So suppose a woman is walking alone along a dark road.

[DanTex]

97. OK. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll take your word on it.

So what's your opinion of the Z case? There seems to be a consensus that something went wrong, a consensus that I share. TM is dead, and from the evidence it appears that he didn't do anything that was too bad. I don't believe for a second that he was actually going to bash Z's head in. We don't know who started the fight, but we know that it was Z who provoked the confrontation by stalking TM. At the very least, you certainly wouldn't be able to prove in a court of law that he did anything wrong. And yet he got the death penalty as carried out by Zimmerman.

It seems to me that permissive self-defense laws are in fact facilitating vigilante justice. It offers more protection to people who carry out vigilanteism, and less protection to victims of vigilanteism.

I certainly don't think that any law that affords more protection to the accused is automatically progressive. Stand Your Ground is certainly not progressive. On the other hand, hate crimes laws are considered progressive, and those favor the state. Laws protecting corporate officers from criminal liability are not progressive. Etc.

And I don't really think that facilitating self-defense claims is particularly progressive either. I don't think that many wrongfully imprisoned people are wrongfully imprisoned because their legitimate self-defense claims were rejected. What I consider progressive would be laws making it less likely that the wrong person gets convicted, as opposed to laws allowing people to push the envelope of what is considered self-defense.

Maybe I'm wrong and haven't thought this through fully, and haven't considered all the ramifications. That's possible. But something certainly seems wrong when a teenager minding his business winds up dead and nobody is held accountable.