Although the jury instructions do briefly mention SYG, I watched about 80% of the trial and the theory of the defense didn’t depend on SYG; it looked like a garden variety self-defense argument to me. According to that theory, TM beat GZ while straddling and pinning GZ. Over the course of 40 seconds (I believe), TM allegedly caused GZ’s head to make contact with cement multiple times (I’m trying to avoid verbs like “slammed” that were contentious at trial), causing injury, while GZ repeatedly called for help to no avail. At the very end, TM reached for GZ’s gun. Both the beating and the reach (plus TM’s alleged threat that GZ was “going to die tonight”), the defense argued, put GZ in reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm. At *that point* (as opposed to his earlier choice to leave his car), if you believe GZ, his choices were apparently to (1) allow himself to continue to be beaten and call for help, accepting the possibility of serious bodily harm or death before help came, or (2) use (deadly) force to prevent the same. Retreat wasn’t physically an option for GZ according to his version of events, and so the right to SYG rather than retreat wasn’t part of his legal theory of the case. As far as I know, all states allow someone with a reasonable fear of severe bodily harm or death to choose to defend themselves from that threat including with deadly force, rather than succumb to it. And according to Volokh, it’s Ohio, not Florida, that is unique in requiring the defendant to prove (by a preponderance) that he or she acted in self-defense rather than requiring the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not so act. And although what we suspect would have been a he said/he said case tends to be resolved for the living in the absence of third-party witnesses, that, too, is hardly unique to Florida. So I’m puzzled as to why you (at #5 in your OP) and Emily Bazelon think that the Zimmerman case (as opposed, perhaps, to a different fact pattern in which a defendant could have safely retreated from an assault but chose not to) shows that Florida law is uniquely problematic. The Florida self-defense law applied to Zimmerman’s case, whatever one thinks of it, seems utterly ordinary. What am I missing? - http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2013/07/race-justice-and-the-political-economy-of-vigilantism.html