While the nation's top cop strongly condemned ?stand-your-ground? laws, and protests over self-defense legal statutes raged across the nation in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal last week, Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos said Friday he doesn't have a problem with the statutes.
?No matter what you do, things can go bad,? Gallegos said. ?But the idea behind stand your ground is that the process of retreating can also put you in danger, even graver danger in some cases. The reality is if someone comes at you, you should be able to stay there and defend yourself.?
Gallegos' comments came just days after United States Attorney General Eric Holder strongly criticized the laws that allow a person to use force in self-defense without first looking for a way to retreat from the confrontation. Speaking to an annual convention of the National Association For Colored People, Holder said Tuesday that he believed the stand-your-ground provisions attempted to ?fix something that was never broken? and may actually encourage ?violent situations to escalate.?
Friday, President Barack Obama made an unscheduled appearance in the White House briefing room to speak about the Zimmerman case, saying it's an opportunity for self-reflection on race relations in the country. Obama also said the 17-year-old that Zimmerman shot dead last year ?could have been me 35 years ago? and said it may be time for the country to take a hard look at self-defense laws.
A Florida jury acquitted Zimmerman last week of charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter stemming from the Feb. 26, 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch coordinator born to a white father and a Peruvian mother, spotted Martin, an African-American, walking through his neighborhood and deemed him suspicious.
Zimmerman followed Martin and called the police before a confrontation ensued in which Martin, who was unarmed, was fatally shot. Zimmerman's defense claimed the shooting was an act of self-defense and came after Martin attacked him.
The case was racially charged from the start -- magnified by often erroneous national cable news media coverage, with prosecutors and others alleging Zimmerman racially profiled Martin -- and Zimmerman's acquittal sparked large protests in some areas and widespread condemnations of the stand-your-ground provisions that have been enacted in more than 30 states.
John Myers, a professor at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law, said Friday that while California is known as a no-duty-to-retreat state, and Florida is deemed a stand-your-ground state, the terms are really synonymous.
?It's exactly the same thing,? he said. ?As I read (the statutes), there is no substantive difference.?
Statutes in both states provide that self-defense is a legal defense to murder and manslaughter charges. For a killing to be considered justifiable self-defense in both states, three criteria need to be met: The shooter needs to be subjected to an imminent or present unlawful attack with deadly force; the shooter needs to honestly believe force is necessary to defend themselves or someone else from the attack; and that belief must be reasonable.
Historically, there was a fourth criteria as well: That the shooter had no avenue of safe retreat. California, Florida and many other states have done away with that provision, instituting stand-your-ground or no-duty-to-retreat laws that allow someone being attacked to meet force with force without first looking to avoid the confrontation.
California and Florida laws, however, do not allow someone to seek out a fight, initiate it and then claim self-defense.
Laws in the two states are so similar, in fact, that if you took the Zimmerman jury and gave them the same set of facts in a California case, they would likely come to the same conclusion, Myers said. University of California Hastings College of Law professor David Levine generally agreed.
?If you had 100 juries in California and 100 juries in Florida, I don't think they come out with the same verdict every time, but you probably see a very similar pattern,? Levine said. ?It could be the same outcome (under California law), for sure.?
Myers said the idea behind stand-your-ground laws is that requiring someone to retreat from a situation can actually put them in additional danger. Even in jurisdictions that require someone to retreat if possible, the requirement is fairly narrow, Myers said.
?The avenue of retreat had to be completely safe and impose no additional risks to the person,? he said, adding that it just doesn't make sense to require someone facing an armed assailant in an open area to turn and run away. ?In the case of guns, there's often no such thing as a safe retreat.?
While Myers said he thinks no-duty-to-retreat provisions are reasonable, he said he thinks it's a topic on which reasonable minds can differ.
For his part, Gallegos largely thinks stand-your-ground laws are logical and give people the ability to properly defend themselves from an unlawful violent attack. However, Gallegos conceded that some people will likely abuse the law, as is the case with all laws, and be emboldened by the no duty to retreat provision.
Levine said he thinks criticism of the stand-your-ground provisions -- like Holder's comments earlier this week -- are valid.
?From what I've seen, it does seem like (the provisions) escalate violence,? he said. ?People don't necessarily know their precise rights, but it gives them a little bit more of a feeling that they can be aggressive if they have stand-your-ground behind them.?
Noting that California already has enhanced legal protections -- known as the castle doctrine -- for people defending themselves in their own home, Levine said that he, like Holder, sees stand-your-ground statutes as attempting to fix a problem that may not have existed.
?I don't perceive that there was a problem before we started getting these stand-your-ground laws,? he said. ?I think people were safe enough, let's say, with guns in their pockets. I'm not aware that there was an epidemic of people getting wrongfully killed because they had a duty to retreat.?
Thadeus Greenson can be reached at 441-0509 or tgreenson@times-standard.com.
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