Stand Your Ground if you’re white (and a man)
by digby
A tale of two “stand your ground” cases:
A man in Florida shoots a man he finds having sex with his wife, killing him. A woman in Florida shoots the wall to scare off an abusive husband, harming nobody. Guess which one was acquitted? Guess which one was convicted?[…]
Both defendants used the defense of “stand your ground,” a Florida law that holds that a person 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.” The man who shot his wife’s lover to death was successful and walks free. The woman who shot at a wall to scare an abusive husband failed and sits in jail.
The disparity between these outcomes should be shocking. But, sadly, it’s not, once you take into account the fact that Wald is white and Alexander is black.
The story goes on to detail the racial disparities in both successful “stand your ground” defenses and homicide convictions. It’s so obvious one wonders what it will take to confront it.
But I was struck by something else in these two cases: the fact that the law seems to assume that a man has a right to abuse and kill people over his own perception of “ownership” of a woman.
In the first case, a 70 year old man shoots his next door neighbor when he catches him having sex with his wife. His defense is that he thought his wife was being raped but the evidence says he knew his wife had been having sex with the man both before and after the marriage and never used the word “rape” in any of the original statements. He used the word “fornicate” which isn’t exactly the same thing.
He was acquitted ostensibly on the grounds that he was “protecting” his wife, but the more likely reason was that he was seen as rightly protecting his male “honor” because he’d been cuckolded by the younger man. The good news, I suppose, is that he didn’t shoot the wife. Progress indeed.
The other case went like this:
She was estranged from her abusive husband, Rico Gray, and had a restraining order against him. Thinking he was not at home, she went to their former house to get some belongings. The two got into an argument. Alexander says that Gray threatened her and she feared for her life. Gray corroborates Alexander’s story: “I was in a rage. I called her a whore and bitch and … I told her … if I can’t have you, nobody going to have you,” he said, in a deposition. When Alexander retreated into the bathroom, Gray tried to break the door. She ran into the garage, but couldn’t leave because it was locked. She came back, he said, with a registered gun, which she legally owned, and yelled at him to leave. Gray recalls, “I told her … I ain’t going nowhere, and so I started walking toward her … I was cursing and all that … and she shot in the air.” Even Gray understands why Alexander fired the warning shot: “If my kids wouldn’t have been there, I probably would have put my hand on her. Probably hit her. I got five baby mommas and I put my hands on every last one of them, except for one … I honestly think she just didn’t want me to put my hands on her anymore so she did what she feel like she have to do to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt, you know. You know, she did what she had to do.” And Gray admits Alexander was acting in self-defense, intending to scare and stop but not harm him: “The gun was never actually pointed at me … The fact is, you know … she never been violent toward me. I was always the one starting it.” Ultimately nobody was hurt. Nobody died. On May 12, 2012, it took a jury 12 minutes to find Alexander guilty of aggravated assault. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Last week a Texas man was acquitted for killing a woman when she refused to have sex qith him after he’d given her $150.00 — under a law that says you have a right to protect your property after dark.
I don’t have anything to base this on other than my intuition, but it just seems to me that we aren’t quite as removed as we think we are from the barbaric practices regarding women and “honor” for which we rightly condemn the fundamentalists.
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