Ohio's Black leaders sound alarms over new stand your ground law effective today
Published in the Akron Beacon Journal, April 6, 2021 (Click here to view on news site).
Ohio’s Black leaders continue to sound alarms over a change in the state's self-defense law, which goes into effect Tuesday.
Senate Bill 175 removes the duty to retreat, meaning people are no longer required to back away from confrontations in public before they can exert deadly force.
In 2008, lawmakers enacted the “Castle Doctrine,” which removed the requirement to retreat before using force only when the threatened person is in their home or car. The new measure expands the use of force to public settings like streets, parking lots and grocery stores.
Proponents of the new law argue that it enacts a common sense reform and aims to give Ohio victims the opportunity to defend themselves wherever danger lurks. Opponents, however, say the law allows people to kill others with impunity.
Critics say removing the requirement to retreat leads to the devaluation of life. Too often, they add, those whose lives are being devalued are Black civilians.
“The 'stand your ground' bill, historically, nationwide, has not been a bill that has protected Black people from vigilantism or racism,” said the Rev. Ray Greene Jr., executive director of the Freedom BLOC, a political activism group advocating for Northeast Ohio's Black community and formerly incarcerated residents.
“This bill has historically not been dealt with in a racially equitable way. It doesn’t provide safety for the community. It provides safety for white men and white men only,” Greene added.
In recent years, stand your ground laws have become associated with high-profile incidents of white-on-black violence, particularly in Florida, which passed the country’s first measure in 2005.
It is the law that Sanford police cited when explaining why they did not arrest George Zimmerman after he fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. At trial, Zimmerman said he shot Martin in self-defense. A jury later acquitted him.
But proponents of Ohio's version of stand your ground legislation argue that people should be able to defend themselves wherever they feel threatened.
Supporters say stand your ground law protects crime victims
“The passage of the law that removes the duty to retreat simply shifts the burden off of the victim of crime and at least gives the person a fighting chance,” said Rob Sexton, legislative affairs director for Buckeye Firearms Association, which lobbied for the passage of the bill.
Dean Rieck, executive director of Buckeye Firearms Association, emphasized that S.B. 175 does not impact the standard for using lethal force in self defense situations.
“It does not give anybody any extra rights. It does not change in any way when you can or can’t use lethal force. … You have to have an honest and reasonable fear of death and great bodily harm before you can use lethal force such as a firearm,” Rieck said.
Rieck said that Ohio’s duty to retreat imposed an “an artificial extra burden” on people who attempted to defend themselves in violent situations.
“They would later have to prove in court that they essentially couldn’t run away or couldn’t escape and that’s just something that is sometimes very difficult to prove in a court. So we’ve been trying to remove the duty to retreat,” he said.
Rieck said that fears that the stand your ground law will lead to more violence or that its application will be plagued with racial disparities are unfounded. Both Rieck and Sexton suggested that the measure could reduce crime and bring justice to victims of gun violence regardless of race.
“The prediction that this is going to cause a lot of mayhem really is not going to come to pass. … The duty to retreat has been removed from lots of other states. It’s never been a problem. … We don’t expect it to be a problem here either,” he said.
Results in other states
But data from other states where stand your ground laws have been implemented show evidence of both increases in gun violence and racial disparities in application.
Between 2005 and 2011, the number of homicides involving Black victims considered justifiable increased more than twofold in stand-your-ground states, according to a July 2020 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Giffords Law Center. Another study from the Urban Institute found that “a white shooter who kills a Black victim is 350 percent more likely to be found to be justified than if the same white shooter killed a white victim.”
A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health this year, which analyzed 32 studies on stand your ground laws found that “in at least some US states, most notably Florida, stand your ground laws have been associated with increases in homicides and there has been racial bias in the application of legal protections.”
Alexa Yakubovich, one of the lead researchers of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at Unity Health Toronto and the University of Toronto, said that there is no evidence to support the claim that stand your ground laws protect people against crime.
“They have not led to decreases in violence and crime after they have been implemented, and we’ve found that they’ve led to at most modest increases on average across the U.S. … but when we look at specific states — and Florida is the one that’s been looked at most because it was the one that first implemented the first model stand your ground law — that’s where we’ve seen really large increases in violence and crime,” Yakubovich said in an interview, adding that it is unclear what forces account for some states experiencing larger increases in violence than others.
The race of victims is “one of the most important predictors regarding the outcomes of self defense cases,” Yakubovich said, with cases involving white victims systematically more likely to end in convictions as opposed to victims who are non-white.
“Not only does it matter if the victim is white, but it also matters if the person claiming self defense is a racial minority,” she added. “In that situation, the conviction rates are the highest of any kind of pairing.”
Response from lawmakers, opponents
State Senators Tim Shaffer and Terry Johnson, who sponsored the bill, along with a host of other Republican lawmakers, and Rep. Kyle Koehler — who drafted the language around removing the duty to retreat — did not respond to the Beacon Journal’s interview requests.
But lawmakers who opposed the bill expressed their disappointment in its passage, given the studies that point to its harms elsewhere.
“What other reason would you want this kind of legislation in Ohio than to have the same results in other states? There really is no other justifiable answer,” House Minority Leader Rep. Emilia Sykes, D-Akron, said in an interview.
“This 'no duty to retreat' is a ‘shoot first’ piece of legislation that will permit the use of deadly force by individuals who believe that their lives are endangered anywhere they are. The bill goes entirely too far and it threatens Black lives and it makes Ohioans less safe overall,” Sykes said, describing an atmosphere of disregard in the Legislature for the perspectives of lawmakers who represent constituents of color.
“Any of the statistics I’ve looked at which talk about what Ohioans want, it isn’t this. So, again, where does our legislation come from?” asked Rep. Tavia Galonski, D-Akron.
Reps. Adam Miller, D-Columbus, and Thomas West, D-Canton, are co-sponsors of House Bill 38, which would reinsert a duty to retreat into Ohio law and repeal S.B. 175.
Gov. Mike DeWine’s signing of the bill drew widespread criticisms from civil rights groups and even the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association and Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio.
“I was disappointed that Gov. DeWine took that stance,” said NAACP Akron President Judi Hill. “I think it was purely political. It was part of a national agenda as opposed to an Ohio agenda."
While many point out the disconnect between DeWine’s remarks when he stood with victims of the Dayton mass shooting and his signing of S.B. 175, Sexton noted that DeWine “had made many verbal and written commitments" to Buckeye Firearms that he would pass the bill before his remarks in Dayton.
“For those that are saying he changed his position, his original position (was to) sign the bill,” Sexton said.
The Beacon Journal asked DeWine’s press secretary Dan Tierney to comment on Sexton’s remarks. Tierney instead discussed DeWine’s efforts to pass other legislation.
“The governor believes that the vast majority of violent crime that plagues our cities and that plagues the state of Ohio, it’s committed by violent offenders. … So if we are going to make any significant impact in reducing gun violence in the state, we have to go where the data tells us,” Tierney said.
Darius Frierson, a firearms instructor and president of the Black Gun Owners Association of Ohio, said that laws don’t exist in a vacuum and context matters.
“We do so much community work because we know what it’s like to be out here where you don’t know if a justice system is for you. We know what it’s like to be an African American man or woman and deal with a cop. You just don’t know. … especially when you’ve got a firearm in play,” Frierson said.
“I don’t feel that duty to retreat should have been completely eliminated … simply because, let’s just be honest, there’s a lot of racial tensions and stuff still going on in the world,” he said. “It’s good for those that are actually trying to protect themselves and do the right thing, but then you have those people that will try to abuse it."