Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘stand your ground’

Zimmerman lawyer: “Stand Your Ground” isn’t our defense

Remember this past April, when I was telling anyone who would listen that Florida’s much-flayed “Stand Your Ground” no-duty-to-retreat self-defense doctrine was unlikely to be relevant in the Trayvon Martin shooting, even as much of the media was publishing piece after piece claiming the opposite? Bloomberg’s Ed Adams is kind enough to remember:

Specifically, as AP now reports, “attorney Mark O’Mara now confirms that ‘The facts don’t seem to support a “stand your ground” defense,'” and that he will instead be advancing a conventional self-defense theory on behalf of client George Zimmerman. To add confusion, the preliminary hearing provided for by Florida law is colloquially known as a “Stand Your Ground” hearing, even if SYG itself is not the grounds on which dismissal is sought.

Particularly shameful were the organized campaigns in some quarters first to demonize Stand Your Ground as having somehow caused Martin’s death, and then to demonize the American Legislative Exchange Council for having promoted self-defense laws in other states. With little critical scrutiny in the media, the campaign even enjoyed a certain amount of success, though its factual flimsiness was apparent enough at the time.

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Prosecution and police roundup

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Prosecution roundup

  • John Edwards mistrial is umpteenth setback for DoJ white-collarers; FEC’s failure to charge might have been tipoff [BLT] One lawyer on the campaign finance implications of the Edwards prosecution [David Frum]
  • Jeralyn Merritt analysis of Martin/Zimmerman evidence dump indicates once again that Stand Your Ground issue is likely to prove a red herring [TalkLeft, earlier]
  • Letter writer doesn’t care for my recent structuring-forfeiture op-ed [Baltimore Sun] More on civil forfeiture: when cops become robbers [Nita Ghei, Washington Times]
  • Deferred prosecution and NPAs: “The Justice Department may be in the next cubicle” [Jim Copland]
  • Converting tickets into “court costs”: ploy raises funds for courts in Atlanta and elsewhere [Consumerist via Alkon]
  • When lawyers advise innocent clients to plead guilty [John Steele, LEF on Brian Banks case]
  • “Jailtime for twittering on your office PC? The federal courts are split” [Appellate Daily via @andrewmgrossman] “12 steps for overcoming overcriminalization” [TPPF via Vikrant Reddy, Right on Crime]

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Crime and punishment roundup

  • Some reps push to cut off federal funds for states with Stand Your Ground laws [Maguire, Just One Minute] Podcast and video of Cato’s panel discussion on SYG laws [and related from Tim Lynch] Muddle-prone media mischaracterizes other cases besides Martin/Zimmerman as SYG [Sullum] “Shame of mandatory minimums shows in Marissa Alexander case” [Roland Martin, CNN, via Alkon] More: Florida voter poll shows strong support for SYG [Sun-Sentinel] New medical reports could prove helpful to defense in Martin/Zimmerman case [WFTV, more]
  • Feds prosecute building firm for paying NYC labor graft, but as for those who receive it… [Holman Jenkins, WSJ, with Wal-Mart Mexico FCPA angle]
  • Why is the Center for American Progress helping the Obama administration pretend that it’s ended the Drug War? [Mike Riggs] “Jailed for trying to fill a prescription” [Amy Alkon] “She stole his heroin, so she was the victim” [Jacob Sullum]
  • Conduct on which defendant was acquitted can still count as prior bad act evidence [Scott Greenfield]
  • New UK justice law abolishes indefinite sentences for public protection (IPPs) [Barder]
  • “Debtor’s Prison for Failure to Pay for Your Own Trial” [Tabarrok]
  • ACLU on unsettling possibilities of surveillance drones, law enforcement and otherwise [Lucy Steigerwald]

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April 20 roundup

  • Lawsuit claim: MERS mortgage system is just a racket to deprive court clerks of recording fees [Baton Rouge Advocate]
  • More reporting on hospital and community drug shortages [Washington Post; my post last summer]
  • Roger Pilon: How the “judicial activism” debate changed [Cato at Liberty]
  • Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, spoken of as a future national political figure, has rather a lot of ties to trial lawyers [Political Desk]
  • Problems with DOJ e-book antitrust suit targeting Apple [Declan McCullagh]
  • One bogus campaign feeds into another: “ALEC Unfairly Demonized Over ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws” [Bader, CEI “Open Market”]
  • New Point of Law discussion on class actions with Ted Frank and Brian Fitzpatrick;
  • Today’s best spam comment? “With all the thistledown floating almost on the net, it is rare to look over a locate like yours instead.”

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California’s court-developed Stand Your Ground law

Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle has an excellent report on California’s longstanding recognition of Stand Your Ground self-defense principles in public places, which developed through judicial rather than legislative action. He reports that “even Californians who illegally carry handguns can invoke the stand-your-ground doctrine, as shown in a 2005 ruling by a state appeals court in Santa Ana.” By contrast, compare the misleading-at-best map run in Wednesday’s news-side Wall Street Journal, which purports to show states with “stand your ground laws in place” but treats California as not having one. The WSJ lists its sources for the map as “Association of Prosecuting Attorneys; Legal Community Against Violence; National Conference of State Legislatures.” Perhaps the paper was relying overmuch on input from anti-gun groups that have sought to portray Stand Your Ground as a novelty foisted on state legislatures in recent years, thus underplaying the doctrine’s deep historical roots in much of America.

