This is what happens when you let the NRA ghost-write your state’s laws:
MIAMI — Florida’s Stand Your Ground law was meant to make sure that average residents could defend themselves without fear of arrest or trial.
Now, police officers accused of using excessive force are trying to claim the law’s protection.
They have sought to use the law to avoid trial in cases in which a 63-year-old man was stomped, a man in a wheelchair was beaten, and two men were shot dead in separate incidents.
The Republican legislators who rubber-stamped the NRA scheme that allowed murderous creeps like George Zimmerman to gun down innocent African-American teenagers like Trayvon Martin helpfully included language that specified the law applies to ”any person.”
Florida Police officers accused of using excessive force have now seized on that language to defend themselves against charges of indiscriminately killing people who “threaten” them. And Judges are letting them get away with it. After all, the language says it applies to “any person.” Racist, killer cops ginned up on steroids deserve those protections, too, particularly when they make those scary traffic stops.
“Stand your ground” laws, the brainchild of the NRA, eliminate “any person’s” duty to retreat and permits the use of deadly force if “any person” “reasonably believes” such force is necessary to prevent one from being harmed or killed. It’s a “get out of jail free card” as long as you can dream up an excuse for your behavior and sell it to a Judge, because the decision to apply it or not precedes an actual criminal trial for the offense. Two dozen states with legislators beholden to the NRA have passed such laws, but Florida is the first to apply it to the police.
Of course, police are already permitted to use deadly force if they suspect danger. It’s the incidents caught on people’s cell phones when a white cop indiscriminately guns down someone with dark skin because of a perceived “twitch” or “attitude” he doesn’t like that tend to land police officers in hot water, subjecting them to the same laws that apply to us. Some of them-- too few--are actually convicted.
But mostly they skate, because they already have immunity for lawful shootings and juries are notoriously unwilling to second-guess someone who wears a bulging uniform.
One Florida case that may test the law’s applicability involves a former Palm Beach Gardens Police officer, Nouman Raja, who shot and killed an African-American musician named Corey Jones who was waiting for roadside assistance because his car had broken down. In an encounter fortuitously recorded by the roadside assistance company, Raja is seen shooting Jones six times as Jones runs away. Raja claims Jones pointed a gun at him, but this is mysteriously absent in the video.
Raja’s lawyers advised the Court they intend to invoke the “Stand Your Ground” law prior to his trial in March. To its credit, the Florida AG’s office is opposing, as are attorneys for the Jones family:
“I think it’s very sad that police officers are taking advantage of that law, especially when they are in the wrong,” said Mr. Jones’s father, Clinton Jones Sr. “I think it’s a disgrace to the police department.”
Raja is not the first police officer in Florida to invoke this statute. A Florida Court of Appeals upheld applying the law to a Broward Sheriff’s deputy named Peter Peraza who gunned down yet another young African-American in a “disputed” incident. That case created a conflict among competing Courts of Appeal, and as a result is heading to the state’s Supreme Court.
Rhonda Felder, who sits on the ‘Stand Your Ground’ Committee for the Black Lives Matter Alliance of Broward, worry that if the Peraza case is affirmed, it could embolden police officers to use blanket Stand Your Ground immunity as a defense and they’ll be more likely to engage in deadly force.
“We’re talking about a professional who should be trained in de-escalation,” Felder said. “Who should be trained in hand to hand, some kind of self defense. We don’t think deadly force should be the first recourse. The law as it is written right now is just open season.”
Others have raised concerns that applying such laws to police officers might affect the state’s critical tourism business. After all, what person of color in his right mind would want to visit a state where police can gun you down essentially at will if they don’t like the way you look at them?
Of course if the Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature wanted to, they could simply carve out an exception that precludes the perverse application of such laws to police officers.
But that might offend the NRA.