By Mark S. Brodin

Reflecting back a decade later, what is the legacy of Trayvon Martin’s case, a teenage life violently cut short, and a legal system that accepted his death without consequence? Among other things, there is “The Trayvon Generation,” poet Elizabeth Alexander’s ruminations on the young African Americans who have grown up in the haunting shadow of this killing, and the anguished mothers who cannot protect their children from such a fate. “[T]o African Americans and other racialized minorities, Martin’s death became emblematic of the extreme outcomes of racial profiling enmeshed in a history of criminal laws arbitrarily targeting Black men.”

I begin with a close look at the Zimmerman trial, expanding on my earlier Howard Law Journal article with new access to an official audio-visual transcript. Then I put the case in its historical context by surveying the American tradition of vigilantism and its incarnation in the “neighborhood crime watches” (like Zimmerman’s) that have become so pervasive. Next, I contrast the response of the legal system to black as compared to white self-defense in notable cases. I conclude with an appraisal of our self-defense law -- doctrine and practice -- and the compelling need to reform it in light of what we have learned about implicit bias, unconscious stereotyping, and their role split-second panicked decision-making.

106 Marquette Law Review 593 (2022)

By Everytown Research & Policy

In October 2022, William Hale and Frank Allison drove alongside each other on US Highway 1 in Hialeah, Florida. A traffic dispute grew more dangerous as both men began driving erratically. When Hale threw a water bottle at the other car, Allison retaliated with a gun, firing a shot that hit Hale’s 5-year-old daughter. In response, Hale fired all of the bullets in his handgun, striking Allison’s 14-year-old daughter. Though both men were initially charged with attempted murder, prosecutors dropped the charges against the man who fired first. Under Florida’s so-called “Stand Your Ground” legal defense law, the thrown water bottle justified responding with deadly force, leading to a child being shot.1 In the end, with two girls wounded in a road rage tragedy, the man who started the shootout was protected by a distortion of self-defense that allows people to shoot first and ask questions later.

New York: Everytown Research and Policy, 2025. 9p.

By Jacob D. Charles & Darrell A.H. Miller

From subtle shifts in the procedural mechanics of self-defense doctrine to substantive expansions of justified lethal force, legislatures are delegating larger amounts of “violence work” to the private sphere. These regulatory innovations layer on top of existing rules that broadly authorize private violence—both defensive and offensive—for self-protection and the ostensible maintenance of law and order. Yet such significant authority for private violence, and the values it projects, can have tragic real-world consequences, especially for marginalized communities and people of color. We argue that these expansions of private violence tap into an ancient form of social control—outlawry: the removal of the sovereign’s protection from a person and the empowerment of private violence in service of law enforcement and punishment. Indeed, we argue that regulatory innovations in the law of self-defense, defense of property, and citizen’s arrest form a species of “New Outlawry” that test constitutional boundaries and raise profound questions about law and violence, private and public action. Simultaneously, we use the New Outlawry as a frame to explore connections between several constitutional doctrines heretofore considered distinct. Whether limits on authorized private violence fall under the state action doctrine, the private nondelegation doctrine, due process or equal protection, or the republican form of government guarantee, experimentation with the New Outlawry provides an opportunity to explore how these different doctrinal categories share common jurisprudential and normative roots in the state’s monopoly over legitimate violence.

124 Columbia Law Review 1195 (2024)