Michael Dunn – Was He Standing His Ground?

No verdict on whether Dunn was acting in self defense or
if he is guilty of second-degree murder.
Image: Shutterstock

On Sunday, February 16^th, Michael Dunn was convicted on four charges: three counts of attempted 2nd degree murder and one count of shooting into an occupied vehicle. The fifth charge, 1^st degree murder, however, resulted in a hung jury and subsequent mistrial.

Many have been quick to compare the Michael Dunn case with that of George Zimmerman. On the night of November 23^rd, 2012, Dunn fired ten rounds at a red Dodge Durango after asking the four teenagers inside the vehicle to turn down their music. The teens refused and, according to Dunn, threatened him. After firing the bullets, he left the gas station. 17-year-old Jordan Davis was fatally wounded by three of the ten bullets. Dunn didn’t contact authorities and his first contact with police was as he was being apprehended at his home in Satellite Beach.

“My intent was to stop the attack, not necessarily end a life,” he said during the trial, where he indicated that he thought he saw the barrel of a gun pointing out the Durango’s window at him. “It just worked out that way.”

Dunn’s lawyers brought up “Stand Your Ground,” which was an instrumental part of the Zimmerman case as well; police and jurors gave George Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt when he claimed he was only defending himself.

“Stand Your Ground the principle—the lack of duty to retreat, the fact that you don’t have to walk away from trouble in the state of Florida, you can kill somebody if there’s ‘a reasonable fear of serious injury or death’—that principle is very much in the jury instruction,” said legal analyst Kendall Coffey during a segment of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry. According to Coffey, though there wasn’t a separate judge-only hearing for Stand Your Ground, it was very much a part of the case.

However, in Dunn’s case, there was no evidence of a gun in the teenagers’ vehicle—only Dunn’s claims that he thought he saw one. This brings up, again, the question of whether race played a role in Dunn’s decision to fire into the teens’ vehicle. All four teens were black, and according to legal analyst Lisa Bloom, that should have been key in the prosecution’s strategy during the trial.

“The prosecution won on all of the easiest charges,” she says. But they failed to convince the jury on the top charge—that of first degree murder. “To do that, they had to show malice, hatred, or ill-will. And to do that, they should have brought in the evidence of racial animus that Michael Dunn handed them on a silver platter by writing racist letters from prison that the authorities then had.”

The result of the trial has good news and bad news for both the prosecution and the defense. But, Davis’ mother, Lucia McBath is grateful that, for now, her family has “just a little bit of closure.” Dunn is looking at a minimum of 60 years in prison, even without the final murder count.