The Nation learned about the Stand Your Ground Law from the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.
The Stand Your Ground Law is in the news every day...
With gun laws rapidly changing in the country, Stand Your Ground is the new normal
Marissa Alexander: In 2010, Marissa Alexander, a Florida woman, fired a warning shot into a wall during a domestic dispute with her estranged husband. She claimed self-defense under the state’s Stand Your Ground law, but was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Her case drew national attention and she was eventually released in 2017 after a plea deal.
The shooting death of Breonna Taylor in 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky, also involved Stand Your Ground issues. Taylor, a 26 year old Black woman, was killed by police officers during a raid on her apartment. The officers claimed they fired in self-defense after Taylor’s boyfriend fired at them, but the use of force has been heavily criticized and has sparked nationwide protests.
In 2013, Kyam Livingston, a Brooklyn woman, died in police custody after being arrested for allegedly violating an order of protection. Her family claimed that she was denied medical care and that the officers involved were protected by the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which they said made it difficult to hold them accountable for her death.
In 2016, Shanynthia Gardner, a Tennessee woman, was charged with killing her four children. Her defense team argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and that she was acting in self-defense under the state’s Stand Your Ground law. However, the judge ultimately rejected this argument and Gardner was found guilty of first-degree murder.
On the morning of July 31, Jacqueline Dixon shot her estranged husband, Carl Omar Dixon, in the front yard of her home. The shooting took place after Carl Omar Dixon had reportedly found (what he believed) to be evidence of his estranged wife’s infidelity. He then allegedly charged at her aggressively, and Jacqueline Dixon shot him with a small caliber handgun.
Anthony Santi, a 41 yea old Kansas City firefighter who was off-duty, was on top of and restraining a 23-year old man in a chokehold outside of an Independence gas station when the woman left the vehicle she was in, yelled at the men to try to break up the fight and fired a round that hit Santi in the back, ultimately killing him.
In Louisiana early this year, a grand jury cleared 21-year-old Byron Thomas after he fired into an SUV with teenagers after an marijuana transaction went sour. One of the bullets struck and killed 15 year old Jamonta Miles. Although the SUV was allegedly driving away when Thomas opened fire, Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre said to local media that as far as Thomas knew, someone could have jumped out of the vehicle with a gun. Thomas, said the sheriff, had “decided to stand his ground.”
In March 2012, Bo Morrison was shot and killed by a homeowner in Wisconsin who discovered the unarmed 20 year old on his porch early one morning. According to friends, Morrison was trying to evade police responding to a noise complaint at a neighboring underage drinking party. The homeowner, thinking Morrison was a burglar, was not charged by the local district attorney.
In April, 22-year-old Cordell Jude shot and killed Daniel Adkins Jr., a pedestrian who walked in front of Jude’s car just as Jude was pulling up to the window of a Taco Bell drive-thru in Arizona. Jude claimed Adkins had waved his arms in the air, wielding what Judge thought was a metal pipe – it was actually a dog leash. Jude shot the 29-yearold Adkins, who was mentally disabled, once in the chest. As of May, an arrest had not been made in the April 3 shooting.
In January, a judge in Miami tossed out a second-degree murder charge against Greyston Garcia after he chased a suspected burglar for more than a block and stabbed him to death. The judge decided the stabbing was justified because the burglar had swung a bag of stolen car radios at Garcia – an object that a medical examiner at a hearing testified could cause “serious harm or death.” The judge found Garcia was “well within his rights to pursue the victim and demand the return of his property.
No one may ever know why 19-year-old Renisha McBride knocked on the door of Theodore Wafer’s house in a Detroit suburb before dawn in November. But there is no dispute that Wafer, 55, afraid and groggy, shot McBride through his screen door, killing her, and then called 911. Wafer is white and McBride was black. “I do believe that you acted out of fear, but an unjustified fear has never been an excuse for taking someone’s life.”
