Stand your ground: new law began Sunday

WORLAND – On July 1, the Stand Your Ground bill became law. Following approval by the State Legislature, the bill was enacted without Governor Matt Mead’s signature.

According to a Wyoming Tribune Eagle March 18 article by Katie Kull, Governor Mead, who neither signed the bill nor vetoed it, addressed the bill in an email statement saying, “I believe existing law adequately addresses the concerns raised in the Stand Your Ground Bill.”

The Stand Your Ground law will work hand-in-hand with the castle doctrine passed and signed by Governor Dave Freudenthal in 2008. The castle doctrine allows residents to use force to defend themselves in their own home against intruders without the duty to retreat and protects from civil lawsuits being brought against them for protecting themselves. The Stand Your Ground law expands the ability of citizens to protect themselves against an imminent threat of bodily harm in any place, not just in their home, where they are legally allowed to be, without the duty to retreat.

The law protects citizens from criminal and civil prosecution. Rep. Mike Greear (R-Worland) said, “The concept behind this is that if you are truly acting in self-defense, that you shouldn’t be locked up and have to be held in jail for a long period of time while you prove you were acting in self-defense or being charged and put out on probation for a long period of time. What it does is it says that you are deemed to have acted in self-defense under a certain set of circumstances with it. So it’s a shifting of the burden. In our rule of law you are innocent until proven guilty. But if you are arrested it might take a long time to prove that you are innocent as you work your way through the system. The concept of this was that you wouldn’t have to wait that long period of time to clear your name. That’s the criminal side of it, was to make this an apparent and readily available defense.”

“On the civil side it was to provide civil immunity. If someone killed or seriously injured another person and did so in self-defense that that other person that was killed or injured or their family couldn’t sue you civilly. So it provides protection both ways,” Greear said.

Greear attempted to amend the bill with an amendment that stated that while in the process of defending oneself, if an innocent bystander is hurt or killed, there would be no immunity for the injuring of the innocent bystander. “My concern was as I read this is if you were to attack me and I was the type of person that was going to shoot you in self-defense and I accidentally shot someone else, I didn’t think that you should get immunity for that. That’s where my amendment was, it didn’t survive. It’s good to have a stand your ground bill in Wyoming but we need to be reasonable about it,” Greear stated. “The governor let it go into law without signing it; he probably had the same reservations that I did,” he added.

The concern now is that the door to legal dueling may be opened, Greear said. He added, “I hope we don’t see any cases where it gets abused the wrong way.”