A reported member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) shot his daughter’s Black boyfriend multiple times during what he described without proof as an instance of self-defense last month in Virginia Beach.
While it was clear that a judge who set Creath’s bail was sympathetic, Virginia’s laws might not be.
An excusable self-defense is defined in the law as a situation when a person provoked the attack, but tried to retreat from the attack before using deadly force in self-defense,” WUSA reported last year.
The castle doctrine was invoked by the judge presiding over the Botham Jean murder trial in Dallas last year, when former police officer Amber Guyger was found guilty for killing an unarmed Black man in his own home after purportedly mistaking his apartment for her own.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit group that addresses mass criminalization and incarceration, “Across the country, Black and brown defendants are at least 10-25% more likely than white defendants to be detained pretrial or to have to pay money bail.”
