Nobody has ever pleaded "Stand Your Ground."

Got it?

If you needed to kill or severely harm somebody because that person was about to kill you, and you go to your lawyer and ask him or her if you should claim that you stood your ground, your lawyer should call you an idiot, and tell you that you're just claiming self-defense.

In every state, stand your ground or duty to retreat, in order to claim self-defense, you need to establish innocence, imminence, proportionality, and reasonableness. Namely, you have to demonstrate that it's at least reasonably true that you were in a kill or be killed situation, and that you didn't cause the situation, but you managed to win the fight against the guy who started it.

All Stand Your Ground says is that the person being attacked shouldn't have to demonstrate after the fact that he or she did everything that he or she could do to escape the attacker before engaging the attacker. What opponents of Stand Your Ground are saying, intentionally or not, is that the state should have more ammunition to put a victim in prison for the rest of his or her life.

Duty to retreat states will acknowledge that would-be victims were innocent, were in imminent danger, and did act reasonably and proportionally, and still throw the would-be victims in prison for the rest of their lives if they can concoct some post hoc scenario in which they could have gotten away.

Namely, to be against Stand Your Ground is to be pro-criminal.