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Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
This year's nationwide protests demanding racial justice and an end to police brutality--sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other Black Americans--inspired a proposal from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that critics worry will lead to more bloodshed: expanding the state's controversial "stand your ground" law with his drafted "anti-mob" legislation.
The Miami Herald reported Tuesday on the draft, which traces back to promises DeSantis made earlier this year "as he tried to deliver Florida" to President Donald Trump. The president--who ultimately won the state but lost the election, though is still refusing to concede to President-elect Joe Biden--has come under fire for his own forceful response to the protests.
DeSantis' administration has circulated an "anti-mob legislation draft" among Florida lawmakers since his public statements in September, but no related measures have been filed in the state legislature. However, local attorneys are already raising alarm that the proposal "allows for vigilantes to justify their actions," in the words of Denise Georges.
Georges, a former Miami-Dade County prosecutor who handled "stand your ground" cases, told the Herald that "it also allows for death to be the punishment for a property crime--and that is cruel and unusual punishment. We cannot live in a lawless society where taking a life is done so casually and recklessly."
Florida passed its "stand your ground" law in 2005--and other states, encouraged by the National Rifle Association, followed suit, enacting measures that effectively say people have no duty to retreat before using deadly force to defend themselves. The Florida measure garnered national attention in 2012, after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in a gated community. Zimmerman's acquittal the next year sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.
"Zimmerman's attorney did not raise a 'stand your ground' defense at the trial," the Washington Post noted in 2014. "But after the trial a juror acknowledged that jurors had discussed the self-defense law before finding Zimmerman not guilty. The law also changed the standard instructions to jurors in homicide cases, so that the judge said that Zimmerman had no duty to retreat and could stand his ground if he felt threatened. (The law may have also played a role in the initial failure of the local police to prosecute Zimmerman.)"
DeSantis' proposal goes even further than 2017 changes to the law that make prosecutors prove by "clear and convincing evidence" that a defendant wasn't acting in self-defense. As the Herald detailed Tuesday:
The proposal would expand the list of "forcible felonies" under Florida's self-defense law to justify the use of force against people who engage in criminal mischief that results in the "interruption or impairment" of a business, and looting, which the draft defines as a burglary within 500 feet of a "violent or disorderly assembly."
Other key elements of DeSantis' proposal would enhance criminal penalties for people involved in "violent or disorderly assemblies," make it a third-degree felony to block traffic during a protest, offer immunity to drivers who claim to have unintentionally killed or injured protesters who block traffic, and withhold state funds from local governments that cut law enforcement budgets.
Former Miami-Dade prosecutor Aubrey Webb told the newspaper that "the Boston Tea Party members would have been lawfully shot under Florida's law by the British East India Tea Company."
"It dangerously gives armed private citizens power to kill as they subjectively determine what constitutes 'criminal mischief' that interferes with a business," Webb said. "Someone graffiti-ing 'Black Lives Matter' on a wall? Urinating behind a dumpster? Blocking an entrance?"
Webb and Georges were far from alone in criticizing the GOP governor's proposal. Critics warned it could lead to more violence by vigilantes like the white teenager charged with killing racial justice protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August and urged DeSantis to instead focus on the coronavirus pandemic that continues to ravage his state.
\u201cFlorida @GovRonDeSantis\u2069 has drafted \u201canti-mob\u201d legislation to expand Florida\u2019s dangerous Stand Your Ground law, which could allow armed vigilantes to shoot alleged looters or anyone engaged in \u201ccriminal mischief\u201d that disrupts a business. #flapol https://t.co/IARLIAb8Gp\u201d— Shannon Watts (@Shannon Watts) 1605068426
\u201canother case in point of how #gunpower is a settler colonial system of social control and social reproduction that delegates the power to kill in a flexible, decentralized fashion so that individuals can kill to "defend" themselves and a broader order of racialized inequality\u201d— inverted vibe curve: burgertown must be defended (@inverted vibe curve: burgertown must be defended) 1605048694
\u201cmore seriously this draft legislation is basically an attempt to give official state sanction to would-be kyle rittenhouses\u201d— b-boy bouiebaisse (@b-boy bouiebaisse) 1605048393
\u201cHospitalizations for #COVID19 continue to rise. \n\nMore Floridians are filing for unemployment.\n\nSmall businesses and our tourism economy continues to struggle. \n\nExpanding Stand Your Ground should not be the priority, @GovRonDeSantis. https://t.co/TJuPfIkCmo\u201d— Nikki Fried (@Nikki Fried) 1605104465
Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, retired Miami-Dade homicide prosecutor Reid Rubin, Miami defense lawyer Phil Reizenstein, and Melba Pearson, a civil rights attorney and former deputy director of Florida's American Civil Liberties Union, all shared concerns about the proposal with the Herald, while others on social media described the draft legislation as "legalizing lynching" and "legalizing murder."
