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Stand Your Ground changes easier on Fla. shooting suspects New York Daily News Shooting suspects in Florida might have a better chance to avoid prosecution because of a new Republican-backed measure on the Sunshine State's controversial Stand Your Ground law. The Florida House of Representatives passed an NRA-endorsed bill ...

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Stand Your Ground changes easier on Fla. shooting suspects - New York Daily News

A critic of the states stand your ground law Wednesday said a change to the law now moving through the Legislature will make it easier for people to murder other human beings.

Lawmakers now are considering shifting the burden to prosecutors, making them disprove a claim of self-defense. Sen. Perry Thurston, a Fort Lauderdale Democrat, called that making a bad law worse.

He appeared with several fellow Democrats at a morning press conference in the Capitol.

The stand your ground law, enacted in 2005, allows people who are attacked to counter deadly force with deadly force in self-defense without any requirement that they flee.

The House onTuesday amended a Senate measure(SB 128) to change the burden of proofto overcomeself-defense to clear and convincing evidence, a lower threshold than the Senates beyond a reasonable doubt.

But lowering the burden wont help the bill, Thurston told reporters, because the problem is with the burdens shifting: Essentially forcing prosecutors to prove a negative.

Rep. Kamia Brown, an Orlando Democrat, added thatthe move willincentivize domestic abusers to finish the job.

Why not go all the way there wont be anyone around to dispute a stand your ground defense, she said.

And Rep. Bobby DuBose, anotherFort LauderdaleDemocrat, said it will embolden gang members to pick on the competition with impunity under the cover of a stand your ground defense.

Specifically, the Senate billsponsored by Fleming Island Republican Rob Bradleywould requireprosecutors to showthat a defendant is not immune from prosecution.

Its in reaction toa state Supreme Court decision that put the onus on the defendant to show self-defense under the stand your ground law.

The House is scheduled to vote on the amendedbill later Wednesday, sending it back to the Senate.

A Periscope video of the press conference can be viewed below:

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Democrats decry change to 'stand your ground' law - Florida Politics - Florida Politics (blog)

Good policymaking requires an evenhanded approach. The proposed changes to the Stand Your Ground Law that recently passed the Florida Senate are anything but evenhanded.

The bill pushes back on a majority decision by the court that ruled that individuals who claim self-defense under the Stand Your Ground statute must prove in a pretrial immunity hearing that they met deadly force with deadly force in fear for their lives.

Under the bill, the burden of proof shifts to the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual is not entitled to claim stand your ground immunity.

While beyond a reasonable doubt sounds like what prosecutors ordinarily should do, consider that in the hearing that they must prove what someone is not entitled to.

Likely the victim is no longer living and the witness list is either grossly short or non-existent.

Further, a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that even the law as it currently exists is associated with a spike of over 30 percent in Floridas firearm-related homicide rate since its passage in 2005. This is despite a national decline in homicides since the early 1990s.

Another study, conducted by the Tampa Bay Times, found that one-third of defendants initiated the confrontation, shot or pursued an unarmed victim and went free.

Given what we know, and what the court apparently understands, the political badminton on this issue should stop and the scales should not be pushed away from fairness and justice.

Valuing the life of individuals should reign over a need to play whos boss, and the court should be able to operate in its appropriate space.

The Senate bill now waits as the House companion, I hope, goes through enough committees to give it proper vetting with more opportunity for public testimony that exposes the fatal flaw of victims never getting their side of the story told because they are no longer able to talk.

And people are able to walk away from a potential murder scene.

State Sen. Audrey Gibson,

Jacksonville

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Tuesday's Lead Letter: Change to Stand Your Ground Law is ... - Florida Times-Union

As the only independent, state-based gun violence prevention organization in Minnesota, Protect Minnesota strongly opposes the passage of Stand Your Ground legislation.

This bill is unnecessary. Minnesota law allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense from grievous bodily harm or death. There is nothing confusing about it: Minnesotans can already use deadly force in self-defense. However, current law establishes an objective standard: the shooter is required to prove the shooting was justified.

This bill removes the obligation to retreat in all situations and gives the presumption of innocence to the shooter, setting a completely subjective standard. All the shooter must do to justify killing another human being is claim that he felt threatened, whether or not the threat was real.

The bill also authorizes use of deadly force when responding to any attempted felony on private property -- in effect establishing the death sentence for attempting to steal a high-end bike out of a garage.

This bill would not make Minnesota safer. Minnesota's gun death rate is 6.6 per 100,000 people. The average gun death rate in the 24 states with Stand Your Ground laws is 14.3 per 100,000 more than twice Minnesota's rate, according to the Kaiser Foundation. A study of states that have enacted such laws showed no evidence of crime deterrence -- rates of burglary, robbery, and aggravated assault have not been affected. On the other hand, homicides in those states have increased by around 8 percent, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

This bill would put Minnesotans at risk. The implementation of Florida's Stand Your Ground law was associated with a 24.4 percent increase in homicide and a 31.6 percent increase in firearm-related homicide, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. On average, Stand Your Ground states have experienced a 53 percent increase in homicides deemed legally "justifiable" in the years following passage of the law, compared to a 5 percent decrease in states without the laws, according to the National Urban League.

Stand Your Ground represents a particular threat to people of color and immigrants, who are often met with suspicion by Minnesotans. If it passes, almost any shooting could be justified because the shooter "felt threatened," even if the "threat" was a hoodie or a hijab. Racial bias and inconsistency in the implementation of these laws is a widespread phenomenon. In Stand Your Ground states, white killers are 354 percent more likely to be found innocent if the victim is black than if the victim is white, according to FBI data cited by the PBS news program "Frontline."

