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(CN) Three years after an argument over texting in a Florida movie theater ended in a 43-year-old mans death, the states controversial Stand Your Ground law is under scrutiny in a hearing underway in a small courthouse about an hour north of Tampa.

Prosecutors say Curtis Reeves, a retired police captain, killed Chad Oulson during an argument in the Wesley Chapel theater in January 2014.

But Reeves attorney, Dino Michaels, contends a video from that night will show Oulson attacked the older man first and the former officer acted in self-defense.

The Stand Your Ground law allows Florida residents to use deadly force to defend their lives or their property. If Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Susan Barthle determines the incident meets the proper criteria, Reeves will be immune from criminal prosecution and civil action.

If not, he will be tried for second-degree murder.

For now his fate is in the hands of Barthle, who is presiding over a hearing on that very question. The hearing is supposed to continue for the next two weeks.

On January 13, 2014, Reeves and his wife arrived at a movie theater and sat behind Oulson and his wife to watch Lone Survivor.

During the previews, Oulson checked his phone, prompting Reeves to ask him to put it away, because the light was distracting him. When Oulson refused, Reeves left to contact a manager. When Reeves returned, the argument continued.

What happened next is still contested.

In his opening statement, Dino Michaels said Oulson stood over Reeves, tossed popcorn at him, and then threw another object probably his cell phone at the retired officers head.

Oulsons behavior terrified Mr. Reeves, Michaels told the court, and terrified his wife who was sitting next to him.

Reeves leaned back, took out a pistol and shot Oulson in the chest.

He acted reasonably because of his background, because of his training, because of the situation, Michaels said of his client..

Assistant State Attorney Glenn Martin painted a different picture.

Martin said Reeves instigated the argument and had non-consensual contact with Oulson three times before the younger man stood up. According to Martin, Reese had already begun pulling out his pistol after Oulson threw fluffy popcorn at him, while reportedly saying, Throw popcorn on me will you?

Was it reasonably necessary to prevent immediate great bodily harm, death or forcible felony? Martin asked the court. When we talk about stand your ground, it has to be just right.

The movie theater shooting is another flashpoint in the rocky history of Floridas Stand Your Ground law.

It first received national attention after the shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch leader George Zimmerman.

Many saw the shooting as racially motivated (Martin was black; Zimmerman is Hispanic) and expressed outrage when Zimmerman was acquitted.

A 2012 study by the Tampa Bay Times found the law had been invoked more than 200 times since its inception and allowed 70 percent of those accused to walk free. Gang members and drug dealers were among those who never faced murder charges, the study said.

But pro-gun advocates like the National Rifle Association have praised the laws, which more than half of the country has enacted over the last decade.

Reeves attorney plans to focus on his credibility as a former police captain and vulnerability due to his age.

The first two witnesses, Reeves children, described a man struggling to remain active in his golden years.

Ive seen my dad push him limits to remain active, said Jennifer Shaw on the stand, describing her fathers difficulties opening a jar or picking up her child.

Reeves son, himself a police officer, had just stepped inside the theater when the shooting occurred. In his testimony, Matthew Reeves heard his fathers voice just before the sound of the gun.

He then described the wounded Oulson taking a step back and stumbling down the theater stairs. The younger Reeves attended to Oulsons wounds before a nurse appeared.

When Reeves looked up to see his father, he testified, the mans glasses were askew and his hand was pressed against the side of his head. His mother?

She was shaking, he said.

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Hearing on Movie House Shooting Latest Test of 'Stand Your Ground' Law - Courthouse News Service

Pam Adams Journal Star education reporter @padamspam

PEORIA From Peorias distinction by an online magazine as the worst city for African-Americans, to mass incarceration and over-policing, to the legitimate white supremacists in the White House, Patrisse Cullors tackled the topics that made a three-word phrase, Black Lives Matter, take hold around the world after George Zimmerman was acquitted in 2013 for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

In that moment I witnessed a modern-day lynching.

