On Nov. 17, Boone County Prosecutor Kent Eastwood filed voluntary manslaughter charges against Curt Andersen, who shot and killed Maria Florinda Ríos Pérez as she tried to enter the front door of his home in Whitestown. Ríos Pérez and her husband ran a house-cleaning business, and a scheduling mistake sent them to the wrong address, where she tried — unsuccessfully — to open a locked door with the key to another home.
Harmless mistakes like hers are common. People take wrong turns, mix up house numbers or try the wrong key. Increasingly, the penalty for these everyday mistakes is death.
Andersen told police he thought someone was breaking in. He quickly hired Guy Relford, the self-styled “Gun Guy” known for defending shooters who invoke self-defense. His team is pointing to Indiana Code 35-41-3-2, better known as the “stand your ground law,” to justify Andersen’s firing through his front door.
Passed in 2006, Indiana’s law allows a person to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” it necessary to prevent serious injury or an “unlawful entry” into their home. The statute eliminates what used to be a core part of American self-defense law, the duty to retreat when safely possible before resorting to lethal force.
A 20-year campaign to normalize shooting first
Indiana was among the first states to follow Florida, which in 2005 became the testing ground for stand your ground legislation. That experiment launched a national campaign to rewrite the rules of armed self-defense. In 2006 alone, Indiana and 10 other states adopted similar laws; today, 38 states have adopted some version of stand your ground.
This shift was deliberate. A coalition of corporate lobbyists, gun rights advocates and conservative lawmakers drafted and promoted the laws. Their goal was to lower the legal and moral barriers to using guns in daily life, to remove the legal consequences of armed self-defense.
Supporters frame the laws as celebrations of individual liberty.
But 20 years after the passage of the first stand your ground law, the evidence tells another story. A 2022 national analysis found that states adopting these laws experienced significant increases in homicide; Florida saw a 31.6% rise in firearm homicides after 2005. The nonpartisan RAND Corp. concluded that there is no credible evidence the laws deter crime.
What they do instead is create more gun violence and a chilling sense that innocent, mundane mistakes can be fatal.
How stand your ground creates a false sense of immunity
In Indiana, the law’s broad protections deepen the problem. Stand your ground not only justifies deadly force based on a subjective “reasonable belief,” but also convinces would-be self-defenders that they are immune to prosecution or civil liability.
Even when prosecutors bring charges, as in Ríos Pérez’s case, the defense may argue that the shooter believed he was in real danger, that his perception of an immediate threat was reasonable. The consequence of this misperception is another innocent life stolen, another family left grieving a catastrophic loss.
Ríos Pérez’s killing fits a national pattern. In 2023, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot after ringing the wrong doorbell in Missouri. In upstate New York, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was killed when friends accidentally turned into a stranger’s driveway. In Florida, Ajike Owens was shot through a closed door after confronting a neighbor who had thrown a pair of roller skates at one of her children. In each case, the shooter claimed to be in fear for their life. In each, stand your ground shaped the narrative and the investigation.
Stand your ground laws transform subjectivity into an encompassing legal standard: Who appears “dangerous?” Who seems “out of place?” Ríos Pérez, a Guatemalan immigrant performing the kind of work that sustains countless American households yet often goes unseen, was misrecognized as a threat the moment she approached the wrong door. Her death exposes the moral hazard of stand your ground and the cultural logic behind it: that property is sacred, fear is reasonable and guns are the ultimate guarantor of safety.
Stand your ground transforms tragic misunderstandings into homicides. As the shoot-first mentality spreads, we must reckon with what these laws have wrought: a culture where suspicion is valorized, restraint is obsolete and armed recklessness is rebranded as self-defense.
Caroline Light is a senior lecturer at Harvard University and author of “Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Wrong address, deadly outcome. This is stand your ground law. | Opinion
Reporting by Caroline Light, Opinion Contributor / Indianapolis Star
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