Florida’s “stand your ground” law gives belligerent bullies like George Zimmerman a lot of cover, but there may be some limits.
The way ABC News reports today’s story (here), Clifford Anthony Bliss Jr., 58, of Umatilla, Florida (photo, left), became angry when his neighbor’s cat wandered into his yard, knocked on the neighbor’s doo, threatened to shoot the cat, and when the neighbor “asked” him not to, he shot the neighbor.
Bliss was arrested for second-degree murder and is being held in jail without bail.
That’s the outline of the story. An Ocala newspaper fleshed out these details here: Bliss, according to neighbors, is a “hothead” who “always carries a gun.” He doesn’t like dogs and cats, and has a history of confronting neighbors about their pets.
The way Bliss tells it, the victim, James Arland Taylor Jr., 41, instigated a fight and “beat him up.” But the witnesses say there wasn’t a fight, only a verbal exchange.
A woman with Taylor told police he “searched for the cat and Bliss followed him. Taylor asked Bliss why he would shoot the cat and ordered Bliss to leave his property. Bliss then shot Taylor in the chest, the woman told the detective. She said there was no physical altercation before the shooting,” according to the newspaper.
Taylor was shot once in the chest with a .22 rifle and collapsed in his front yard. The woman tried to administer CPR while calling 911. Bliss called Taylor’s wife and told her to come home for “an emergency,” that there’d been a fight and he’d been shot, but from news reports it doesn’t appear he called 911 or attempted to render aid to Taylor. He left the scene, but returned before deputies arrived, and submitted peacefully to being arrested.
The “stand your ground” law enacted by Florida and some other states modifies the general law of self-defense. It basically says you don’t have to back down or leave the scene of a confrontation. In technical terms, it abrogates the “duty to retreat before using deadly force,” as Wikipedia puts it (here). The practical effect is that by encouraging participants in a confrontation to “stand their ground,” it makes verbal confrontations more likely to escalate to physical violence. Wikipedia notes that opponents of Florida’s law argue it also makes it “more difficult to prosecute cases against individuals who commit a crime and claim self-defense” — as the Zimmerman case showed.
Assuming Bliss will be prosecuted, that could be tested in his case. Having shot Taylor, who died, he’s clever enough to insist there was a fight. With his history and all the witnesses against him, that may not persuade a jury. But it gives him a chance he doesn’t deserve to get off like Zimmerman did. Ordinarily, absent such a law, belligerent instigators can’t claim self-defense; “stand your ground” laws alter that equation in an undesirable way.
This isn’t about the cat, of course. It’s about neighborhood frictions and the inability of human beings to get along. The close proximity of suburban neighbors isn’t to blame; rural people fight with their neighbors, too. It’s entirely a people problem. Rodney King, the victim of a brutal police beating that set off rioting, famously said, “I just want to say – you know – can we all get along?” The answer is no.
That’s why thoughtful people support laws that encourage de-escalation, and laws that encourage people to “stand their ground” are dangerous. Those laws are appropriately called “shoot first” laws, because they transform self-defense from a last resort into the first resort. And they’re ripe for abuse, as when hotheads like Zimmerman and Bliss go looking for trouble, find it, take a life, and then claim to be victims deserving of the law’s protection. In such cases, “stand your ground” laws are nothing more than a legal shield for murderers, and put innocent people in great danger.