An assessment of the intended and unintended consequences of Arizona's Self-Defense, Home Protection Act

Abstract

On 24 April 2006 the Governor of Arizona signed into law a series of amendments to Title 13 of the Arizona Revised Statutes (Senate Bill 1145 2006). A key feature of this legislation, the so-called ‘stand your ground’ provision, states that individuals have no duty to retreat before opting to use deadly physical force to thwart the commission of a variety of violent offenses (Senate Bill 1145, Section 13–411 2006). The purpose of the study is to determine whether or not the modification of the criteria for the justification for the use of deadly force by civilians achieved its manifest goal of making individuals more capable of resisting violent crime or had the unintended consequence of increasing the likelihood that individuals would experience a violent death. The interrupted time series analyses indicate that, contrary to legislative intent, the implementation of Arizona's Self-Defense, Home Protection Act made life more dangerous for those living within the state.

Keywords::

• justifiable homicide
• social policy
• interrupted time series analysis

Notes

^1. Ren et al. (forthcoming) report that a second intervention, the killing of two individuals by a homeowner as they attempted flee from the scene of an attempted burglary (the Horn shooting), resulted in a statistically significant reduction in business burglaries in Houston. They conclude that this finding indicates that ‘...the Texas castle doctrine law exerted a significant impact on burglary in Houston by decreasing 5.38 cases per day after the public attention was drawn to the law by the Horn shooting (Ren et al.forthcoming, p. 15).’ We respectfully disagree with this interpretation of the final ARIMA transfer function equation. The parameter estimate for the effect of the first intervention, which assesses the influence of the implementation of Texas's castle legislation on commercial burglaries within Houston, is insignificant. Hence, all one can safely infer from the interrupted time series analysis is that while the Horn shooting led to a permanent and lasting decline in commercial burglaries, the implementation of the Texas castle law did not.

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Notes on contributors

Mitchell B. Chamlin

Mitchell B. Chamlin is Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas State University, San Marcos. His substantive research focuses on the elaboration and falsification of macro-criminological theory, while his policy-based research focuses on the impact of statutory changes on criminal and deviant behavior. He has published over sixty-five articles in peer-reviewed journals. Most recently, his work has appeared in Addiction, American Journal of Public Health, and Deviant Behavior.