Column: 'Stand your ground' law flaws

• Black teenager shot in confrontation over loud music late last month.
• Case has similarities to Trayvon Martin case.
• Latest suspect claims he felt his life was in danger, though no weapon was found in car of victim.

The latest victim of Florida's "stand your ground" law was buried in Georgia on Saturday -- eight days after the vehicle he and three other black teens were sitting in was pumped full of bullets by a man who objected to their loud music.

Cops say 45-year-old Michael David Dunn fired eight or nine shots into the SUV, snatching the life from the body of 17-year-old Jordan Russell Davis, who was sitting in a back seat outside a Jacksonville, Fla., convenience store.

After the shooting, Dunn waited for his girlfriend, who was inside the store when the gunfire erupted, to return to his car before driving off. They spent the night in a local motel. The next day Dunn drove 173 miles to his home in Satellite Beach, Fla., where he says he was preparing to turn himself in when police showed up to arrest him.

The Dunn case has similarities to the Trayvon Martin killing that drew national attention earlier this year. George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic neighborhood watchman, killed Martin back in February. Like Davis, Martin was black and 17. Zimmerman, 29, followed Martin inside the gated community he patrolled because he looked suspicious. They tussled on a rain-soaked lawn before Zimmerman shot the unarmed Martin.

Like Dunn, Zimmerman claims he pulled his gun and fired because he feared for his life, which is the heart of Florida's stand-your-ground law. The 2005 legislation says a person who believes that he's in imminent danger has "no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force if the person is in a place where he or she has a right to be."

But that's where the similarities end. Zimmerman's attorney has since said he won't employ the stand-your-ground defense, believing that a simple self-defense strategy to win acquittal for his client. It appears Zimmerman's lawyer was forced to beat that legal retreat based on evidence, including an affidavit by investigators that Zimmerman "disregarded the police dispatcher" who told him not to follow Martin. If the gun-toting Zimmerman precipitated his deadly encounter with Martin, the stand-your-ground law might be a harder defense to mount.

Because there was never any physical contact between Dunn and Davis, Dunn's lawyer can't do a similar flip-flop. Instead, Robin Lemonidis claims her client fired on the SUV after one of its occupants brandished a shotgun while they were exchanging words over the loud music. Never mind that cops say no weapon was recovered from the vehicle, that is Dunn's story and -- for now, at least -- his lawyer is sticking to it.

Why? Maybe because she knows the history of what's happened to defendants in such stand-your-ground cases in Florida. Since the law's enactment, 73% of the people who have used this defense after killing a black person have been set free, according to an analysis done by the Tampa Bay Times. Those who killed someone white escaped a guilty verdict just 59% of the time.

Those numbers have the stench of Jim Crow justice. They suggest that black life does not have the same value as white life in the Sunshine State. They imply that a law that gives a person the right to use deadly force, when he has the option to retreat from a conflict, tilts the scales of justice in favor of injustice.

Last month, a task force appointed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott to review the stand-your-ground law in the wake of Martin's killing found little room to improve the statute. But given the death of Davis, there is clearly still good reason for criticism of that ill-conceived law.

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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