ByJulia DahlCBS News
Trayvon Martin
Family Photo/CBS Miami
Trayvon Martin
Family Photo/CBS Miami
(CBS) - Around 7 p.m. on February 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked out of the gated community near Orlando where he was visiting his father to go get some Skittles at a neighborhood convenience store. On his way home, Martin somehow aroused the suspicions of neighborhood watch leader, George Zimmerman, who called 911 to report the boy.
When police arrived, Martin was dead, shot by a bullet from Zimmerman's 9mm semi-automatic handgun.
Zimmerman, 28, who was bleeding from the nose and back of his head when police found him, claimed the two got in a scuffle and that he shot the boy in self-defense. Thus far, no charges have been filed against him.
Martin's family, not surprisingly, is outraged, and calling for Zimmerman's arrest.
"What gave him the right to think he was judge, jury and executioner?" asks Martin's uncle, Ronald Fulton.
The answer to his question may be simple: the state of Florida, which in 2005 enacted one of the nation's strongest so-called "stand your ground" self-defense laws. According to the , a person in Florida is justified in using deadly force against another if he or she "reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony."
Was Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed, posing a threat to Zimmerman's life? We may never know for sure, but in Florida - and a growing number of states - what matters isn't whether or not Martin was actually a threat, only that Zimmerman "reasonably" believed he was.
But what is reasonable? Ekow Yankah, an associate professor of criminal law at Cardozo School of Law in New York, says that to some people, it is reasonable to be suspicious of a young black man walking alone in the dark.
"We have to decide what counts as 'reasonable' to be afraid of, and nobody should pretend that that isn't socially and culturally loaded," says Yankah.
Gregory O'Meara, an associate professor of law at Marquette University School of Law, agrees.
"These 'stand your ground' laws license pistol-packing urban cowboys and paranoid people," says O'Meara, who fought the passage of a similar law in Wisconsin. "We've all been trained to be afraid of black men, and if you're afraid enough that justifies everything."
But Allen County, Indiana prosecutor Karen Richards, who has prosecuted cases involving claims of self-defense, says that the new laws simply "solidify what juries were feeling anyway. If you're in a place where you have a right to be and you have a reasonable belief you need to use deadly force, juries don't think you need to retreat."
Of course, that's assuming the case gets to a jury. So far, Zimmerman hasn't even been charged with a crime. Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee did not return Crimesider's call for comment on the case, but at a on Monday he said he did not have enough evidence to arrest Zimmerman.
"In this case Mr. Zimmerman has made the statement of self-defense," Lee said. "Until we can establish probable cause to dispute that, we don't have the grounds to arrest him."
According to the National Rifle Association - which has lobbied for and in some cases assisted in writing laws expanding self-defense statutes - since 2006, at least 29 states have passed amended self-defense laws that the gun rights advocacy group supports, including four last year. Although each state's statute is slightly different, generally, this new crop of laws allows citizens to use deadly force on someone they reasonably believe is a threat to their life. Instead of having a so-called "duty to retreat" from perceived danger, a citizen can "stand their ground" and meet force with force. Some laws also create immunity from civil lawsuits for those found to have reasonably used deadly force.
"We want to make sure if a crime victim acts to save his life they can't be penalized or prosecuted for doing so," says NRA spokesperson Andrew Arulanandam.
Currently, legislatures in Iowa, Nebraska and Alaska are considering bills that would similarly expand where, when and how a citizen can kill someone they perceive as trying to harm them. Bucking the trend, on March 5 Minnesota's governor vetoed a bill that would have expanded the places in which a citizen could use deadly force.
In Oklahoma, which passed a "stand your ground" law in 2006, the new language made it easy for law enforcement to clear 19-year-old , who shot and killed a man trying to break into her Oklahoma home on New Year's Eve. McKinley was immediately hailed as a hero. The situation was less clear cut when pharmacist
shot one of the young men who tried to rob the Oklahoma City drugstore where he worked in 2009. Ersland shot 16-year-old Antwun Parker in the head, chased his accomplice out, then returned and shot Parker five more times as the teen lay on the floor. Ersland pleaded self-defense, but was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He is appealing the conviction.
Thus far, there is no indication that Trayvon Martin was in the commission of any sort of crime when he was approached by Zimmerman, who was reportedly driving an SUV. Still, judging by the fact that he has not been arrested and the case has been referred to the state's attorney, law enforcement seems to be struggling to determine whether Zimmerman's actions fall within the scope of the Florida law.
"The law has made things confusing for law enforcement," says Zachary Weaver, a Florida defense attorney who in 2008 wrote an article on the state's "stand your ground" law for the University of Miami Law Review.
In fact, in several of the states considering "stand your ground" laws, law enforcement has spoken out against expanding the ways and means for a citizen to use deadly force against another.
