Ilya Shapiro Tag

This morning Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois held a US Senate hearing nominally on the subject of Stand Your Ground laws. Here I'll just share an overview of the testimony, along with my own general observations. (More detailed posts will likely follow.) [caption id="attachment_69289" align="alignnone" width="450"] US Senate hearing: "Stand Your Ground: Civil rights and Public Safety Implications of the Expanded Use of Deadly Force"[/caption] My first general observation is that the anti-SYG folks were, as experience would suggest, big on emotion and small on actual facts, law, or data. One of the anti-SYG witnesses, Professor Sullivan from Harvard Law School, did raise some actual data--but when these were utterly destroyed by the later testimony of Dr. John Lott and Elliot Shapiro of CATA, Professor Sullivan was swift to discount the use of data (which he himself had introduced into the testimony) and instead focus on the "real people" behind the data. In sharp contrast, the testimony of the pro-SYG speakers was focused and direct. Second, the anti-SYG folks persistently conflated the legal concept of Stand Your Ground with utterly discrete legal concepts, such as presumptions of reasonableness and civil/criminal immunity.