‘Stand your ground’ laws under attack
Black teen’s death seen as consequence
WASHINGTON — Soon after teenager Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Florida last year during a fight with neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, Eric Holder, America’s first black attorney general, took his 15-year-old son aside for a chat.
He told his son what his father had told him when he was his son’s age. He told him “about how as a young black man I should interact with the police, what to say, and how to conduct myself if I was ever stopped or confronted in a way I thought was unwarranted.”
In a speech Tuesday to the NAACP, he added, “I’m sure my father felt certain — at the time — that my parents’ generation would be the last that had to worry about such things for their children.”
At about the same time that Holder was counselling his son on the dangers facing a black man in a society where racial profiling is endemic, Rekia Boyd, 22, was standing among friends in a west side Chicago neighbourhood when an off-duty police officer, who like Zimmerman was a “white Hispanic,” approached the group appearing, according to witnesses, drunk.
Chicago police later said the officer was responding to a complaint about a disturbance in the neighbourhood. The story is clouded with contradictory statements from police and witnesses, but the result is not. The officer fired five shots blindly into the group, hitting Antonio Cross, 40, in the hand and killing Boyd with a bullet to her head. He claimed Cross had pulled a gun. In fact, he was holding his cellphone. Both victims were unarmed. Cross was charged with aggravated assault.
The police department in March awarded Boyd’s family $4.5 million in compensation. Charges were dropped against Cross. The officer has never been charged. He’s on administrative duty.
Boyd’s death is just one of about 480 killings of youngAfrican Americans in Chicago since the Florida shooting of 17-yearold Trayvon Martin. That’s a bit lower than the murder rate for all of Canada.
Politics and the determination of the NAACP to transform the Trayvon Martin killing into a national case of racial profiling separated it from all the rest. The fact that there was no evidence that Zimmerman racially profiled Martin as he tracked him through a Florida gated community didn’t seem to matter. But in the wake of Zimmerman’s acquittal, focus is turning on the so-called “stand
These laws try to fix something that was never broken
ERIC HOLDER
your ground laws,” which a Texas A&M University study claims has increased murders and manslaughter from seven to nine per cent, or by about 700 killings. The National Rifle Association for years campaigned for these new selfdefence laws and succeeded in getting them passed in Florida and 32 other states.
Following the Zimmerman acquittal, Holder was the first prominent official to move beyond the race issues and to attack the laws that even a juror admitted allowed Zimmerman to shoot Martin, when he told the NAACP convention Tuesday that they have served only to increase deadly violence in America.
“These laws try to fix something that was never broken. There has always been a legal defence for using deadly force if — and the “if” is important — no safe retreat is available.”
That’s the difference between “stand your ground” and the traditional concept in English common law of selfdefence. If there’s a safe path to retreat you have to take it. If there’s a way to minimize the violence, you have a duty to test it. Stand your ground removes that requirement. It allows a person to stand his ground and shoot you if he or she thinks you are a threat of grave bodily harm.
After Holder’s statements, the National Rifle Association was quick to stand its ground. “The attorney general fails to understand that self-defence is not a concept, it’s a fundamental human right,” NRA director Chris Cox said in a statement.