A conviction of George Zimmerman wouldn’t have erased the grief of the family of Trayvon Martin, who still would be dead from a confrontation that need not have taken place. Nor does the acquittal represent total relief for the family of Zimmerman, who still has little chance of leading a normal life.
For those who knew Martin and know Zimmerman, no jury’s verdict would have changed those facts.
For the rest of us, it appears the broader fallout from the acquittal of Zimmerman will be a push from the left, and specifically from many prominent African-American liberals, to repeal “Stand Your Ground” laws in Florida and beyond.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder criticized these laws in a speech Tuesday to the NAACP; the leader of that group, Benjamin Jealous, pledged to seek the repeal of these laws. Singer Stevie Wonder said he will not perform in any state with such a law. One of those states is Georgia, where state Sen. Vincent Fort said legislators “must revisit racial profiling and Stand Your Ground laws,” among other statutes.
Never mind that Zimmerman’s attorneys did not even invoke Florida’s Stand Your Ground law during the criminal trial — though it could factor into potential civil cases. If these laws are becoming a new civil-rights cause, shouldn’t we know if it affects minorities disproportionately?
According to the facts in one state, at least, that’s not the case.
The Tampa Bay Times has compiled a database of 133 fatal Florida cases in which Stand Your Ground was invoked. Twenty-one of these cases arepending.
In the 112 cases that have been resolved, defendants’ Stand Your Ground claims were deemed “justified” 65 percent of the time.
For black defendants, the success rate in resolved cases is 69 percent. For white defendants, it’s 62 percent. For Hispanics, it’s 67 percent.
No racial disparity there.
Nor were African-Americans unlikely to invoke the defense in the first place. Including cases still before the courts, black defendants have made one-third of Stand Your Ground claims in Florida, despite making up just one-sixth of the state’s population.
In the vast majority of resolved cases, the defendant and person killed were of the same race; in only 26 were the dead and the accused people of different races.
In those 26 cases, Stand Your Ground was somewhat more likely to be a successful defense when the person killed was black (nine of 10) or Hispanic (five of six) than when a white person was killed (six of 10). The success rates were much more similar when the defendant was black or Hispanic (five of seven for each group) compared to white defendants (10 of 12).
But keep in mind these sub-categories involve very small sample sizes. For example, had Stand Your Ground claims been successful in one less case where the dead person was black and one more case where the dead person was white, the success rates for those races would have been virtually the same.
What’s more, none of this analysis considers the facts of individual cases. That’s why I haven’t referred to the dead as “victims”; in many cases, the aggressor was the person who wound up dead.
For its part, the Times concluded there was “no obvious bias in how black defendants have been treated.”
It would be good to know what these kinds of statistics look like in Georgia and other Stand Your Ground states. But in Florida, it is far from clear these laws represent a threat that is peculiar to African-Americans.
Are there racial disparities in our justice system we should address? Absolutely. That’s one reason criminal justice reforms in Georgia during the past two years — addressing nonviolent adult and youth offenders, two groups in which black Georgians are disproportionately represented — have drawn wide, bipartisan support.
But the numbers from Florida suggest that, in terms of righting racial wrongs, Stand Your Ground laws don’t deserve the prime attention they’re receiving.
