Wes
Denham has written article after article about Stand Your Ground. Yet,
he criticizes fellow media for its "hullabaloo" over the law in his most
recent column [Crime City, "Stand Your Wallet," March 12]. He further
criticizes the deceased, their families and their lawyers. Let me offer
some criticism of my own.
What I found when I researched Mr.
Denham was that he was not a lawyer, police officer or probation
officer. Even the books penned by him are ridiculed by lawyers and legal
minds alike in reviews. This hardly qualifies someone in most cities to
have a crime column.
Let me get to the point of my rebuttal.
There were more than a dozen errors in Denham's column, starting with
his description of self-defense laws and Stand Your Ground. The
battleground over one's duty to retreat is not a "single sentence" and
Stand Your Ground is not merely a criminal (or civil) immunity battle.
In
the early 2000s, the NRA couldn't get enough money to legislators to
have its agenda sufficiently passed, so the United Sportsmen of Florida
(USF) was created to double up donation revenue. Awards were then given
to state representatives, including Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, the NRA's
2004 Defender of Freedom Award winner and, incidentally, the 2005 Stand
Your Ground co-draftsman. The other power behind the bill was Marion
Hammer, the head of both the NRA and USF. They sold fear of home
invasion and rape to empower the legal gun owner to kill — few questions
asked. Coincidentally, since 2005, gun manufacturers have
conservatively contributed well over $40 million to the NRA. Fear sells.
This
isn't an exaggeration. Backers of the bill, including father and son
state Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Destin, and state Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Shalimar,
wrote: "Consider an elderly woman in a dimly lit parking lot or a
college girl walking to her dorm at night. If either was attacked, her
duty was to turn her back and try to flee, probably be overcome and
raped or killed."
Except that is entirely untrue. The old law said:
"The
defendant cannot justify the use of force likely to cause death or
great bodily harm unless he used every reasonable means within his power
and consistent with his own safety to avoid the danger before resorting
to that force. The fact that the defendant was wrongfully attacked
cannot justify his use of force likely to cause death or great bodily
harm if by retreating he could have avoided the need to use that force."
If
there was no means to avoid confrontation consistent with your own
safety, you could freely stand and "shoot, stab, bludgeon, punch, kick
or bite." The elderly woman has never been required in this country to
turn her back and run — ever. We did not have an epidemic of rape that
this law resolved. And yet writers like Denham are allowed to insinuate
that America was a nation riddled with women and children being hunted
down and killed by their attackers because there was no right to "stand
your ground." It's shameful. Worse yet, laws like Stand Your Ground
empower prejudice.
And then there's Denham's assertion that
"prosecutors, defense attorneys and police" have been "conspicuously
absent" from speeches by "weeping families." Denham obviously didn't
take time to even research his column at all. David LaBahn (the
president and CEO of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys), Ronald
S. Sullivan Jr. (the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at
Harvard Law School), Chief Scott Knight (former chair of the
International Association of Chiefs of Police), and dozens and dozens of
others have spoken out about Stand Your Ground and sat right next to my
clients at these very hearings. I spoke not as a lawyer for the family,
but as a dad. So not only do I resent Denham's statement that "weeping
families" and their lawyers were the only ones who testified as utterly
untrue, but it was also grossly offensive and heartless. Do not judge
the family of a murdered child unless you have walked in their shoes.
Stand
Your Ground has everything to do with the killing of Trayvon Martin,
Jordan Davis, Chad Oulson and others, whether the immunity hearing is
brought before a judge or not. The law now says anyone who is "attacked"
(without bothering to define if that means physical harm or merely an
attack on one's senses, through insults or less) has "no duty to
retreat," even if he or she was the cause of the problem or aggressor,
even if retreat is entirely reasonable, or even if everyone else in
their right mind would have simply retreated. The prospective killer can
"stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly
force." This is a standard that protects the killer all the way through
the criminal trial, through the jury verdict. It is read in every
self-defense case, and the state has the burden to prove the act was not
in self-defense.
Finally, the 2005 law ends with one more vulgar
line: It is OK to kill in self-defense if the killer "reasonably
believes it is necessary" to kill. So, the judge and jury must take the
killer's word — his or her "reasonable" belief — to decide if the
killing was justified. This empowers prejudice and vitiates the sanctity
of life. There was nothing wrong with the law before. Now, it allows
anyone with a legal gun and enough sense to lie when facing life in
prison to get out of jail free.
And since Denham brought it up,
the immunity from civil suit applies only when criminal immunity is
given. A simple not-guilty verdict does not eliminate the civil cause of
action for wrongful death. Despite that, insurance carriers have
exclusions for most, if not all, of these incidents. We anxiously await a
case in which we can show that the civil immunity provision is
unconstitutional as long as the state is the only one allowed to speak
on behalf of crime victims on the issue in court. The state represents
the citizens, not the victims. It is a conflict of interest, a
miscarriage of justice and a violation of due process for the victims to
have rights extinguished without being able to be heard. I encourage
every single victim of crime to pursue private counsel options. Much of
what we do in this regard is pro bono — for free — but it'd be too
simple to pick up the phone and actually learn about what we do,
wouldn't it?
I will end with a quotation from Abraham Lincoln: "I
do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was
yesterday." The information is out there, but the lazy man often finds
it easier to keep churning out the same old lies.
John M. Phillips
The author is a local attorney who represented the family of Jordan Davis, the teenager killed by Michael Dunn.