This bill also puts anyone whose behavior is unusual at risk, such as those who suffer from mental illness or autism. Although the gun lobby would like us to believe that the mentally ill are the primary perpetrators of gun violence, in actuality they much more likely to be victims. Their behavior can seem "scary" and this bill gives Minnesotans the right to shoot "scary" people.

The same is true for home health care workers, meter readers, pizza deliverers, repair people, census takers, and kids whose Frisbee ends up in a neighbor's garden -- anyone who has to cross a property line or knock on a stranger's front door would be put at risk if someone in the home felt "threatened" by their presence.

To sum up, Stand Your Ground is unnecessary, won't make Minnesota safer, and will put Minnesotans at risk. This "shoot on sight" legislation does not align with Minnesota Nice nor Minnesota values. We urge state law makers to keep House File 239 from moving forward.

The Rev. Nancy Nord Bence is executive director of

, which is based in St. Paul.

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Bence: Stand Your Ground law makes no one safer - Post-Bulletin

Ill give the mainstream media this much: Its absolutely consistent in its inability to understand or explain use-of-force law generally and Stand-Your-Ground laws in particular.

The most recent example comes out of Tulsa, Okla., where this past Monday a 23-year-old staying at his fathers home encountered three armed assailants who had forcibly entered by kicking in the back door.

Unfortunately for these home invaders, the 23-year-old possessed a loaded AR-15 rifle, and he knew how to use it. All three suspects ended up dead. A fourth, the getaway driver, would later turn herself into police. The shooter immediately called 911 to report the incident, a call which is remarkable in its own right. (Seriously, go listen to it.)

As seems inevitable in any media coverage of a self-defense shooting, news reports of the incident routinely made reference to Stand-Your-Ground:

The homeowners son who shot them has not been arrested while police investigate whether he acted in self-defense under the states Stand Your Ground law. CBS News

[Assistant District Attorney Jack ] Thorp told reporters that investigators will help his office determine whether Oklahomas Stand Your Ground law applies in the case of the triple shooting. Fox News

Killing of 3 teens during burglary may test Oklahoma stand your ground law Yahoo News

As also seems inevitable, these references to Stand Your Ground laws betrayed a shocking inability to understand what such laws actually mean.

The first thing to know about Stand Your Ground is that traditional self-defense law often imposed a legal duty to retreat before using defensive force if a safe avenue of retreat was available. Stand Your Ground serves to relieve a defender of that duty to retreat in cases where it would previously have existed and that is all that Stand Your Ground does.

This means, of course, that in circumstances in which no legal duty to retreat exists, Stand Your Ground is entirely irrelevant, because no one needs to be relieved of a legal duty he never had in the first place.

If no safe avenue of retreat is available, then there is no legal duty to retreat, even in the absence of a Stand Your Ground law. If there exists a safe avenue of retreat for the defender, but that path of retreat is not safe for a person accompanying the defender (e.g. a small child or elderly parent), the defender is not required to leave the other behind, and thus there is no legal duty to retreat, again rendering any Stand Your Ground law irrelevant.

And then there is the universal exception to any legal duty to retreat: the so-called Castle Doctrine, which holds that even in cases when one would otherwise have a legal duty to retreat, that legal duty doesnt apply if they are in their castle meaning their home and sometimes their business or vehicle and they are facing armed intruders who have forcibly entered. In such a home-invasion, there is no legal duty to retreat, so Stand Your Ground laws do not apply.

This last circumstance is precisely what that 23-year-old Oklahoman faced on Monday, and there is no state in the country where he would have had a legal duty to retreat, meaning his actions were not governed by Stand Your Ground law. Instead, he found himself in a very straightforward defense of dwelling scenario. Under Oklahoma law, as in many states, a home defender in this situation is also favored by the creation of certain legal presumptions that strengthen the legal defense for their use of force.

The relevant Oklahoma law is easily found in Oklahoma Statute 1289.25, Physical or Deadly Force Against Intruder, which creates two legal presumptions in defense of dwelling cases.

The first is that the defender had a reasonable fear of death or grave bodily harm:

A person...is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another when using defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm to another if...the person against whom the defensive force was used...had unlawfully and forcibly entered, a dwelling, residence, occupied vehicle, or a place of business...

The second legal presumption created by the statute is that the home invader intends to commit an act of violence:

A person who unlawfully and by force enters or attempts to enter the dwelling, residence, occupied vehicle of another person, or a place of business is presumed to be doing so with the intent to commit an unlawful act involving force or violence.

It is true that 1289.25 elsewhere contains references to Stand Your Ground, self-defense immunity, and reimbursement of a defenders legal expenses in a civil suit. But each of these is an entirely distinct legal concept, and may or may not apply to a particular defensive force event depending on the facts of the case. As explained above, the statutes Stand Your Ground provisions dont remotely apply to the Tulsa shooting, as the long-standing provisions of the Castle Doctrine already relieved the defender of any legal duty to retreat even if such a duty existed under Oklahoma law.

In short, this was a defense of dwelling scenario which raised a legal presumption of reasonable fear on the part of the defender and of intent to commit violence on the part of the home invader. Stand Your Ground has nothing whatsoever to do with this case but no one should hold their breath waiting for the mainstream media to realize it.

Andrew F. Branca is an attorney and the author of The Law of Self Defense: The Indispensable Guide for the Armed Citizen.

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The Mainstream Media Gets 'Stand Your Ground' Laws Wrong Again - National Review