Who gets to kill in self defense?

Policy highlight

“The ‘true man’ doctrine helped pave the way for ‘stand your ground’ laws, which have proliferated across the country since Florida became the first state to enact “stand your ground” in 2005. Such laws state that anywhere a person has a right to be, in public or private, one has the right to fight back against attack — except most of the laws are not written to apply to violence in the home, against another person who has the same right to be there, like a spouse. This makes domestic violence victims largely defenseless in the very place that holds the most danger for them.”

Challenges misconceptions

“The very question the law most commonly and doggedly asks of a woman in Ms. Ford’s situation — why didn’t she leave? — assumes ‘that the family home is not her home but his and he has the right to drive her out of it,’ as Ms. Gillespie put it. Ms. Ford had called for help. She had tried to retreat. And finally, she stood her ground. The law has little imagination for her kind of story, not in the 17th century and not today.”

Approachable data

“Stanford researchers surveyed 649 women incarcerated in California prisons for murder or manslaughter; 134 of them were convicted in the deaths of their partners. Of the women convicted in the deaths of their partners, 110 experienced domestic abuse in the year leading up to their offenses.”

Explores solutions

“One example of a country that has proceeded with legal reforms that attempt to balance accountability with a more complete understanding of domestic abuse is Canada, which changed its self-defense laws in 2013... The new law does not preclude self-defense arguments for planned killings, for instance. In order to claim self-defense, the accused still must provide evidence that the actions were reasonable, given the violence or threat of violence faced, but the idea of reasonableness is assessed in light of any number of considerations, such as the parties’ relative sizes and strengths, a history of abuse, the nature of the relationship and other contextual factors. These factors might even include personal history: Today in Canada, a woman who has had a traumatic past should be able to introduce that history as context for her state of mind at the time of her crime and potentially secure a full acquittal.”

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