What ‘Stand Your Ground’ Really Means
A version of this story first appeared in the January/February 2017 issue of Pacific Standard. Buy this issue now.Disparities on this front have a long history in America. In the body of English common law on which American jurisprudence was based, there was a strong “duty to retreat.” Before meeting violence with violence, and certainly before killing your attacker, you first had to make an honest effort to simply get away. The one exception, known as the Castle Doctrine, held that, if you were attacked in your home, the duty to retreat evaporated. If you fought back, the law would protect you — or it might, depending on who you were. If you were a slave and your owner came across your doorstep looking to kill or rape you, the law would be little help. If you were a woman being beaten or raped by her husband, the law forbade you to fight back and barred you from testifying against him in court. Native Americans attacked at home by European colonists fought back at their own peril. Their “castles” were simply not as sacred as the white man’s.
Starting in the late 19th century, judges across the country issued rulings declaring the old “duty to retreat” an anachronism, one fundamentally at odds with the American frontier spirit. In the words of one ruling, self-defense was a right of “true manhood.” It went without saying that the “true man” was a white man. This was especially evident in the post-Civil War South. After Reconstruction fell apart, states across the former Confederacy quickly passed “black codes” that, among other restrictions, barred blacks from owning or carrying weapons. The federal troops who had enforced racial progress at gunpoint packed up and went home, and the killing of blacks by whites skyrocketed. In those rare cases where the judicial system got involved, white juries and white judges were almost always willing to believe white killers’ claims of self-defense.