Can you shoot someone, claim self-defense, and get away with the murder? Maybe, maybe not—but your odds are a lot better if the person you attack is black.
That's the chilling implication of a newly published study, which examines 204 cases involving Florida's controversial "stand your ground" law. It reports that, once a series of variables are taken into account, defendants in these cases were twice as likely to be convicted if their victim was white.
"Our results depict a disturbing message," writes a research team led by Melody Goodman of Washington University in St. Louis. "Stand-your-ground legislation in Florida has a quantifiable racial bias that reveals a leniency in convictions if the victim is nonwhite."
The study, which is published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, utilizes a database of Stand Your Ground cases created by the Tampa Bay Times newspaper. (It also updates some of the information found there.)
[For more of this story, written by Tom Jacobs, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...al-clear-racial-bias]
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