Notwithstanding tendentious efforts to politicize the issue of late, it’s also worth noting that leading Democratic governors like Janet Napolitano (Arizona) and Jennifer Granholm (Michigan) were among those to sign Stand Your Ground laws in the post-2005 wave of new legislative adoptions [Hawkins, Breitbart] Earlier on Stand Your Ground here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.

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April 16 roundup

  • Although I’m known as a foe of everything John Edwards stands for, I hope he beats this campaign finance rap [Atlantic Wire]
  • Michael Bloomberg launches demagogic new campaign against Stand Your Ground laws, calling to mind the recent critique of the NYC mayor’s paternalist dark side by Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic;
  • Jerry Brown frees grandmother dubiously jailed in shaken-baby death [Slate, earlier]
  • As Scruggs (Dickey not Earl) still pursues vindication, Alan Lange looks back on Mississippi scandals [YallPolitics]
  • Deservedly favorable profile of Fifth Circuit judge Jerry Smith [NOLA]
  • In which I tell off Bill Donohue’s Catholic League for its double insult last week to gays and to adoptive parents [IGF]
  • “The Ninth Circuit was, believe it or not, correct” [Ilya Shapiro and Trevor Burrus, Cato, on administrative law case arising from NLRB rules change on drug rep overtime]

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Misleading audio clips and media transparency

In one of the standout instances of media misconduct during the run-up to the recent furor, NBC repeatedly aired, on “Today” and other shows, audio footage misleadingly edited so as to advance the proposition that George Zimmerman was suspicious of Trayvon Martin because of his race [Erik Wemple, Washington Post] While announcing that it had fired the unnamed producer it considered responsible, NBC was less than forthcoming about other details of the scandal, which — as Mickey Kaus points out — may have had a lot to do with its lawyers’ concerns about minimizing a possible defamation payout: “Like other tort laws, libel laws are in practice the enemy of transparency.”

Some have recalled the scandal in which “Dateline NBC” aired footage of supposedly exploding GM cars that in fact had been rigged with incendiary devices. But I’m actually more put in mind of a less celebrated media disgrace from the same era, the Texaco Tapes pseudo-scandal, in which (as I recount here) the New York Times and other outlets avidly promoted systematic misreadings of audiotapes in a hotly disputed racial-bias case, and failed to engage in adequate (or, really, any) soul-searching when the misreadings came to be exposed. In the Martin/Zimmerman case the questionable audio readings included the “two-shot” account influentially advanced by the New York Times when the case first broke nationally, and the supposed racial slur which dominated coverage for a couple of days before being (if the prosecutor’s affidavit is any indication) discreetly laid to rest.

More: Speaking of the New York Times, you have to wonder whether that paper has some sort of stylebook rule requiring it to keep misreporting what Stand Your Ground laws do [Jacob Sullum, more, earlier] And Tom Maguire notes that the paper’s latest editorial appear to be backing off its earlier assertions that the Zimmerman case will hinge on the state’s curtailing of the old “duty to retreat”: “The duty to retreat evidently extends to Times editors.” He also wonders whether, on the much-discussed question of whether Zimmerman flouted the advice of a 911 operator, the NYT editorialists read their own paper. Yet more: Maguire collects the media myths.

I have a new post at Cato rounding up many of my recent writings and broadcast appearances on the subject, under the title, “Why Is Press Coverage of the Martin/Zimmerman Case So Bad?”

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Zimmerman in custody, charged with second degree murder

Coverage everywhere.

Of the continuing efforts in many quarters to demonize “Stand Your Ground” law, despite mounting indications that it will not make the difference in determining George Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence at trial (on which see my Cato colleague Tim Lynch’s writing here and here, as well as mine), Ann Althouse asks: “Why inject an inapplicable, controversial issue? To inflame passions? To skew judgment? To take any opportunity/nonopportunity to push your pet issue?”

The thing is, “Stand Your Ground” hadn’t really been a pet issue one way or the other for many of those who now harp on it. I think the better answer is: because many people yearn for ways to blame their ideological opponents when something awful happens. It’s much more satisfying to do that than to wind up wasting one’s blame on some individual or local police department for actions or decisions that might not even turn out to be motivated by ideology.

Consider, for example, the efforts to set up the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council as somehow the ultimate villain in the Martin shooting. Left-wing groups, assisted by labor union and trial lawyer interests, had been pursuing a campaign against ALEC for months before the Martin case, in hopes of making the group radioactive among generally liberal donors like the Gates Family Foundation and the Coca-Cola Co. Nothing had worked — until the synthetic Stand Your Ground furor finally afforded an opening.

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