People can claim the protection of South Carolina’s “stand your ground” law if they act in self-defense while jaywalking, jogging in a park after hours, or—in the case of one Greenville County man who was sentenced to 12 years in prison after shooting another man in what he says was self-defense—being in the parking lot of an apartment complex for which he was technically on a non-trespassing list because his mother had been evicted years earlier.
On Dec. 18, the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a trial court judge had wrongly denied Marquez Glenn immunity from prosecution for the shooting solely on the grounds that he had been placed on the complex’s no-trespassing list. The court remanded the case for a new immunity hearing.
“This is a win not only for Marquez Glenn and his family, but every citizen of South Carolina,” said Chris Brumback of Brumback & Langley in Greenville, one of Glenn’s attorneys. “I was thrilled with the decision from a broader policy standpoint.”
Glenn shot Elphonso Bruster in 2013, allegedly after Bruster’s uncle attacked him and it looked like Bruster was reaching for a gun. Glenn sought immunity from prosecution under the state’s Protection of Persons and Property Act, often known as the “stand your ground” law. Greenville County Circuit Court Judge John C. Hayes III denied the motion, concluding that Glenn, who’d been invited over to a friend’s apartment, didn’t have a right to be in the complex given that he was on its no-trespass list, and so couldn’t claim the protections afforded by the statute.
Brumback said that at the time Glenn’s mother was evicted for non-payment of rent, it was the apartment complex’s policy to place all evicted residents on the no-trespassing list, regardless of the reason for the eviction.
After immunity was denied, a jury convicted Glenn of assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature in 2015, and in 2018 a divided panel of the state’s Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s order in an unpublished opinion. The Supreme Court granted a writ to hear the case, and Justice Kaye G. Hearn, writing for the court, reversed the Court of Appeals’ decision and remanded the case for a new immunity hearing.
Under the stand-your-ground law, Hearn wrote, defendants are immune from prosecution if they show that they can satisfy either all of the requirements of the statute, or all of the elements of common-law self-defense. Before its passage, people who perceived themselves to be in peril typically had a duty to retreat, if possible, before using deadly force in self-defense. But the stand-your-ground law eliminates that duty to retreat (hence the name) if the person is in any place “where he has a right to be.”
The “right to be” requirement is not defined in the statute, but it shouldn’t be applied hyper-technically or devoid of context, Hearn said, and the Supreme Court has recognized the “irrationality” of foreclosing immunity based on the location of the incident provoking the use of self-defense.
“Analyzing a defendant’s ‘right to be’ in a place where he is attacked … without considering proximate cause or a causal connection to the incident leaves an innocent person’s ability to seek the Act’s protection up to happenstance, which we also do not believe was the intent of the Legislature,” Hearn wrote. “To bar a victim of crime from claiming immunity based on a hyper-technical reading of the statute would lead to absurd results when his presence in the place he was attacked had no relation to the incident itself.”
Hearn used the example, which Brumback had offered up at oral argument, of a person jogging through a municipal park that closes at 9 p.m. Reading the law the way it was applied in Glenn’s case, the jogger would be barred from asserting immunity under the law if he or she were attacked at one minute past nine because the park would then be closed to the public.
“I think that’s partially what helped the court latch onto that argument. This all highlighted, in the court’s words, the absurdity of some of these outcomes if the state’s position was adopted by the Supreme Court,” Brumback said. “That can’t be what the legislature intended.”
Hearn noted that the trial court’s failure to address the elements of self-defense in its oral ruling from the bench had made appellate review of the order difficult. The Supreme Court declined Glenn’s invitation to find that he had satisfied all of the elements of self-defense, citing a reluctance to infer findings of fact that didn’t appear in the record. Instead, it remanded the case for a fresh immunity hearing, instructing the trial court to analyze all of the elements of self-defense and determine “whether Glenn’s alleged trespass was proximately related to the shooting.”
The court also said that, going forward, any circuit court holding a Duncan hearing (a pretrial hearing to decide if a defendant is immune from prosecution under the stand-your-ground law) must conduct a proximate cause analysis before deciding whether the defendant has satisfied the “no duty to retreat” element of the statute, when applicable.
Brumback said that he wished the court had found that there was no need for another immunity hearing, but that he believed that Glenn had an excellent chance of prevailing this time around.
John Scully, also of Brumback & Langley in Greenville, and Roy F. Harmon III of Harmon & Major in Greenville also represented Glenn.
The 12-page decision is State v. Glenn (Lawyers Weekly No. 010-080-19). The full text of the opinion is available online at sclawyersweekly.com.
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