Civilian Use of Deadly Force in Self-Defense: Public Health, Stand Your Ground

Stand Your Ground and Expanded Castle Doctrine (SYG) laws are part of the broader doctrine of self-defense in US criminal law. They excuse the use of deadly force in self-defense under some circumstances, even when the actor could have safely chosen retreat over violence. The elimination of this "duty to retreat" is said by SYG proponents to reduce the legal risk for people defending themselves and deter criminals by increasing their perceived risk of encountering an armed and ready victim.1 Although the no-retreat rule embodied in SYG laws has a venerable lineage in Anglo-American jurisprudence, the concept became more salient after the turn of the century-and spread to more states-with support from the National Rifle Association (NRA).2The effects of SYG laws are hard to study. Both self-defense doctrine and the morality it reflects are complicated, and the changes entailed in SYG marginal.2 Legal complexity arises in part because the duty to retreat is a less distinct element of self-defense in practice than it sounds in legal text (Figure 1). Even in states still requiring retreat, a defendant can set forth a version of events (possibly uncontested if the victim is dead) in which retreat was not a reasonable option. Other elements of self-defense interact with retreat. Who was the aggressor? Was violence imminent? Was the defendant's force proportional to the victim's? Had the aggressor stopped the attack before the defendant used force? The defendant's decisions must be objectively reasonable, but the jury will be composed of people with at best a normal distribution of biases and sometimes a skewed one if lawyers have used jury selection skillfully, so that the race, gender, and other characteristics of the victim-defendant dyad will influence juror perceptions of events and judgments of reasonableness.