Did “Stand Your Ground” Matter in the George Zimmerman Case?

I know many legal experts, including Colin (in the post immediately below), are downplayingthe role that Florida’s Stand Your Ground (SYG) law played in the GeorgeZimmerman case.  And it is true that thedefense narrative of the case fit into a standard definition of self-defense law.  But I think SYG played a significant role inthe case for a couple of reasons.  Hereis the main one: 

Juries rarely completely accept a criminal defendant’s self-interestedaccount of his actions, and I would be surprised if they did so in thiscase.  But even discounting Zimmerman’saccount, there remained a great deal of uncertainty as to how the tragicaltercation began and how it unfolded. That is where the SYG instruction that the jury received comes in.  Thejury instructions, available online, include slightly more than a page on self defenseand the core of that instruction is the SYG law:  “If George Zimmerman . . . was attacked inany place where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had theright to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force . .. .”  This instruction, coming not fromthe parties but from the judge, emphatically carves out a broad swath of deadly conductthat is permitted under Florida law. Jurors who believed that the truth of what happened that night laysomewhere within that broad swath (or, more precisely, that the prosecution’sevidence did not disprove the possibility that it did) were required to acquit,even if they believed Zimmerman to be more culpable than his statement topolice would suggest.

Interestingly, the jurors did not get all of the SYGprovisions in the instruction quoted above. As I mentioned in an earlier piece Iwrote on SYG when this case first broke, a person cannot invoke the SYG law ifhe “initially provokes the use of force against himself.”  Alafair Burke, a law professor at Hofstra hasan insightful article in the Huffington Post (available here) that describeshow the Zimmerman prosecutors lost a lengthy after-hours battle to get thatpart of the SYG law included in the jury instructions.  Prof. Burke concludes:  “Losingthe initial aggressor instruction may have been the moment the state lost itscase.”

– JB