Stand Your Ground Law For Whites Only?
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When “stand your ground” fails
John McNeil killed a white man who assaulted him on his property. But, unlike George Zimmerman, he's serving life
much-needed scrutiny to "Stand Your Ground" laws. If you read or hear
about a local "Stand Your Ground" case that isn't getting much national
press, blog about it on Open Salon.
As the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the failure of
authorities to arrest his killer, George Zimmerman, continues to grab
headlines, many conservatives and gun rights advocates insist that race
has nothing to do with it. Some have also rallied to the defense of
Florida’s “stand your ground” law, the self-defense legislation under
which Zimmerman was able to avoid arrest. Yet not all stand your ground
claims are so successful. Not too far from Sanford, Fla., a black man
named John McNeil is serving a life sentence for shooting Brian Epp, a
white man who trespassed and attacked him at his home in Georgia,
another stand your ground state.
It all began in early 2005, when McNeil and his wife, Anita, hired
Brian Epp’s construction company to build a new house in Cobb County,
Ga. The McNeils testified that Epp was difficult to work with, which led
to heated confrontations. They eventually decided to close on the house
early to rid their lives of Epp, whom they found increasingly
threatening. At the closing, both parties agreed that Epp would have 10
days to complete the work, after which he would stay away from the
property, but he failed to keep up his end of the bargain.
On Dec. 6, 2005, John McNeil’s 15-year-old son, La’Ron, notified his
dad over the phone that a man he didn’t recognize was lurking in the
backyard. When La’Ron told the man to leave, an argument broke out.
McNeil was still on the phone and immediately recognized Epp’s voice.
According to La’Ron’s testimony,
Epp pointed a folding utility knife at La’Ron’s face and said, “[w]hy
don’t you make me leave?” at which point McNeil told his son to go
inside and wait while he called 911 and headed home.
According to McNeil’s testimony,
when he pulled up to his house, Epp was next door grabbing something
from his truck and stuffing it in his pocket. McNeil quickly grabbed his
gun from the glove compartment in plain view of Epp who was coming at
him “fast.” McNeil jumped out of the car and fired a warning shot at the
ground insisting that Epp back off. Instead of retreating, Epp charged
at McNeil while reaching for his pocket, so McNeil fired again, this
time fatally striking Epp in the head. (Epp was found to have a folding
knife in his pocket, although it was shut.)
The McNeils weren’t the only ones who felt threatened by Epp.
David Samson and Libby Jones, a white couple who hired Epp to build
their home in 2004, testified that
they carried a gun as a “precaution” around Epp because of his
threatening behavior. According to Jones, Epp nearly hit her when she
expressed dissatisfaction with his work at a weekly meeting. The couple
even had a lawyer write a letter warning Epp to stay away from their
property. Samson testified that after they fired him, Epp would park his
car across the street and watch their house, saying “it got to the
point where my wife and I were in total fear of this man.”
After a neighbor across the street who witnessed the encounter corroborated McNeil’s account,
police determined that it was a case of self-defense and did not charge
him in the death. Nevertheless, almost a year later Cobb County
District Attorney Patrick Head decided to prosecute McNeil for murder.
In 2006, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
McNeil’s attorney Mark Yurachek told Salon that “DAs throughout
the country enjoy that kind of flexibility of deciding who to
prosecute, but it’s curious that he took a year to do it.” While he said
there’s no way to know what swayed the DA to prosecute, Yurachek
revealed that letters, which he obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act, were written to the DA’s office demanding that McNeil
be charged. “They were mostly emails from people cajoling prosecutors to
investigate,” says Yurachek. “One was from Epp’s widow. Others were
written anonymously.”
In 2008, McNeil appealed his
case to the Georgia Supreme Court with all but one of the seven
justices upholding his conviction. The sole dissent came from Chief
Justice Leah Ward Sears who argued, “the State failed to disprove John
McNeil’s claim of self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.” She went on to write:
Even viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict,
the evidence was overwhelming in showing that a reasonable person in
McNeil’s shoes would have believed that he was subject to an imminent
physical attack by an aggressor possessing a knife and that it was
necessary to use deadly force to protect himself from serious bodily
injury or a forcible felony. Under the facts of this case, it would be
unreasonable to require McNeil to wait until Epp succeeded in attacking
him, thereby potentially disarming him, getting control of the gun, or
stabbing him before he could legally employ deadly force to defend
himself. This is not what Georgia law requires.
As a leading gun rights state, Georgia has both a stand your ground law that
permits citizens to use deadly force “only if he or she reasonably
believes that such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily
injury,” as well as a Castle Doctrine law, which justifies the use of deadly force in defense of one’s home.
Thus far, gun rights advocates such as the NRA and former Cobb County
congressional Rep. Newt Gingrich have been silent on McNeil’s
conviction, though it’s unclear whether they are aware of the case. The
NRA did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Still, Rev.
William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP State Conference,
argues, “The NRA would be screaming about the injustice of his
conviction if John had been white and shot a black assailant that came
at him on his property armed with a knife.” (McNeil grew up in North
Carolina, where the local NAACP chapter, led by Barber, was the first to
pick up on his case in Georgia.)
Barber was clear that the NAACP remains firmly against stand
your ground laws because “they give cover to those who may engage in
racial profiling and racialized violence,” adding that “There is a
history and legacy of discriminatory application of the law” that
continues to this day. “African-Americans are caught in curious
position. On one hand, we fight against stand your ground laws, but once
the laws are on the books they aren’t applied to us.”
Civil rights activist Markel Hutchins agrees and has filed a federal lawsuit challenging
Georgia’s stand your ground law because the law is not applied equally
to African-Americans. He accuses the courts of accepting “the race of a
victim as evidence to establish the reasonableness of an individual’s
fear in cases of justifiable homicide.”
Meanwhile, Barber argues that McNeil’s treatment stands in
stark contrast to that of George Zimmerman, who has been afforded the
benefit of the doubt despite his victim being unarmed. “America’s always
had a difficult issue dealing with race, so rather than face it when
it’s exposed, the tendency by some is to try and dismiss it. But the
reality is you do not see this kind of miscarriage of justice when it
comes to whites.” He adds, “John’s whole life has been taken away from
him. His wife is very ill with cancer and she has lost a husband, his
sons have lost a father and society has lost a man that was contributing
to his community.”
Read More: http://www.salon.com/2012/04/11/when_stand_your_gr...
Zimmerman pursued him, making Zimmerman the aggressor.
Hispanics are quite well known to be racist against blacks. That's no secret.