The African-American woman who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for discharging a firearm as a warning to her abusive husband is set to get a new trial.
Marissa Alexander fired a bullet into the ceiling, injured no one and pleaded Stand Your Ground against her husband. It took the jury only 12 minutes to convict her. They rejected her self-defense argument and Alexander, 34, was sentenced under the 10-20-Life Law, which carries a series of mandatory minimum sentences related to gun crimes.
“We reject her contention that the trial court erred in declining to grant her immunity from prosecution under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law,” wrote Judge James H. Daniel, “but we remand for a new trial because the jury instructions on self-defense were erroneous.”
And get this. The prosecutor in her case was Angela Corey, who also prosecuted George Zimmerman, who was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin.
After an outcry at the apparent racial double standard in the application of Stand Your Ground, Corey told the Washington Post, “I think social media is going to be the destruction of this country.”
No, this flawed justice system and blatant discrimination will. Let’s be all the way real.
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