Bad ideas never die for good in the Florida Legislature. They are just resurrected the next year with new bill numbers. That is the case with a renewed effort to stand the criminal justice system on its head by making it easier for defendants to hide behind Florida's ''stand your ground'' law and get away with murder. The reasoning is just as flawed as it was last year, and lawmakers should kill it again this year.
Sen. Rob Bradley's bill, SB 128, squeaked through the Senate Judiciary Committee this week by a 5-4 vote with Republicans supporting it and Democrats opposing it. If history repeats itself, the Fleming Island Republican's legislation will sail along in the Senate as it did last year. It will again be up to the House to stand with prosecutors, law enforcement officers and common sense and reject it.
This is just another attempt by the same legislators who want guns openly carried everywhere to make it easier to shoot someone and successfully claim self-defense. Now, defendants invoking ''stand your ground'' have to show by a preponderance of evidence in a pretrial hearing that they qualify for that immunity. Bradley's bill would require prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant cannot invoke ''stand your ground.'' That flips the burden of proof from the defendant to the prosecutor and sets an even higher standard for prosecutors to be successful than defendants have now.
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-block-changes-to-stand-your-ground/2310895