I’ve read the Florida law, and unless I’m misremembering, someone who initiates a violent felonious assault cannot later claim self-defense as full justification for the ensuing homicide. They can probably use what happened after the start of the fight to get the charge down a notch or two. But not to make it go away.
And I’m fully aware that “who started it” is often difficult to determine, one of the problems with the various “stand your ground” laws. Who was defending himself and who was perpetrating an assault justifying lethal force is very often hard to figure out after the fact.
In some of these cases, a guy walks simply because the only person who could contradict his story is no longer able to talk. This could conceivably give someone an incentive to make sure the other guy doesn’t survive, something that is IMO troubling.
A serious problem with SYG is that it tends to assume that of the two parties to a dispute one is the perpetrator and the other the defender. But anybody who’s ever seen a barfight or a high school fracas can bear witness to the fact that this is by no means always the case. Quite often both guys are aggressors. So if one of them happens to kill the other, should we automatically assume the survivor was defending himself appropriately with lethal force?
“Violent felonious assault” is not the same thing as “starting the fight,” which was all I was commenting on. I suspect that the prosecution is going to try to blow a lot of smoke trying to imply Zimmerman “brandished” his gun to initiate the confrontation for just that reason, but there is no eveidence whatsoever that this is what happened.
And for what it’s worth, regardless of who started the fight, “Stand Your Ground” really does not appear to apply at all in this case. Once pinned on the ground, Zimmerman had no option to retreat.