With "Stand Your Ground" now a political liability,
former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush says the "Stand Your Ground" law he signed shouldn’t protect a neighborhood watch captain who hasn’t been arrested in the shooting death of an unarmed teenager.
Bush spoke Friday at the University of Texas at Arlington, just outside Dallas. He told reporters afterward that the Florida law doesn’t apply in the incident that left 17-year-old Trayvon Martin dead.
He said, "Stand your ground means stand your ground. It doesn’t mean chase after somebody who’s turned their back."
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Former Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush: Self-defense law he signed doesn’t cover Trayvon Martin’s death".
To be sure, there should not be a law excusing what Zimmerman apparently did. However, the bill Bush signed into law doesn't say what Bush wants it to say, not even close. To interpret Bush's "Stand Your Ground" law the way he now suggests would require a judge to write an exception into the law that does not exist.
The bill Bush signed into law provides that
A person [1] who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and [2] who is attacked [3] in any other place where he or she has a right to be [4] has no duty to retreat and [5] has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force [6] if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.
Section 776.013(3), Florida Statutes (bracketing supplied).
Applicability of the statute as a defense is not precluded by an individual precipitating the event (e.g., by chasing someone) which in turn creates the situation wherein the precipitating individual "stand[s] his or her ground and meet[s] force with force". The individual using deadly force must merely (1) be in a place he "has a right to be" and (2) reasonably believe deadly force "is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself".
Stated differently, the "right" to "stand your ground" and kill another human being is not lost merely because the killer engaged in behavior that may precipitated the event where deadly force was used.
If Bush wanted the law to say what he now claims it means, he should not have blithely toed the NRA line, but rather insisted on language being added (along the lines of the underscored language below):
A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony. However, a person may not stand his or her ground and meet force with force, if he or she precipitated the event leading to the reasonable belief that he or she will suffer great bodily harm.
Judges, of course, cannot read the underscored exception into the statute because doing so would make them left wing judicial activists.