Examining the Race Effects of Stand Your Ground Laws and Related Issues

By The  U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, and later that year, on November 12th, the shooting and killing of Jordan Davis triggered a national controversy over the legislated criminal defense called “stand your ground.” These laws expanded the self-defense principles of the castle doctrine to situations and areas outside the curtilage of a home. It also expanded the principle of self-defense to a lesser justification standard than that of justifiable homicide. The United States Commission on Civil Rights opened its own inquiry on the subject in May 2013, and in October 2014, held a hearing in Florida. The transcript of that hearing forms the main body of that report. Unlike other hearings or briefings, the work of the Commission was conceived as an investigation, on a bipartisan vote made possible by the vote of then-Vice-Chair Abigail Thernstrom.  We are here presented with only the testimony heard in Florida five years ago, as well as research and public information subsequent, but that does not prevent members of this Commission to state their observations on an issue that continues to trouble our nation to this day. And so my statement begins. The question we asked then, and we ask now, continues to be: do Stand Your Ground laws have an unacceptable racial bias in their application in the criminal justice system. What we do know, and what we cannot ignore, is that the same racial biases that have permeated our criminal justice system cannot be separated from this issue. When you consider the racial disparities in selective prosecution and sentencing that have been amply documented in the literature is it any wonder that a law like Stand Your Ground, which in effect grants both powers to an individual under the guise of self-defense would suffer similar maladies?

Washington, DC: USCCR, 2020. 386p.