Cullors, an artist, organizer and co-founder of Black Lives Matter, spoke at Bradley Universitys Renaissance Coliseum on Thursday. About 800 people attended the lecture, as many white people as black people. Almost as many appeared older than 30 as younger. Student groups came from nearby schools, including Illinois State University, Monmouth College, Illinois Central College and area high schools.

Cullors linked earlier Black Lives Matter protests to the more recent Womens March and widespread protests at airports after President Donald Trump issued an executive order restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

She urged her audience to resist, organize and build power, whether it involved the Trump administration or local issues on their campuses or their cities. The statistics that plague this city can shift.

The countrys history of inequality and injustice makes it hard for people to imagine how the country can be, she said.

How do we have a conversation that reimagines a country without incarceration? she asked. Public safety is access to food. Public safety is access to housing. Public safety is basic human rights.

Cullors no longer takes questions on her views on the phrase All Lives Matter. Find the responses on Black Twitter or other social media outlets, she said. But she is concerned about efforts to depict Black Lives Matter as a hate group.

The unfortunate reality of white racism is, its a deep fear of black people standing up for themselves, she said. Its simply 'our lives matter.'

Calling it a hate group is coded language that really means black lives don't matter, she added.

Pam Adams can be reached at 686-3245 or padams@pjstar.com. Follow her on Twitter @padamspam.

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Black Lives Matter co-founder tackles local and national issues in Bradley speech - Peoria Journal Star

TheBlaze.com

Iowa panel OKs gun bill with stand-your-ground provision The News Tribune The 17-year-old was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. Zimmerman ultimately didn't use the state's stand-your-ground law as defense though its consideration garnered attention. Zimmerman was later acquitted of ... Iowa gun bill seeks 'stand-your-ground' lawQuad City Times all 99 news articles »

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Iowa panel OKs gun bill with stand-your-ground provision - The News Tribune

Two separate bills, one in the House and one in the Senate both propose flipping the burden of proof from defendants to prosecutors in stand your ground and self-defense cases, potentially stopping the cases, from ever going to trail.

George Zimmerman, Michael Dunn, and Curtis Reeves all claimed either "self defense" or "stand your ground" in cases where they shot and killed someone during a confrontation.

And all of those cases may have taken a very different legal course if the burden of proving "self defense" was on the prosecutor and not the defendant, which is exactly what two new bills making their way through the state legislature would do.

Republican State Senator Jeff Brandes from Pinellas County is co-sponsoring the bill.

"Consistent with our law the state should always have the burden of proof i these situations the state should always have to prove that you acted outside the law," says Senator Brandes.

Tampa Defense attorney BarryCohensays if the bills become law it opens the door for accused killers to avoid trail.

"I think this is ridiculous it's unfair to the state and I'm a defense lawyer," he says.

"If there are two people in a house-- a husband and wife-- and the wife shoots and kills the husband and all she has to say is he came at me with a knife. How is the state going to prove that?," he says.

The FloridaCoalition Against Domestic Violence says they are concerned about the proposed bills and the message it may send if it becomes law.

And just to clarify, even if this bill becomes law it would not affect the Reeves case, because he's being prosecuted under the current law.

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Major changes in the works for Florida's self-defense "burden of proof" - ABC Action News

The modern Civil Rights Movement which began in earnest in the mid-1950s has much in common with the recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement

The deeds and sacrifices of Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, the hundreds on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, generated the energy which eventually knocked down Jim Crow.

Blacks Lives Matters (BLM), social media and the cell phone recorder have stimulated the current movement, due in part to the deaths of Black men and women from the bullets and deadly choke holds of police officers.

On February 26, 2017, we all should take a minute to remember Trayvon Martin. On that date in 2012, a 17-year-old child was coming back from the store.

with a soda and Skittles as snacks to watch an NBA game in Sanford, Florida.

George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch guard, spotted him and declaredthe young hooded Black mandid not belong in the neighborhood, confrontedhim and killed him during a struggle.

Zimmerman, who is White, claimed he was standing his ground, and scared for his life. But if you were being followed by a stranger, dont you think such a defense would have been Trayvons?

