Title
Resolution Calling for Repeal of Michigan’s Stand Your Ground Law and for Strengthening of Firearm Regulations
Memorandum
The death of Trayvon Martin and acquittal of George Zimmerman brought national attention to the issues of “Stand your Ground” laws and racial profiling. This event, in which an unarmed young man died at the hands of someone carrying a firearm, and other cases of gun violence such as the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and in a mall in Oregon also raise the issue of pervasive gun violence in the United States
The Trayvon Martin case exemplifies many of the systemic inequalities in our society. Most victims of gun violence are, like Trayvon Martin, people of color. Stand Your Ground laws are not applied in a race-neutral manner. Research by the Urban Institute shows that white-on-black shootings are more likely to be found justified, and black-on-white shootings less likely to be found justified, in states with those laws.
This racial disparity in the application of Stand Your Ground laws mirrors a wider disparity within the American criminal and legal system, as discussed in the 2013 Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads selection, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Stand Your Ground Laws, such as Michigan’s Public Act 309 of 2006, the Michigan Self Defense Act, permit the use deadly violence even when there is an opportunity to retreat. By nullifying the common law “duty to retreat,” they allow the use of deadly force even when it could be avoided.
Michigan’s Stand your Ground law also places significant burdens on prosecutors by requiring they prove that defendants did not “honestly and reasonably believes that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent the imminent death”. This is an unreasonably high bar for prosecution, especially in cases such as Trayvon Martin’s in which the only other witness who could offer testimony to refute what the defendan...
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