by Nicole Flatow
South Carolina is one of more than 20 states that has passed an
expansive Stand Your Ground law authorizing individuals to use deadly
force in self-defense. The law has been used to protect a man who
killed an innocent bystander while pointing his gun at several teens he called “women thugs.” But prosecutors in Charleston are
drawing the line at domestic violence.
In the cases of women who claim they feared for their lives when
confronted with violent intimate abusers, prosecutors say the Stand Your
Ground law shouldn’t apply.
“(The Legislature’s) intent … was to provide law-abiding citizens
greater protections from external threats in the form of intruders and
attackers,” prosecutor Culver Kidd told the Post and Courier. “We
believe that applying the statute so that its reach into our homes and
personal relationships is inconsistent with (its) wording and intent.”
Most recently, Kidd raised this argument in vigorously pursuing a
murder case against Whitlee Jones, whose screams for help as her
boyfriend pulled her down the street by her hair prompted a neighbor to
call the cops during a 2012 altercation. When the officer arrived that
night, the argument had already ended and Jones had fled the scene.
While she was out, Jones decided to leave her boyfriend, Eric Lee, and
went back to the house to pack up her things. She didn’t even know the
police officer had been there earlier that night, her lawyer Mary Ford
explained. She packed a knife to protect herself, and as she exited the
house, she says Lee attacked her and she stabbed Lee once in defense. He
died, although Jones says she did not intend to kill him.
On October 3, Circuit Judge J.C. Nicholson sided with Jones and granted her
Stand Your Ground immunity,
meaning she is exempt from trial on the charge. In response to Kidd’s
argument that individuals could not invoke Stand Your Ground to defend
against violence in their own homes, Nicholson said that dynamic would
create the “nonsensical result” that a victim of domestic abuse could
defend against an attacker outside of the home, but not inside the home –
where the most vicious domestic violence is likely to occur.
Kidd is unsatisfied with this reasoning, and is appealing the case to
argue that Jones and other defendants like her can’t invoke the Stand
Your Ground law so long as they are in their home. The Post and Courier
reports that there are two other similar cases coming up the pike that
are being pursued by the same prosecutor’s office. In one, a judge who
dismissed a murder charge against a women who stabbed a roommate
attacking her called the charge “appalling.” In another, the defendant’s
attorney plans to ask for a Stand Your Ground hearing.
Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, the top prosecutor for that office, is
also siding with Kidd. Wilson and Kidd do have a legal basis for their
arguments. South Carolina is one of several states that has two
self-defense provisions. One known as the Castle Doctrine authorizes
occupants to use deadly force against intruders. Recently, the South
Carolina Supreme Court
ruled
that this provision could not apply to fellow occupants of the home, in
a case involving roommates, although that ruling was since withdrawn
and the case is being re-heard this week. The Stand Your Ground law
contains a separate provision that authorizes deadly force in
self-defense against grave bodily harm or death in another place “where
he has a right to be.” Prosecutors are arguing that neither of these
laws permit one occupant of a home to use deadly force against another.
But as Nicholson points out, this interpretation would yield the
perverse result that both self-defense provisions explicitly exempt
domestic abusers when they perpetrate violence within their own home.
The Post and Courier, which originally reported prosecutors’ position, has been
doing a series
on domestic violence over the past few months, in which it found that
women are dying at a rate of one every 12 days from domestic abuse in
South Carolina, a state “awash in guns, saddled with ineffective laws
and lacking enough shelters for the battered … a state where the deck is
stacked against women trapped in the cycle of abuse.”
More than 70 percent of those who kill their spouse had “multiple prior arrests on those charges” and the majority spent just days in jail.
It is in that context that the Post and Courier gave front page
treatment to another strike against domestic victims in Stand Your
Ground laws, even as those who engage in what many consider vigilante
killings are protected by the law. The man granted immunity for killing
an innocent bystander, Shannon Anthony Scott, reportedly
had a sign posted in his window that read, “Fight Crime – Shoot First.”
Lee, the victim in Jones’ case, had
previously been arrested
when “a woman said he smashed her flower pot and shattered her bedroom
window with a rock during a fit of rage” and had a prior conviction for
property a property crime.
Jones said she feared for her life. And those like her who defend
themselves against domestic abuse shouldn’t need Stand Your Ground laws
to raise a claim of self-defense. Most states, including South Carolina,
have longstanding court precedent that permits individuals to raise
claims of self-defense in cases where their life is threatened. And
those common law claims are one of the reasons many opponents argue that
the expansive protection of Stand Your Ground laws is not needed, and
gives those who turn to force too much legal cover. But one of the
demonstrated flaws of Stand Your Ground laws is that their imposition
has been arbitrary, and allowed immunity in
many more cases involving white shooters and black victims.
In cases in which women have invoked Stand Your Ground laws, an MSNBC
analysis found that women invoking the Stand Your Ground defense against
white men
succeeded in only about 2.6 percent
of cases (2.9 percent of the woman was also white). The disparity of
Stand Your Ground cases came to national attention with the case of
Marissa Alexander, who was
sentenced to 20 years in jail for firing a warning shot against her alleged abuser. She was denied Stand Your Ground immunity.
Ernie Chambers, a long-serving, African-American state senator, has
proposed a bill that would strike the word "religious" from the list of
groups that are property-tax-exempt.
