20 Years for Standing her Ground: A Florida woman faces prison after firing a warning shot to scare off an abusive husband.
By
Jacob Sullum
"I got five
baby mammas, and I put my hands on every last one of them except
for one," Rico Gray confessed during a November 2010
deposition. "The way I was with women…they had to walk on
eggshells around me." He recalled punching women in the face,
shoving them, choking them, and tossing them out the door.
Yet somehow, after one of those women fired a warning shot into
the ceiling of her Jacksonville, Florida, home to scare him away
during yet another violent outburst, prosecutors managed to
convince a jury that Gray was the victim. As a result, Marissa
Alexander, a 31-year-old mother of three,
faces 20 years in prison for standing her ground against an
abusive husband.
Gray has been
arrested twice for domestic battery, including an
assault that sent Alexander to the hospital. In September 2009
Alexander obtained a
protective order against Gray that was still in effect on
August 1, 2010, when he flew into a jealous rage after discovering,
while poking through her cellphone, that she had sent pictures of
their newborn daughter to her first husband.
Alexander was in the master bathroom at the time, and Gray tried
to force his way in. When she came out, he screamed and cursed at
her while preventing her from leaving the bedroom. "I was like
forcing her back with my body," reported Gray, who is seven inches
taller than Alexander and outweighs her by 100 pounds.
When Alexander managed to get by, she ran through the kitchen to
the garage, where she
says
she realized she did not have the keys to her car, could not call
for help because she had left her cellphone behind, and could not
escape because the garage door was not working. Instead she grabbed
her handgun from her car and headed back through the kitchen, where
Gray confronted her again.
In his deposition Gray admitted he "had told her if she ever
cheated on me I would kill her" and during the fight said, "If I
can't have you, nobody can." He conceded he "was going towards her"
when Alexander fired a single shot, high and to his right, that
went through the kitchen wall and lodged in the ceiling of the
living room. Finally he left, along with his two sons.
"The gun was never pointed at me," Gray said. "She just didn't
want me to put my hands on her anymore, so she did what she feel
like she have to do to make sure she wouldn't get hurt." If his
sons hadn't been in the house, Gray said, "I probably would have
tried to take the gun from her," and "I probably would have put my
hand on her."
But at the July 2011 hearing where Alexander
argued that the charges against her should be dismissed because
she had acted in self-defense, Gray—who immediately after the fight
portrayed her as the aggressor, then said in his deposition three
months later that he had lied out of anger—
changed
his story again, saying he had lied in his deposition to protect
her. Circuit Judge Elizabeth Senterfitt
rejected Alexander's motion to dismiss, saying she could have
escaped through the front or back door instead of going to the
garage.
Yet Florida's
self-defense law says "a person is justified in the use of
deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat" if "he or she
reasonably believes" it is necessary to prevent "imminent death or
great bodily harm" or "the imminent commission of a forcible
felony." In 1999, furthermore, the Florida Supreme Court
ruled
that a woman attacked by her husband in the home they share has no
duty to flee.
On March 16, after
deliberating for 12 minutes, a jury
convicted Alexander on three counts of aggravated assault with
a deadly weapon. Although she injured no one, she faces a 20-year
mandatory minimum sentence unless she can
win a new trial.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/05/02/20-years-for-standing-her-ground
Mr.
Kim was transporting his firearms from his parents’ house in New Jersey
to South Carolina when he stopped at Walter Reed in Washington for a
medical appointment in the summer of 2010.