As digital rights activist Evan Greer put it: "This is basically just a license for white people to kill protesters."
The greatest athletes in America are standing up for justice at a critical time.
Despite unprecedented, multiracial demonstrations across the country protesting police violence against African Americans, the horrors keep on coming.
Last week, Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a policeman in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the anger has grown, some of the protests have been marred by vandalism and looting. Now armed right-wing militia groups are escalating the tensions. In Kenosha, two demonstrators were murdered and one wounded by a 17-year-old Trump supporter illegally wielding an assault weapon.
It is into this cauldron that the professional basketball players of the NBA stood up, forcing a suspension of the playoffs, to support the call for justice. Their example was picked up by others--the WNBA, baseball players, tennis champions like Naomi Osaka and more.
This takes courage. Great athletes are taught to focus on their sport and to ignore their power in the culture. Owners, agents, managers and fans see them as entertainment, not as citizens or leaders.
Yet the very God-given gifts, discipline and skills that make a great athlete contribute to their capacity for leadership. In the Old Testament, little David honed his skill with a sling. When an oppressive horde led by a giant named Goliath threatened the Hebrew people, David stepped up, hurling the stone that slew the giant and saved his people.
Now America's greatest athletes are standing up, calling this country to change. They know that they will face criticism and abuse. They know that they could be risking their careers and livelihood.
When LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and the Miami Heat players stood up in response to the death of Trayvon Martin, Americans across the country took notice. The same is true now as the current athletes focus on Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake and the others they name.
They know the risks, but they also know that when they leave the court or playing field and return to their families, they are just another Black person to the police, and must worry about how to protect their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, or even themselves. Both Sterling Brown of the Milwaukee Bucks and Thabo Sefolosha of the Houston Rockets were victims of police lawlessness.
Here the example and leadership of LeBron James has been critical. Athletes across the world look up to him. When LeBron uses his platform to speak out--even in the face of insults from the president and others--he sets a tone and an example for others. In my opinion, he uses his gifts and platform so responsibly because it is his way of thanking God by serving others.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used his gifts and platform to change the culture. Today, athletes are using their commitment to call this country to its senses.
Great athletes have often been pacesetters. When Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson stood up to racially biased and arbitrary social mores, he impacted the culture. When Joe Lewis defeated Max Schmeling, he pummeled the entire Nazi theory and racist ideology. When Jesse Owens became the world's fastest man at the Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler wouldn't shake his hand, but when Owens came home, he told me President Roosevelt wouldn't shake his hand either. Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier in baseball and bore the physical and psychological scars from doing it.
At the height of his career, Muhammad Ali, became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and paid the price of years stolen from his career. Every athlete should be grateful to Curt Flood for ending the reserve clause and gaining athletes the right to free agency to negotiate the best deal they could. Colin Kaepernick launched his nonviolent campaign against police killing of Black people four years ago that has cost him his career.
The athletes had to stop business as usual to gain attention. They have been in intense meetings figuring out how they can most be effective. They understand that the murders can't go on; the system must change. They are calling on others to join them. They are putting their time and their resources on the line. They've now convinced NBA owners to turn their arenas into polling places where people might vote safely.
Their actions have already had effect. It is too easy for cynical politicians and entrenched interests to turn attention from the injustice to the excesses that mar those protesting it. The players have forced our attention back to the injustice and to the core demand that Black Lives Matter. For that, they deserve our respect and our support.
When the brutal murder of George Floyd occurred on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, few people could have imagined that it would have such far-reaching repercussions. Following the equally egregious killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, some of us assumed that Floyd's name would join the miserable rollcall of names of black Americans such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, slain at the hands of racist police and their civilian counterparts.
But Floyd's murder has ignited a breadth of protests seldom seen in the United States, and the current tension-filled climate has aspects that are still unfolding, and implications that are not yet fully appreciated.
