Stand Your Ground defenses fail when the shooter cannot prove fear of deadly threat.

Evidence

At his trial, the very rock of his defense crumbled as the judge, Albert Collier, dismissed the Stand Your Ground defense. He ruled that because the gun had gone off accidentally, it was impossible to claim that Murray had been standing his ground; in other words, one could not accidentally stand one’s ground. Second, and equally important, Collier explained, Murray clearly couldn’t have felt threatened by the white men who were beating on him. Those men were not doing anything to make Murray “reasonably believe that deadly force was necessary to prevent death or great bodily injury to himself or a third party.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 778

Categorization

• SEED: A double-standard case pair (Zimmerman vs. Murray) framed by identical legal doctrine makes a strong essay skeleton on how threat-perception jurisprudence encodes race.