Ok so I read through this thread and it shocked me that not ONE person here decided to be smart and look up the Stand Your Ground law in Florida. The part that pertains to this reads as follows:
There's a few things that stick out here to me. First, is the duty to retreat. UNLESS someone
reasonably believes their life is in danger or great bodily harm is imminent (i.e. someone's coming at you with a knife, not unarmed and barefisted), then you have a duty to attempt a retreat. Even if Travyon did start the fight, it's not very reasonable to expect that the life of a full grown man with 100-lb weight advantage was in any true danger to justify lethal force.
Now it does say something about you can use lethal force against someone if it's in order to prevent a forcible felony (defined as: Treason and any felony which involves the use or threat of physical force or violence against a person). Now it hardly seems like that applies to someone merely walking down the street on a cell phone. And wearing a hood does not indicate any sort of criminal behavior whatsoever, I'm an upperclass white male and wear hoods in public all the time. Does that mean someone has the right to come up an shoot me? Absolutely not, it's ludicrous. So the self defense claim gets thrown out the window right away.
Now here's the part that I really think applies here (full text of the law
here):
So I think section (2) part (B) really applies here. It's fairly obvious that Zimmerman was the aggressor (even if he didn't throw the first punch, stalking Travyon the way he did is an act of aggression under the law). According to the second 911 call that Amar posted it seems that Zimmerman made zero attempt to flee, and there's no evidence that Travyon chased after him and indicated he wanted to continue the fight.
All in all after reading the law in it's full text it seems there's no reason to apply the Stand Your Ground law. If anything the law would have applied to Travyon in this case, not Zimmerman. I hope this clears up a lot of the stupid bickering over the self-defense and the law in general because it seems pretty clear cut to me that Zimmerman's actions don't fall under any of these categories.
EDIT: Here's some more interesting parts of the law, as pertains to home defense, but there's sections that discuss altercations in a public space
This, to me, actually seems to give credence to the idea that Stand Your Ground applies to Travyon instead of Zimmerman. He was in a public space that he was permitted to be in and was seemingly met with force. Zimmerman had been obviously stalking him and judging from the manner in which he was fuming at the 911 operator over how "they always get away with this", it's hard to logically conclude that he approached Travyon in a calm manner. Remember, a forcible felony can be describe as a threat of force, and it's hard to argue Travyon couldn't reasonably feel threatened in this situation. The cries for help also lead one to believe that Travyon even gave up his right to stand his ground and is an obvious attempt at trying to get away. I really can't see how anyone can argue in favor of Zimmerman in lieu of the written word of the Stand Your Ground Law in Florida. The fact that the police still haven't even made an arrest is proof of how Jim Crow discrimination is still extremely present in the justice system. If it were the other way around, and the blood were on Travyon's hands I sincerely think it would have been handled quite differently, despite Travyon's good case for having Stand Your Ground apply to him.
Originally Posted by droogsteve
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