ORLANDO, Fla. — When George Zimmerman pursued and shot to death 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on a rainy night 10 years ago this week, he was the captain of a neighborhood watch group in a gated Sanford neighborhood that had grown increasingly worried about a rash of burglaries and drug activity.
Trayvon was returning to the townhouse of his father’s fiancee from a nearby convenience store. But Zimmerman, who had a state permit to carry a concealed firearm, said he acted in self-defense and police photos showed him with a broken nose and a bloody face. He was later acquitted of second-degree murder by a jury for the Black teenager’s death.
Two years ago, in a South Georgia neighborhood, residents also became alarmed about a rise in burglaries and break-ins. According to police, two men grabbed a handgun and a shotgun, got into a pickup truck, and — along with a third man — chased Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging through the neighborhood. They shot and killed the 25-year-old Black man.
The men were found guilty of murder by a jury last month after they argued the shooting was in self-defense and claimed Arbery fought back as they tried to make a “citizen’s arrest.”
“Ahmaud Arbery was ... hunted down and shot,” Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley of Georgia’s Eastern Circuit said as he sentenced Arbery’s killers. “And he was killed because individuals here in this courtroom took the law into their own hands.”
These shooting deaths and others in the past decade have raised questions about whether laws that expand the right to self-defense have encouraged vigilantism — including “stand your ground” laws, which Florida pioneered in 2005 and became a flashpoint after Trayvon’s killing.
“I think so,” said Kenneth Nunn, a law professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. Such legislation, he said, “encourages people who could walk away not to do so and engage in conflicts when they are not necessary. … There is a lot of research that shows that the rate of violent homicides has increased significantly after the passage of SYG legislation.”
Despite facing widespread controversy as Trayvon Martin’s killing made national headlines in 2012, Florida’s “stand your ground” law was never significantly reformed — and in the decade since has been adopted in more than two dozen other states.
A study published Monday in a peer-reviewed medical journal linked “stand your ground” laws to an 8% to 11% increase in national monthly homicide rates — including double-digit rate increases in Florida and several other states in the South.
Orlando attorney Mark O’Mara, who represented Zimmerman a decade ago, said the Sanford shooting has made people more aware of Florida’s “stand your ground” law and similar legislation around the country — and some now use it to justify violence.
“If I asked you before 2012 [about “stand your ground”], you would look at me with a dull look in your eye, because few people knew about it,” O’Mara said. “But because of Zimmerman, it is now a catchphrase that everybody knows. ... It has led to people believing that they have more rights than they actually do — and to respond with more force.”
Expert: 'Stand your ground' is ‘hostile’ to common law
In a Clearwater convenience store parking lot in July 2018, Markeis McGlockton was shot and killed by Michael Drejka after he became upset that McGlockton’s girlfriend had illegally parked in a disabled spot without a permit. As Drejka yelled at the woman, McGlockton came out of the store and shoved Drejka to the ground.
Drejka pulled out a handgun and shot McGlockton as he was stepping away.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, at first, did not charge Drejka, citing Florida’s “stand your ground” law. But Drejka was later charged and convicted of manslaughter and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, shot and killed two men and wounded another in August 2020. Rittenhouse and others had gathered in front of a car dealership and claimed they were protecting it from rioters.
Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges after his attorney argued the shooting was in self-defense.
Wisconsin does not have a “stand your ground” law. But the state does have self-defense legislation that allows a person to use force if they reasonably believe that force would prevent death or great bodily harm to themselves, which mirrors some of the Florida law’s language.
Supporters of “stand your ground” and similar legislation say the laws make it clear that a person who uses lethal force must be in a place where they have a legal right to be and cannot be engaged in unlawful activity.
In other words, the person who uses "stand your ground" as a defense cannot be the person who started a confrontation by threatening, stalking, or assaulting another person, said state Sen. Dennis Baxley, one of the authors of Florida’s original legislation.
“It’s when you are under attack, and when you have every reasonable expectation that you need to defend yourself,” said Baxley, as he dismissed suggestions that the law encourages vigilantes. “It’s about this principle that a law-abiding citizen can stop a violent act.”
The “real problem,” Baxley argued, isn’t vigilantes but “lawlessness in the streets, and it’s making people say to themselves: ‘I want to be prepared and protect my family from harm. I better take care of myself because the government is moving to disarm people.’”
The Rev. Gregory O’Meara, a former prosecutor and now an associate professor of law at Marquette University in Milwaukee, said that under common law, a person who is somewhere other than their home can use force for self-defense if they were subject to an imminent attack, could not retreat safely and it was the only way to thwart the attack.
