Thanks, Stand Your Ground! No homicide charges for teen who shot, killed man

[rrneck]

74. 11 to 1

http://blog.metrotrends.org/2012/03/stand-ground-laws-miscarriages-justice/

First, it is important to note that justifiable homicides are exceedingly rare. Between January 2005 and December 2009 there were more than 73,000 homicides in the United States but less than 2 percent (1,148) were found to be justifiable.

We combed the data to identify homicides which resemble the known facts from the Trayvon Martin case—cases in which there was a single victim and a single shooter (both of whom were civilians and strangers) and in which the victim was killed by a handgun. We identified 4,650 of these cases in the SHR. Of these, just 10.9 percent (506) were ruled to be justifiable homicides.

We then looked for a scenario where homicides are justified more than half the time. It turns out that the scenario with the highest probability of being a justified homicide is much like the Martin case—a single, White civilian handgun shooter who is a stranger to (and older than) the Black victim. But even then, the shooting is found to be justified less than half the time.

Finally, we searched the SHR data for cases that matched all the facts of the Martin case (including ages and races). Out of 70,000 cases, we find that the homicides similar to the Martin case occurred just 23 times in five years. Of those 23 cases, only 9 (39 percent) were ruled to be justifiable homicides.
Since the overwhelming majority of shootings are not justified, it seems clear that SYG laws reduce the chance for justice by moving the burden of proof from the shooter to law enforcement.

While your 11 to 1 factoid sounds like a horrible miscarriage of justice caused by SYG laws, when we look at the data it seems to disappear into statistical insignificance. Since laws are human constructs, and humans are imperfect, the laws we craft will be imperfect as well. There will be miscarriages of justice, of which the Zimmerman case is a fine example.

If SYG laws were universally repealed today, I expect the result will be little more than a statistically insignificant blip in the conviction rate for racially motivated homicide and conviction for same. And that blip would be easily swallowed by extenuating factors that are much more deserving of our attention because of their efficacy in the improvement of people's lives outside the narrow confines of self defense.