Apparently warning shots to scare off a repeated domestic abuser don’t count as standing one’s ground. Maybe if he’d been holding some skittles she wouldn’t have been sentenced to 20 years. (Thanks, S!)
5 thoughts on “On Standing One’s Ground”
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Feminist Philosophers 
What an odd story…but no matter what the truth is, 20 years seems excessive. The prison system in this country desperately needs to be reworked.
Yes, there some oddnesses to the story that come it in this article on it (and not in others). But importantly there’s nothing at all strange about a domestic violence victim seeking her abuser out again, and prosecutors should be aware of that. And it really does show some very selective prosecutorial decisions when put along side Zimmerman.
Well, it seems like the cases are legitimately different , so I can see how prosecutors might treat them differently. Also, different prosecutors/detectives handle cases differently – I don’t see any way around that. Further, (judging solely from the linked article) it is possible that Alexander did some domestic abusing of her own (i.e., she wasn’t just a victim), and she fired a gun in the general direction of children. (All of this should be taken with a grain of salt, I readily admit I am under-informed about what happened.)
I’m not saying she deserves the sentence that she got (she probably doesn’t), and I’m not saying that the law was applied evenly and fairly (the Stand your Ground law seems particularly open to interpretation), but the cases don’t seem analogous.
We’ll see what happens on appeal. It sounds excessive to me.
The excess seems to originate from sentencing law in Florida. It’s difficult to tell whether or not the journalists report the law accurately, because plenty of journalists are sloppy, but from the article it says that firing a gun during the commission of a crime automatically generates a 20 year sentence.
Most of us are philosophers and know how to construct thought experiments. I’m sure we can come up with plenty of cases where this policy would generate truly, idiotically disproportionate sentences.