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Join on Telegram Denver- The recent killing of 31-year old Moroccan Adil Dghoughi in Martindale, Texas has raised questions about whether the attacker, 65-year old Terry Turner, will be the latest murderer to escape justice via a controversial law present in several US states.
While the case is still in the early process of investigation, if Turner is charged by officers for the shooting it is likely legal defense will choose to justify the shooting through “stand-your-ground” legislation. Defense lawyers will likely attempt to paint Adil Dghoughi as a threat to Turner, as they have done in a similar fashion to other innocent minorities gunned down in brutal acts of violence.
Origin of Stand-Your-Ground
Self-defense laws have traditionally been included in legislation to legally justify responding to attacks, however this has traditionally come with the obligation that a defender has a “duty to retreat” if reasonably able to do so. This changed in 2005, when Florida became the first US state to introduce a stand-your-ground law into their legislation.
Stand-your-ground laws removed the duty to retreat against a perceived attacker. Instead, individuals were now justified in the use of deadly force during incidents where a person believes they are in imminent danger of deadly force or harm to their body or property without an obligation to leave or call the police.
As of 2021, over 30 states in the US now have stand-your-ground laws written into legislation justifying the use of deadly force during a perceived attack.
Proponents of the law hailed stand-your-ground as an effective deterrent against criminal behavior, but several studies that have emerged since the law’s widespread implementation have found stand-your-ground laws have had the opposite effect in the US.
In 2018, Non-profit policy think tank RAND institute released a report compiling several incidences when stand-your-ground was used as justification in a shooting death. RAND analysts found evidence that “these laws are associated with an increase in homicides” in states where stand-your-ground was authorized. RAND’s findings were later corroborated by at least four other studies with similar findings.
RAND highlighted the higher homicide rate stemmed from the lower standard of justifying legal force that stand-your-ground allows. Analysts determined the laws “encourage impulsive and illegitimate uses of deadly force” in situations that could have otherwise been prevented.
A Color-Coded Disparity
While it is clear that stand-your-ground produced higher homicide rates in states, studies also indicated that a huge racial disparity exists in the practical application of the law. A study from Texas A&M University revealed that “the shooting of a black person by a white person is found justifiable 17 percent of the time, while the shooting of a white person by a black person is deemed justifiable just over 1 percent of the time.”
The results of the study show a clear bias in how the legal system perceives the law when it’s employed to justify the killing of a minority in the US. University of Florida in Gainesville law professor and civil rights expert Darren Hutchinson added it’s “easier for whites to raise a stand-your-ground defense,” especially when the person killed is a minority.
Another study from the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center found cases where blacks and Latinos were killed to be 354% more likely to be justified by stand-your-ground laws than white-on-white killings. The clear racial disparity has allowed the extrajudicial killing of several unarmed minorities throughout the US for nearly two decades.
Hope for Justice
While it’s clear that many minorities in the US have been unjustly murdered under the guise of self-defense, there is still hope that victims like Adil Dghoughi can find justice in the US. In 2018, a Texas man was sentenced to life in prison for the shooting of three unarmed neighbors in Houston. Jurors in Houston convicted Raul Rodriguez of murder after he reportedly shot and killed an unarmed woman and injured two others in an argument.
Rodriguez’s claims of self-defense were denied by the jury, who state no harm would have come to Rodriguez or the victims if he had not initially drawn his weapon. Although a rarity in a pro-gun state such as Texas, the case set a precedent of the limits of stand-your-ground justification.
With the tragic death of Adil Dghoughi that occurred Monday, relatives are hoping for a similar display of justice from the Texas legal system. Adil’s actions in no way indicated a threat to Terry Turner, yet his life was taken by the Martindale resident anyway.
Considering reports that Adil was sitting in his car near Terry Turner’s residence with his windows rolled up and car in reverse, it is clear Adil had no intentions of entering or remaining on Turner’s property. Adil’s girlfriend claims he was likely stopped on Tina’s Trail in an attempt to find a signal for his GPS system, a difficult task in rural Texas.
With no indication that Turner attempted to ascertain what Adil was doing on his driveway, he promptly walked up and fired a shot into Adil’s car, killing him less than thirty minutes after he left his girlfriend’s residence. As the investigation into Turner’s shooting of Adil Dghoughi continues, the situation will serve as another test of the Texas justice system, and whether stand-your-ground will continue to be used as a superficial excuse to justify the impulsive killing of innocent people in so-called “self-defense”.
