Distortion

Ben Montgomery:

In 2005, as lawmakers pushed to pass sweeping self-defense legislation that would become known as the "stand your ground" law, critics had one challenge: Show us a case in which someone had been treated unjustly. • Backers of the new bill had an answer: James Workman.

Here was a 77-year-old retiree asleep with his wife in an RV outside their hurricane-damaged home in 2004. And here came a menacing intruder, prowling through the dark, bursting into the trailer. The homeowner shot the intruder, then had to wait months — painful, anxiety-filled months in legal jeopardy — before prosecutors decided the two shots he fired were justified, that what he did was protect himself and his wife.

That's too long, said the senator who introduced the bill.

"You're entitled to protect your castle," Durell Peaden said at the time. "Why should you have to hire a lawyer to say, 'This guy is innocent'?"

The story was repeated again and again, to reporters and in the halls of the Capitol.

It worked. The law passed 39-0 in the Senate and 94-20 in the House, and then it swept across the nation, driven hard by the National Rifle Association, to more than two dozen other states.

But if you really look at the case, you see that the story told by proponents of "stand your ground" is a distortion. And it's being distorted to this day.