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Criminologists, attorneys and other experts say the shooting death of James Rube on Big Cypress Street last week, and other cases like it, bear great significance for the community at large, as well as the state and the nation.
This is particularly true because the defense claim of the shooter – port captain Ray A. Carlos – may end up resting on the “stand your ground” doctrine of Louisiana law.
Little studied but highly publicized, stand your ground provisions say that a person has no duty to retreat from someone perceived as an aggressor before using deadly force.
What studies have been done suggest that stand your ground provisions have had little marked effect on crime statistics, other than one significant difference in states where they exist.
The homicide rates in those states, studied over a 10-year period, rose by an average of 8 percent, or 60 more deaths per year.
Those results, some researchers say, mandate a second look at whether stand your ground laws are accomplishing what their authors intended. The suggestion is not that people should not be able to defend themselves, but recognition of the fine line between properly doing so versus taking greater risks that one’s self or an innocent person might be hurt or killed.
“Loss of life is a significant thing and the extent to which laws contribute to that it is important,” said Texas A&M economist Mark Hoekstra, whose stand-your-ground paper, published in the Journal of Human Resources, is one of only two such studies in the nation. “These laws expand the legal justification for the use of lethal force in self-defense, thereby lowering the expected cost of using lethal force and increasing the expected cost of committing violent crime.”
But that’s not what appears to actually happen, the research shows. Both the Texas A&M study and another at Georgia State University show that the opposite may be true.
“There is a much greater likelihood that you are going to meet up with hurting yourself or getting hurt because you are trying to take on the bad guy with a gun,” said Georgia State researcher Chandler McClellan. “But a greater probability is that you are going to shoot someone completely innocent. People are putting themselves in greater danger and putting others in greater danger.”
Those studies may have significant value when a special panel of experts reviews Louisiana’s stand-your-ground provisions, in response to a formal legislative request.
The Louisiana State Law Institute is in the process of selecting a chair for the committee, who will then select experts in fields like law, criminology or public health, to determine whether legislation is required to address the issue. This is due to the effort of state Rep. Wesley Bishop, D-New Orleans.
The Rube shooting, a review of the research shows, is significant from several perspectives.
National media tend to focus on cross-racial cases in the self-defense or stand-your-ground context, such as the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida.
But the greater number of such cases, the Georgia State research shows, are not reflected in the high-profile matters.
“Our results indicate that Stand Your Ground laws are associated with a significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males,” McClellan said. “According to our estimates, between 4.4 and 7.4 additional white males are killed each month as a result of these laws. We find no evidence to suggest that these laws increase homicides among blacks … Taken together, our findings raise serious doubts against the argument that Stand Your Ground laws make America safer.”
The Rube shooting involved a white male shooting a white male, in a situation where the shooter left the safety of his home with a gun in his hand.
In states without a stand-your-ground statute, the researchers suggest, the homeowner might have been less likely to have done an investigation in that manner and perhaps been more likely to call police if it appeared someone was advancing on his property, in simple terms resulting in one less dead person in the crime statistics.
“People are responding to these laws by being more likely to be engaged more likely to be involved in an incident in which someone is killed,” Hoekstra said.
The stand-your-ground laws are an expansion beyond long-standing concepts of self-defense dating to the earliest English common laws.
Those early laws said that one must “retreat to the wall” and thus no longer be able to retreat safely before responding to an attacker with deadly force.
There was an exception to this, however. If the attack occurred within your own home or “castle” the duty to retreat no longer existed.
Since 2005, according to the Texas A&M paper, states have expanded the ability of people to defend themselves, by increasing the number of place where doing so is allowed.
Some laws “added a presumption of reasonable fear of imminent serious injury or death,” shifting the burden of proof from the defendant in self-defense cases to the prosecution.
“Now that you are allowed to use lethal force without having to first try to retreat, that is going to increase the probability of you using lethal force,” McClellan said. And while some may see that as a good thing, he and other researchers caution, the results – a law-abiding citizen shooting an unarmed person facing serious criminal charge, for example – must be carefully weighed from a public policy perspective, and carefully discussed.
“Policemen are trained to use weapons and use them on people,” McClellan said. “There are anecdotes about how difficult it is for the police officer to know whether to pull the trigger, or whether to pull it once or twice … There is probably a safer alternative.”
George Zimmerman (center) and his attorneys discuss his case in court in this file AP photo. A July 6 shooting has cast a spotlight locally on Louisiana’s “stand your ground” laws.
