“Stand Your Ground” Has Got to F***ing Go.

[GreenStormCloud]

68. OK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law

Beard v. U.S. (158 U.S. 550 (1895)

Laws or rulings implementing features of Stand Your Ground have a long history within the United States.

In Runyon v. State, a 1877 Indiana court case, the court said "The tendency of the American mind seems to be very strongly against the enforcement of any rule which requires a person to flee when assailed, to avoid chastisement or even to save a human life . . . [Therefore,] [t]he weight of modern authority . . establishes the doctrine that when a person, being without fault and in a place where he has a right to be, is violently assaulted, he may, without retreating, repel force by force, and if, in reasonable exercise of his right of self-defence, his assailant is killed, he is justifiable."[35]

Other early cases invoking a "no duty to retreat" argument include People v. Lewis, 48 P. 1088 (Cal. 1897); Boykin v. People, 49 P. 419 (Colo. 1896); Ragland v. State, 36 S.E. 682 (Ga. 1900); Page v. State, 40 N.E. 745 (Ind. 1894); State v. Hatch, 46 P. 708 (Kan. 1896); and State v. Partlow, 4 S.W. 14 (Mo. 1887).

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. declared in Brown v. United States (1921) (256 U.S. 335, 343 (16 May 1921)), a case that upheld the "no duty to retreat" maxim, that "detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife".[36]

As you can see, SYG isn't new at all. And those Justices above didn't invent it then either. Ultimately it goes back to English Common Law.