A lawsuit filed by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH group challenging the fairness of Georgia’s “stand your ground” law may be dead.
Despite promises made last November by Jackson at a nationally covered Atlanta news conference that this was to be the first of many such legal actions across the country, nothing has happened since the case was filed. The two people named as defendants — the governor and the state attorney general — were never served.
The courts allow 120 days to serve a defendant and that time ran out March 4.
“If the suit is a serious case why would (the state defendants) not be served?” said former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers.
Rainbow/PUSH did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
The issue of when lethal self-defense should be allowed has become a hot topic nationally since neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida. Self-defense has been cited in the case of a retired Florida policeman who shot and killed another moviegoer in a dispute and in the Jacksonville trial of a man who was convicted of second-degree attempted murder after shooting at teenagers in an SUV.
The Georgia lawsuit, filed Nov. 1, was to have been the first to address issues raised in those cases about whether stand-your-ground laws are vague, arbitrary and discriminatory.
James Johnson, whose son was killed in a barroom fight by a man who was cleared after claiming self-defense, was at the Atlanta news conference with Jackson and said he expected the Georgia suit would bring meaning to the death of his son.
Johnson was surprised to learn the suit — brought on behalf of the estate of James Christopher Johnson III — is likely to be dismissed simply because there was no follow-up.
“I need to find out what went on. This is the first I heard,” Johnson said.
Attorney Robert Patillo said he thought Gov. Nathan Deal and Attorney General Sam Olens were served by mail in December, but a spokeswoman for Olens said neither the attorney general nor the governor had been served, nor had they received a letter asking them to “waive” service.
Patillo said he would try to find out why the lawsuit was never served, which is the responsibility of the plaintiffs.
“If we need to refile it, we’ll refile it,” Patillo said.
The Georgia suit was seen as the beginning of a national campaign to repeal laws that say there is no requirement to retreat when threatened.
“Our sense of justice is being surrendered to madness such as stand-your-ground laws,” Jackson said in November.
The concept of the right to self-defense is centuries old; the Georgia Supreme Court endorsed it in 1898. But in recent years nearly two dozen states, including Georgia, have written into their laws that the “defense of castle” doctrine goes beyond homes and cars and that there is no “duty to retreat.”
“Stand your ground has been remarkably active in these high-profile cases,” University of Georgia law professor Ron Carlson said.
Yet the courts have not addressed the question of whether such laws are too vague. “A good statute needs to give clear guidance as to what is prohibited and what is allowed so that citizens can conduct themselves accordingly,” Carlson said.
That was the issue raised in the Rainbow/PUSH suit and in an earlier suit filed in Georgia by a local activist in April 2012.
“It is not clear what actions would create ‘reasonable belief’ that deadly force is necessary,” said the suit filed two years ago by Markel Hutchins.
As with the suit brought by Hutchins, the gun-rights group Georgiacarry.com asked that the Rainbow/PUSH case be dismissed.
The Hutchins suit was dismissed six months after it was filed, with the defendants never having been served.
The judge assigned to the Rainbow/PUSH suit has not ruled on a motion to dismiss.
In a motion docketed March 24, Georgiacarry.com attorney John Monroe noted that the Rainbow/PUSH case is the second federal lawsuit challenging Georgia’s stand-your-ground law in which the governor and attorney general were never served.
“The parallels between the two cases are startling,” Monroe wrote in the motion to dismiss the suit.
“Why would you file a lawsuit and do nothing, nothing at all?” he said later in an interview.
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