to flee if it was safe you took away one of the elements that Prosecutors and law enforcement could use as proof that a killing was in anger instead of fear. If you eliminate retreat it becomes hard to tell the difference between voluntary manslaughter and self-defense.

More importantly, if Stand Your Ground is such a great law that doesn't need to be changed at all, then it doesn't need distortions to succeed. Instead of saying that victims had to retreat, even at the risk of their safety, before using deadly force the truth is that a lack of retreat could be used by law enforcement as proof that a shooting was not in self-defense. Maybe we don't want that as a state. Maybe we think that the right to ones own safety trumps other concerns like reasonableness. If so, let's be honest about it instead of trying to say that without Stand Your Ground women would be in danger.

I'm going to be pointing PolitiFact towards the quote that started this story to see if they agree with my analysis.