The court accepted Zimmermans stand and found him not guilty of murder. Black people began wearing hoodies to remind us of the injustice.

Turn the dial back to a hot August in 1955, in Money, Mississippi.

Then 14-year-old Emmett Tillwas visiting his mothers home state from Chicago, and allegedly whistled and made other lewd remarks to a White woman in a general store.

Shortly afterthat, the young man was pulled from a bed in his uncles home, taken to a remote area and was mutilated.

His body was later found. Back in Chicago, his mother demanded that the badly decomposed body of her child be put on display in an open casket to see just how deadly Jim Crow and White hate could be. Jet magazine carried it on the front page.

The men who killed Till were not found guilty and the woman who claimed that he was fresh with her, 62 years ago, Carolyn Bryant has said she lied in a recently published book, The Blood Of Emmett Till by Timothy Bryant.

Three months later in 1955, Rosa Parks sat and Black people stood up in Montgomery, Alabama, pressing Black residents to fight and destroy the system which kept them in a state of slavery by another name.

Rosa, like other Black Montgomerians, were sick and tired of being sick and tired of being relegated to sitting in the back of the bus.

Several yearsago a youngClaudette Colvin (no relation, I guess) defied the law and was arrested. But Parks move triggered a year-long boycott by Black people of the bus lines. The courts struck down the citys Jim Crow seating policy. The modern Rights Movement was underway.

Black people found tools to fight Jim Crow: depriving the bus company of their dollars and directly challenging a system, non-violently, there and across the South.

The masters of Jim Crow were made to realize their hypocrisy. They were not living up to the ideal that all men were created equal.

Move forward years to Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and recall 19-year-old Michael Browns body lying in the middle of a hot street heated by an August sun. A White officer shot him because, again, the cop felt like his life was being threatened.

In that city Black folk were so politically disengaged, it never dawned on them that they were in the majority.

Browns death pointed up the sustained and violent nature of how police treated them there and elsewhere in our so-called post-racial America.

Blacks were being ticketed at a higher rate for traffic violations and the city was using that money to fund the citys modern version of Jim Crow.

Protestors converged onFerguson, unrest ensued, reforms were imposed and the old masters of the new Jim Cow system were dispatched.

From the tumult in Ferguson, The Black Lives Matters Movement was given birth. Like the Civil Rights Movement which was given life in the mid-1950s after the murder of Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it was the object of what we call now Whitelash by conservatives.

How dare these ungrateful and underserving Blacks, who have caused their own ills, demand to be treated equally, when, the nation had just elected its first Black President.

This view of the nations racial tensions help elect Donald Trump.

It is called Whitelash against the current Black liberation movement.

There is a claim that these protesting Blacks and Hispanics are being ungrateful and racist. But this is just a rhetorical ply and mind trick to confuse Black people and distract us from the continued racism many Whites deny.

Along with the current liberation movement led by the BLM, the Black Press and others fighting for criminal justice reform against police abuses, the current revolt against Trump reminds us of another passage in history

Recallthe mid-1960s when the resistance to the Vietnam War and the fight for Civil Rights reforms collided.

The collision drew attention to the financial inequality, deprivations of people from certain Islamic and Black dominated countries immigrating to our borders, educational and housing disparities then.

The collision worked, and the nation did advance to a degree, but it seems that there was a great of unfinished business that Trump has used to trigger White anger and resentment anew today.

Again, unrest is brewing in the streets and I hope that it will be a shield against the Trump White House and the GOP controlled Congress.

This is just a reminder that while we celebrate the 2017 edition of Black History Month, we should be mindful of it year round.

Lets not forget the young and old men and women, and institutions whose sacrifices made Black history viable as a bulwark against hatred and bias.

Lets not forget that the same factors which created slavery, Jim Crow and its modern version today, still exist. And if we are to have any future, we must fight against it.

By Leonard E. Colvin Chief Reporter

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Urban Notebook: Don't forget Emmett, Trayvon and Michael And Their Impact - Thenewjournalandguide