You Have Options

[Content Note: Violence; racism.]

One of the jurors in the Michael Dunn trial has spoken out about why the jury was hopelessly deadlocked on the murder charge:

In an interview with ABC News, a juror identified only by her first name, Valerie, said three of her fellow jury members wanted to acquit Dunn of the first-degree murder charge.

Initially, she said, two of her colleagues had believed Dunn's self-defence argument that Davis charged out of his car at him after being asked to turn the music down, with the defendant then taking his 9mm pistol from his glovebox and firing at the teenager.

That number rose to three, she added, during almost 30 hours of deliberations in which they scrutinised jury instructions containing an explanation of Florida's controversial stand-your-ground law, which states that a person has no duty to retreat from an attack.

"It said if he believed that he had an eminent threat to himself or his fiancee, so that was a thing that those two folks believed … [that] he was frightened and there was no other option for him in regards to Mr Davis," Valerie said.

"The rest of us were 100% sure [that] you didn't have to react, you could have had another option. We all believed there was another way, another option. Roll your window up, ignore the taunting, put your car in reverse, back up to the front of the store, move a parking spot over. That's my feeling."

She said it was clear during the first hour of deliberation that the jury of seven women and five men was deadlocked on the murder charge, and that their subsequent discussions sometimes degenerated into shouting and screaming. "At one point we were all trying to get our point across," she said.

You could have had another option.

One of the things about Stand Your Ground laws is that they don't oblige people with guns to consider any other options. But they exist. You have options. But plenty of people don't care about those other options, when they're "feeling threatened" and have access to a gun.