Alexander down a path to prison began in August 2010. Alexander has become the face of efforts to challenge laws, like the state’s mandatory-sentencing rules, that can have an impact on self-defense cases. State Senator Rob Bradley, a sponsor of the bill, said, “I think it is important that anybody who feels that the criminal system has affected them shares their stories.” If enacted, it would shift the burden of proof from defendants to prosecutors. On Thursday, she plans to speak before a Florida Senate committee meeting in support of that proposed amendment to the law. Alexander said of how she believed the court viewed her defense, “It was a crime from the jump,” adding, the Stand Your Ground law “was never considered.” Alexander’s lawyers, said in a telephone interview. “Here is a black woman who had a history of abuse against her and tried to use Stand Your Ground and ended up with a 20-year sentence,” Bruce Zimet, one Ms.
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That led to her trial and ultimate conviction, said Faith E. That shield was denied her in 2011, when a judge in a pretrial hearing rejected her attempt to use the law, saying she did not meet the burden of proof because there was a “factual dispute” on her Stand Your Ground defense. In Florida, the law allows for the use of deadly force in self-defense with no duty to retreat when a violent intruder breaks into a home or car.
She will advocate amending the law in order to take the burden of proof off defendants who have to demonstrate in pretrial hearings that they acted in self-defense and deserve immunity from trial. She plans to take up the fight for domestic abuse victims and push for a change in what advocates have called the uneven application of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. According to her account in court documents, he had threatened her nine days after she gave birth to their daughter. Alexander, 36, spent almost a half-dozen years either locked in prison or confined to her house after she was convicted of aggravated assault charges in 2012 for firing a warning shot at her husband, who she said had abused her. “I didn’t carry an umbrella when I first got home,” she said, “because I wanted to feel the rain drops on my skin.” She can ride a bicycle and stroll on the beach, which she dreamed about in prison.
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She is now free to go to the park and play basketball with her children in her Jacksonville, Fla., neighborhood. Marissa Alexander no longer wears an ankle monitor.