Dennis Flaherty, the executive director of the Minnesota Peace and Police Officers Association, told Crimesider he believes such a law "will increase the situations where deadly force is used unnecessarily." Flaherty, who has been in law enforcement for nearly two decades, says he can't think of a single case where a Minnesotan has been prosecuted for killing someone in self defense.
"It's a solution to a non-existent problem," he says.
Julia Dahl
Julia Dahl writes about crime and justice
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Stream CBSN live or on demand for FREE on your TV, computer, tablet, or smartphone.Bring your own apps: The new consumer threat to the CIO - TechRepublic
Non-standard apps and cloud services are sneaking into the workplace. Here's what you need to be prepared for.
The CIO's control over workplace IT is gradually slipping away as today's digitally-savvy workforce have decided they want to call the shots when it comes to the technology they use at work.
But it's not just their iPads and laptops that staff are bringing into the office, they're also sneaking their own apps onto the corporate network & introducing a new security headache and management challenge for the CIO.
Whether that&s sharing documents in the cloud via Dropbox or Google Docs, downloading document reading apps or installing open source office and collaboration software & workers are no longer grateful consumers of software given to them by the IT department, as Mark Bramwell, CIO for the global health foundation the Wellcome Trust, points out.
&We talk about a tech-savvy community but it goes far beyond that. People are used to everything from downloading software, to setting up and configuring it. Everybody is potentially now a developer and a configurer of applications,& he told me at an event to launch &Great expectations or misplaced hopes?&, a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit looking at changing workplace technologies.
The CIO has to accept, Bramwell said, that there are no watertight methods for securing sensitive corporate data stored in a public cloud-based app or service.
&If you are looking for guarantees over availability or security there are not solutions that we can totally guarantee as an IT department, because as soon as it [corporate information] leaves this building it is out of our control, it's in the public domain,& he said.
Protecting valuable corporate data stored in cloud-based consumer apps is as much as a challenge for IT chiefs as securing data on consumer devices.
Whereas tablets and smartphones can be updated with software to remotely wipe them if they are lost or stolen, the enterprise IT team will not usually have the same ability to directly erase data in the case of a cloud-app being compromised.
If member of staff's account with a public cloud storage provider is compromised they may not know about the breach for some time until after it happens - unlike when a personal device is lost and the risk to the data stored on it is immediately apparent.
There is also the risk that by copying corporate data to a public cloud provider's server, staff may be breaching data protection laws governing regions where certain information can be stored.
But consumer apps in the workplace don't just carry a security risk, once non-enterprise apps start to proliferate in the workplace, and the helpdesk requests start to build up, they can be a burden on the in-house IT team.
&Clearly there's cost of ownership,& said Bramwell. &I can support 100 document reader applications if I have an expanded team who is proficient and knows the ins and outs of every one of those 100 applications. That clearly comes at a greater cost than only having one or two document reader solutions where I only need one person who's proficient in them to support and maintain them.
&Where there are a proliferation of solutions it's not about being prescriptive about what people can and can't do, it's about making sure they integrate properly, that people are aware of the risk and issues, and service levels they might face from using those.&
While staff usually choose to use personal apps or devices to make their work life easier, the adoption of new apps can also introduce new burdens for them. Take the Wellcome Trust's experience during its 18 month trial of paperless committee meeting, using readers on the iPad to access committee documents.
Bramwell said: &All of a sudden you've introduced a step where somebody within business has to convert a word document into a Pdf, and that then has to be emailed or put in a repository for them to pick up and somebody then has to pick that up and load that onto a reader on the iPad.
&It's clearly more efficient than carting around several hundred pounds of paper, but a different way of working that means there is extra effort elsewhere in that workflow that people have to embrace,& he said.
Stopping staff from installing their own apps or blocking access to certain software-as-a-service offerings isn't really viable, due to ever present threat of workarounds, and also risks barring the workforce from utilising a genuinely useful business tool.
A better way to deal with the spread of consumer apps, Bramwell said, is to educate staff about what information can be safely stored outside of the corporate system and the implications of installing personal software or accessing non-enterprise services at work.
If a workforce remains determined to use an unsanctioned app or cloud-service that is causing problems for your organisation, then blocking access is not necessarily the answer.
Examine why staff seem determined to use this app or service, and see if you can develop or source an alternative offering that doesn't throw up the same security or management problems, but that matches the consumer product for usefulness: &What we need to do as CIOs is not react and respond, we need to move ahead proactively, by providing solutions that support the enterprise to collaborate and share information in ways that are equally readily available, equally intuitive and that perform equally well,& Bramwell said.
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About Nick Heath
Nick Heath is chief reporter for TechRepublic UK. He writes about the technology that IT-decision makers need to know about, and the latest happenings in the European tech scene.
Nick Heath is chief reporter for TechRepublic UK. He writes about the technology that IT-decision makers need to know about, and the latest happenings in the European tech scene.
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