When neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman figured out that his best chance at beating the rap for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was to invoke Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, the cops and the prosecutors went along willingly and immediately, not bothering to arrest Zimmerman for 45 days. But as Zimmerman prepares to go to trial for Martin’s killing, news of another “Stand Your Ground” shooting, this one from 2010, suggests that when it comes to equitable application of the law, Florida law enforcement has some distance to go.
On August 1, 2010, Marissa Alexander shot at — but missed — her abusive estranged husband, Rico Gray, in the midst of a violent episode that resulted when Gray found text messages from Alexander’s ex-husband on her phone. “If I can’t have you, nobody’s going to have you,” Gray told her as the altercation was getting underway. In the middle of the fight, Alexander broke away and ran into the garage. She said that she wasn’t able to flee because the garage door wasn’t working, and besides, she didn’t have her car keys with her. So she opened the car door and reached into the glove compartment where there was a gun. Running back into the house, she fired a single shot at Gray, missing him and their two sons.
Florida State Senator Gary Siplin said that a case like Alexander’s was just the kind of thing that legislators had in mind when they passed the controversial “Stand Your Ground” law. “She did not have a history of criminal or violent behavior. Instead, she had a history of being physically and emotionally abused.”
In addition, she didn’t kill anyone. Alexander’s family says that she is an experienced gun handler, and that she missed him on purpose, and that she was only trying to bring an end to the fight.
In a deposition for the case, Gray admitted saying to Alexander “if she ever cheated on me I would kill her.” He also said that during the fight that led to the shooting, he told her, “If I can’t have you, nobody can.” He admitted that he was he “was going towards her” when Alexander fired, and that the shot that went “high” and to his right. Gray even went so far as to say that Alexander had not pointed the gun at him: “She just didn’t want me to put my hands on her anymore, so she did what she feel like she have to do to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt.”
None of this moved State Attorney Angela Corey who prosecuted the Alexander case, and who is currently overseeing the prosecution of George Zimmerman. She cited police photos that showed the bullet holes in the wall were at “adult height”, and argued that the “Stand Your Ground” law didn’t apply to Alexander anyway, because she could have fled the scene. This, even though the Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that a woman attacked by her husband in the home they share has no duty to flee.
No matter. Because Gray changed his story by the time the trial came around, and prosecutor Corey was having none of this “self defense” business, Marissa Alexander was given a mandatory minimum 20-year sentence by a jury last week, after 12 minutes of deliberation.
Even though she had no criminal convictions prior to the shooting, and she did not injure Gray, Alexander sentence was “enhanced” because Florida law dictates a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years for anyone convicted of firing a gun during the commission of a crime. What the jury determined the crime being committed exactly was in this case is hard to pinpoint, but it seems to us as though Alexander fired the gun at Gray to bring an end to a crime being committed against her. By that standard, a convenience store clerk being robbed would get 20 years for shooting the guy holding him up. But we’re no legal expert here, especially in what passes for law in the Sunshine State.
Corey offered Alexander a plea, which would have resulted in a three year sentence, but she offered it to her just before the trial was to start. She had only three hours to think about it. Alexander considered it, but ultimately she believed that she was innocent and that no jury would convict her. She was wrong about that.
For his part, Lincoln Alexander, Marissa’s first husband, the man who left the text messages that precipitated the incident, was not at all surprised by the verdict. “We already knew what Angela Corey’s stance was. She wanted her to do 20 years.”
Florida Congresswoman Corrine Brown said in a statement that she “watched in horror and extreme sadness” as Alexander’s conviction was handed down. “This African American woman didn’t hurt anyone, and now she might not hug her children for twenty years,” she said.
Oh, yes. We failed to point out that in this instance the shooter was black. Which is probably why Alexander didn’t have to wait 45 days to be arrested and for charges to be brought. The wheels of justice turn much more efficiently for African Americans than they do for people like George Zimmerman.
Also, unlike Zimmerman, Alexander was being attacked by a violent man who had abused her physically and mentally before. She wasn’t following him around with a gun, like Zimmerman did, and she didn’t call 911 and tell the dispatcher that her husband was acting “suspiciously”, and she didn’t keep following him after the 911 dispatcher told her to not to, and to let the cops handle it.
She didn’t have time for any of that. She felt that her life, or at the very least, her physical well-being was being threatened. And she didn’t kill her attacker.
Still, the cops didn’t find anything ambiguous about the situation when they arrived, and so they took Alexander away that very same night. She had charges instated immediately. She wasn’t afforded the luxury of walking around free for 45 days like some people.
We’re not defending the Florida’s preposterous “Stand Your Ground” law in the case of Marissa Alexander. We think it’s a stupid law, and besides, we don’t think it’s even relevant here. When a woman who has a history of being battered by her husband is in the process of being battered once again, we think that she has the right to defend herself. We don’t think that you need to have a “Stand Your Ground” law that says it’s OK for an abused woman to try to stop her abuser in the act of abusing her. And the fact that she used the gun in a way that caused no injury to her attacker and still got 20 years for her trouble is patently absurd.
Angela Corey, as we said above, has been called in to “oversee” the prosecution of George Zimmerman for the shooting of Trayvon Martin, mostly because of all of the uproar over the way the case has been handled thus far. Since she’s apparently willing to send a battered black woman to prison for 20 years for not shooting her abuser, we’ll be watching with keen interest to see how the George Zimmerman prosecution is going to unfold.
So will a lot of people.