One of the most unexpected and remarkable aspects of the nationwide protests is how these demonstrations have spread to other parts of the world, including continental Europe and the United Kingdom. Protests are occurring
not just in British cities with sizable communities of black people--such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester--but also in cities north of the English border, like Glasgow and Edinburgh. The rallies that have taken place across the United Kingdom have reflected the outrage of people of many different ethnicities.Like the United States, Britain has a protracted and shameful history of black deaths in police custody. A significant number of the placards held by British protesters have drawn attention to the abuse of black people in Britain, even as these signs also demanded an end to the transatlantic pandemic of racism--a pandemic which, like Covid-19, has claimed a grotesquely disproportionate number of black lives.
As could be expected, Black Lives Matter protests took place in Bristol, a city in the west of England with a long history of activism and protest emanating from its black communities. But few could have predicted that in the aftermath of the rally, activists would seek, in particularly dramatic fashion, to right a specific wrong and an injustice that had been well over a century in the making.
In Bristol's city center there has stood, from the late-nineteenth century onward, a statue of a merchant who shipped captured African men, women, and children, as part of what historians refer to as the Atlantic Slave Trade, or the Triangular Slave Trade. The merchant, Edward Colston, amassed considerable wealth from his trading activities and in doing so became an important philanthropist within the city, the benefits of his largesse still being enjoyed by modern-day Bristolians.
But just as there's a long history of activism in the United States around the removal of confederate monuments, people have spoken out against Colson's statue since it was erected in the late 19th century. In more recent years, those voices became more animated. Some sought a compromise by asking that a plaque be appended to the monument, drawing attention to how Colston amassed his fortune, and the price paid by hundreds of thousands of African people in this endeavor.
On June 7, matters came to a dramatic head when a number of Black Lives Matter protesters tore down the statue of Colston. For good measure, the damaged statue was rolled to the nearby docks in Bristol city center and dumped into the water of Bristol's harbor--the same harbor from which vessels set sail on their murderous voyages.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and senior government figures such as Home Secretary Priti Patel were quick to condemn what they declared to be acts of "thuggery," a racially loaded term if ever there was one.
Ironically, just as Johnson, Patel, and others have demanded the vigorous prosecution of those allegedly responsible for the toppling of the statue of Colston, politicians across the U.K. and throughout Europe began, at long last, to take preemptive action to remove statues of equally offensive figures.
These include a statue of the infamous King Leopold II of Belgium, who presided over unspeakable horrors inflicted on the people of the Congo. He was a monarch who ruthlessly and mercilessly exploited both the land and the people of a vast expanse of central Africa. One of his preferred methods to induce harder labor in the Congo, and punish those he believed to be slackers, was to amputate the hands, feet, and limbs of men, women, and children.
What started in Minnesota has the potential to do more than address systemic problems in the United States; people on the other side of the Atlantic have taken these protests into remarkable, extraordinary, and wholly unforeseen directions.
There are numerous statues of him across Belgium, and one of them, in a supposed gesture of retribution, had a hand severed some years ago; another was unceremoniously removed. But one Leopold II statue that's still standing bears a particularly deplorable inscription: "I have undertaken the work in the Congo in the interest of civilization and for the good of Belgium."
In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan, in response to the toppling of the Colson statue, announced a review of the many statues and street names with explicit links to Britain's involvement in the slave trade. A statue of the notorious slaveholder Robert Milligan was already being removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands. Milligan owned several sugar plantations and hundreds of enslaved people in the British colony of Jamaica--He was just one of the many slaveholders and imperialists that were honored in public spaces in Britain.
Parallels can--and should--be drawn between the belated removal of Confederate statues and monuments throughout the South, and the similarly belated removal of statues of brutes such as Colston and Milligan.
What started in Minnesota has the potential to do more than address systemic problems in the United States; people on the other side of the Atlantic have taken these protests into remarkable, extraordinary, and wholly unforeseen directions.
Names of some of those taken by police brutality in the United Kingdom (as seen on placard above): Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg, Sheki Bayoh, Leon Briggs, Christopher Aider, Joy Gardner, Cynthia Jarrett, Cherry Groce, Smiley Culture, Michael Powell, Ricky Bishop, Brian Douglas, Leon Patterson, Derek Bennett, Sarah Reed, Roger Sylvester, Azelle Rodney, Mzee Mohammed, Edson Da Costa, Rashan Charles, Kevin Clarke, Luigi Basile, Leroy Junior Medford, Shane Bryant, Oghene Abboh, Demetre Fraser.