New self-defense law gets a second look

Little attention was widely paid last summer when the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law that changed many of the state’s gun rules. George Zimmerman’s night of self-appointed security duty took care of that.

It turns out that the law passed in June 2011 contains a section virtually identical to the “Stand Your Ground” statute passed in Florida in 2005 and made infamous after the February night that Zimmerman shot and killed a teenager named Trayvon Martin.

The new North Carolina law, like Florida’s, says that a person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or harm to himself or someone else, or to prevent a serious crime.

Florida police initially sparked public outrage when they declined to charge Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense under the law. Now, a special prosecutor is preparing to put Zimmerman on trial. And, increasingly, Stand Your Ground laws themselves have been on trial in the court of public opinion.

Some legislators in Florida are calling for the law’s repeal. The state’s Republican governor Rick Scott announced the creation of a task force to review the state’s law. And a statistical analysis by the non-partisan website PolitiFact.com found that justifiable homicides have tripled in Florida in the five years since its passage.

John Rubin, professor at the University of North Carolina School of Government and author of the book “The Law of Self-Defense in North Carolina,” says the practical impact of the 2011 law may be more limited than Florida’s because in North Carolina, the principles underlying the statute were already embodied in the state’s case law.

In fact, the Florida statute looks like it could have come straight from the North Carolina Supreme Court, which wrote in 1979 that “a defendant may employ deadly force in self-defense only if it reasonably appears to be necessary to protect against death or great bodily harm.”

“They seem legally similar to me, ‘stand your ground’ and ‘no duty to retreat,’ ” Rubin said about North Carolina’s law. “It’s not entirely clear to me the particular issue that the legislation was intended to address.”

But the confusion over why the N.C. legislature felt that it needed to tweak the law might be explained by the fact that the new statute didn’t originate from within the halls of the General Assembly. Instead, it was the work of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative interest group that provides state legislators with model statutes that they can submit for consideration, often word-for-word.

Twenty-five states have passed Stand Your Ground laws since 2005. South Carolina passed its Protection of Persons and Property Act in 2006. The language is slightly different from North Carolina and Florida’s laws, and even uses the phrase “stand his ground,” but the effect is largely the same.

The incident in Florida brought increased attention to ALEC’s efforts. Several large corporations terminated their membership in the group after liberal activists called for boycotts. ALEC responded by announcing that it would focus its attention on less incendiary issues like the economy.

North Carolina Rep. Kelly Hastings, a Gaston County Republican and one of the primary sponsors of the new law, agreed that it codified some existing case law, but said that it was important in that it covered a lot more than just self-defense, and was “a pretty big bill in the final analysis.”

In addition to expanding the right to self-defense, the law also expands the “castle doctrine,” the rule that a person has no duty to retreat from his own home, to a person’s vehicle and place of work. Under the doctrine, the occupant of a home can presume a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily harm if an intruder forcibly enters his or her property.

R. Andrew Murray, district attorney for Mecklenburg County, said with the expansion of the castle doctrine, that presumption now extends to cars and the workplace.

He said that although his county sees a fair number of cases where self-defense is raised as an issue, he doesn’t think the statute will change those cases much because North Carolina case law has always recognized self-defense—and because the prosecution can still present evidence that the fear was not reasonable.

“The castle doctrine is not carte blanche to use deadly force in a situation where you are not in threat of serious harm or death. The law has not changed in those circumstances, and if [deadly force] is not justified, then prosecution will follow,” Murray said.

Without discussing any specific cases, Rubin agreed that a person who initiates an altercation may be in for a surprise if they then try to claim protection under the new law.

“[The law] expresses, or at least clarifies, our existing law on the aggressor, or fault, doctrine. The basic rule is if you are at fault in starting an encounter with lethal force, you don’t get to claim self-defense when the other person responds with lethal force,” Rubin said.

Rubin said it was less clear what would happen if a shooter provoked a conflict in a non-lethal way and the situation escalated. If the provoked person reacted in a lethal way so quickly that there was no other way for the initiator to react, then the initiator would have the right to use lethal force, he said.

The law went into effect on December 1, 2011, so the North Carolina appellate courts have yet to apply the law.