Trayvon Martin, the Castle Doctrine, and Minnesota’s close call (5×8 – 3/20/12)
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The Florida shooting examined, the picture of poverty, Duluth in a fog, the hockey team that must not be mentioned, and the lost art of locking the car.
1) THE TRAYVON MARTIN DOCTRINE
It's unlikely anybody on either side of the emotional "stand your ground" bill in Minnesota has been swayed by the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. A 28-year old "neighborhood watch" leader who called "911" because Martin looked suspicious and "we've had some break-ins" in the neighborhood killed him in "self defense," he insists. Martin is black and he was found armed with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea when police viewed the body, the Washington Post reports. The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing an investigation.
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Police haven't charged George Zimmerman because it hasn't been proven he did anything wrong under the law, a version of which Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed a couple of weeks ago.
Slate takes a deeper look at the law today, which springs from attempts to provide more protection for victims of domestic violence:
Now someone under attack could "repel force by force" if he was attacked "in a place where he has a right to be." That's how the Supreme Court put it in 1895. This is amazingly called the "true man" doctrine, from a line in an 1876 case: "A true man, who is without fault, is not obliged to fly from an assailant, who by violence or surprise, maliciously seeks to take his life or do him enormous bodily harm."
Not all the states adopted the true man doctrine. And 100 years later, courts and legislatures faced a new problem: What to do with women who said they were victims of domestic violence and had killed their husbands to save themselves? Did you have a right not to retreat if the person coming after you lived under the same roof? At first, the answer was no, to the fury of feminists. Then in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court said a woman who shot and killed her husband during a violent fight at home could successfully call on the Castle Doctrine to argue self-defense. "It is now widely recognized that domestic violence attacks are often repeated over time, and escape from the home is rarely possible without the threat of great personal violence or death," the court wrote.
The article says prosecutors aren't even bothering to charge people because of the law. That's not the way it was intended, at least not in the Minnesota version that Gov. Dayton vetoed. Someone who killed another person could use the doctrine in a self-defense claim in a court case. But the unintended consequences -- or perhaps they're intended -- of the law is that it rarely gets to that point.
NPR examined the law in 2007, after a man in Texas told police he was going to shoot men breaking into a neighbor's home. "Property isn't worth killing over," a 911 operator told him.
2) THE PICTURE OF POVERTY
You know what story isn't made up? Poverty in our backyard. Last evening, CBS profiled one of the journalists who founded "In Our Own Backyard," which encourages people to document poverty in their own backyard. It spoke to the art of telling the stories of the poor while giving them dignity.
Steve Liss, the photographer, was interviewed last fall on NPR. His group, AmericanPoverty.org, is planning a Mother's Day Project this year in which photojournalists will highlight "the struggles and dreams of impoverished mothers."
3) DULUTH IN A FOG
David Cowardin's outstanding time-lapse video of the evening fog Saturday on Lake Superior proves, again, that Duluth is the most fascinating part of Minnesota when it comes to weather.