“The common law permits you to use defensive force if you reasonably believe that an attack by another is imminent and that every step of your response, every bullet you fire, every swing you take, is necessary to repel the attack that you reasonably believe is occurring,” said O’Meara, whose areas of research at Marquette include legal ethics, criminal procedure and legal interpretation.
But “stand your ground” legislation “seems hostile to the common law idea” that a person should avoid killing someone else if they can possibly avoid it, he added.
The Florida law says that a person can use deadly force anywhere they’re allowed to be, with no duty to retreat, if that person “reasonably believes” the force is needed “to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm” to someone or to prevent a forcible felony.
“I don’t know if the [’stand your ground’] laws have led to more vigilantism,” O’Meara said. “But those who take the law into their own hands and choose to cloak themselves in the mantle of ‘stand your ground’ laws surely have another legal defense tactic in their quiver.”
Force as ‘default reaction’?
Zimmerman’s defense team argued that the common law definition of self-defense justified their client’s actions. They opted against requesting a so-called “stand your ground” hearing prior to his trial, at which he could have sought immunity from prosecution.
Zimmerman, who prosecutors said prior to the fight followed Trayvon into a darkened alley against a police dispatcher’s instructions, claimed he was lying on the ground being beaten by Trayvon when he fired his gun — leaving him no option to retreat, his attorneys said.
But the controversial self-defense law still had bearing on the case. Sanford’s police chief cited the law in explaining his agency’s initial stance that Zimmerman could not be arrested. And “stand your ground” language appeared in the instructions Zimmerman’s jurors were given when they deliberated the charges against him.
Because the law allows the use of lethal force in response to a perceived threat, “It certainly serves to protect the actions of those who have a conspiratorial or suspicious bent,” said O’Meara, of Marquette University.
“And, of course, I worry about the safety of young men of color because so many see them as objects of irrational fears,” he added.
Though comprehensive data on Florida’s “stand your ground” law is hard to come by, studies have found evidence of racial bias in its application. For example, a review by the Tampa Bay Times found that defendants who claim “stand your ground” are more likely to succeed if the person they used force against is Black.
But former state Sen. David Simmons, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee in 2005 and was the law’s main drafter, argues the legislation is not racially biased. African Americans, he said, can use it as a defense as comfortably as white defendants.
“I am more than thoroughly convinced that it is a good law, because it’s been adopted by many states almost verbatim,” Simmons said. “And ‘stand your ground’ protects African Americans 100%. Because if you are a victim, and you acted reasonably, then you should be able to rely on ‘stand your ground.’”
The findings of the study published Monday by the journal JAMA Network Open “do not lend support for the claim that SYG laws widen racial disparities,” its authors wrote, but “suggest that adoption of SYG laws across the US was associated with increases in violent deaths, deaths that could potentially have been avoided.”
Simmons — who was a member of a task force formed by then Florida Gov. Rick Scott in 2012 to look at the state’s “stand your ground” law — introduced a bill a year after the Trayvon Martin shooting that would tweak the law to bar neighborhood watch volunteers from confronting suspects.
Simmons, at the time, said that he agreed with legislation that allows people to defend themselves. But “I do not agree with people being able to willy-nilly brandish firearms,” he said.
Critics of the law argue the question of whether someone acted reasonably in using deadly force — a standard on which conviction or exoneration in “stand your ground” cases can hinge — is too subjective, leading to inconsistent outcomes, sometimes within the same case.
In November 2012, Michael David Dunn shot and killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis after telling the Black teenager and his friends to turn down their music at a gas station parking lot in Jacksonville. Dunn, a white man, told authorities that Davis had threatened him with a “gun or a stick.”
After Dunn was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, he appealed his case to the Florida Supreme Court, citing Florida’s "stand your ground" law. But justices rejected his appeal.
In New Orleans, Catina Curley, a Black woman, was found guilty of second-degree murder for killing her husband in 2005 after suffering years of abuse. She spent nearly 11 years in prison until March 2019, when a judge ruled that the fatal shooting was a justified act of self-defense.
This month, the trial began for Curtis Reeves, a 79-year-old man, who shot and killed Chad Oulson in January 2014 in a Wesley Chapel movie theater after an argument over the use of a cellphone escalated and Oulson threw a bag of popcorn at the retired police captain.
Reeves initially claimed self-defense under “stand your ground.” But three years later, a judge said the law did not apply in the case. Reeves is now charged with second-degree murder and aggravated battery and has pleaded not guilty.
O’Mara, the attorney who defended Zimmerman, said “stand your ground” has created the false impression “ that you can act immediately rather than judiciously” when faced with a conflict on neutral ground.
“The problem with that is that people uneducated in the law just sit back and say, ‘ ... I can just take my gun and shoot,’" he said. “Unfortunately, that has become the default reaction to aggressive behavior rather than the last resort.”
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