Man Who Claimed Stand Your Ground Defense in Killing of White Teen Convicted of Manslaughter

Marc Wilson has been fighting for his freedom for several years under Georgia’s Stand Your Ground law.

The 23-year-old Georgia man is accused of shooting and killing 17-year-old Haley Hutcheson after he fired at a truck full of teens in Statesboro, Georgia, in June 2020.

Wilson’s defense claims he shot at the truck in self defense after the teens yelled racial slurs and tried to run him and his white girlfriend off the road. One of his bullets struck and killed Hutcheson, who was sitting in the back seat of the pickup.

After one day of deliberations, a grand jury determined Wilson was not justified in firing the shots in self-defense.

Wilson was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He was found not guilty on the more serious murder and aggravated assault charges.

Stand Your Ground

The case had been closely watched by experts and activists to see whether a Black man could successfully use the stand your ground defense when using deadly force. Similar self-defense argument led to successful acquittal for George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin.

Wilson’s lawyers maintain that if Wilson were white, the state’s response might have been starkly different.

“We believe that if Marc Wilson was a white gentlemen that night, accosted by a truckload of angry, belligerent, possibly drunk Black men, and he used a legally possessed firearm to defend himself and his passenger, that he would have been given a medal and not given a prosecution,” Wilson’s attorney Francys Johnson previously told reporters.

Despite having no criminal record prior to the shooting, Wilson spent a year and a half in jail awaiting trial after the original judge overseeing the case, Michael Muldrew, denied him bail for posing a “significant threat to the persons in the community” based on the charges against him. Muldrew was recused in February after he met with two of the prosecuting attorneys in private. Only after the new judge, Judge Ronnie Thompson, replaced Muldrew was Wilson granted release on $100,000 bail.

Regardless of Wilson’s lack of criminal history, prosecutors contended Wilson acted criminally the night of the incident because nothing the teens did that night warranted his use of deadly force.

“As we proceed through that evidence… one thing is going to ring true through this whole trial,” Chief Assistant District Attorney Barclay Black said in court last week, according to the Statesboro Herald. “That is no matter what gets thrown around this courtroom, no matter what fingers get pointed at anybody, Haley Hutcheson didn’t do a doggone thing to anybody, except get a bullet in the back of her head.”

Statistics

From 2005 to 2010, the first five years after stand your ground laws were introduced, only 11 percent of cases involving a Black shooter using stand your ground and a white victim were deemed justified, according to a 2020 study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, compared to 45 percent of cases involving a Black victim and a white shooter.

One of the most infamous cases of stand your ground being used successfully was in 2013, when George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a Black 17-year-old who was walking home through Zimmerman’s neighborhood in Sanford, Florida, was acquitted. Zimmerman claimed he felt threatened by Martin, despite initiating the interaction by following him through the neighborhood even though he was told not to by dispatchers.

But a year prior, in May 2012, 31-year-old Black woman Marissa Alexander was prosecuted for aggravated assault with a lethal weapon. She too, used the stand your ground defense, claiming that she fired a warning shot after her husband attacked her and threatened to kill her on August 1, 2010, in Jacksonville, Florida.

But Alexander’s stand your ground defense was denied. She was convicted and received a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison.

In 2013, Ms. Alexander’s conviction was overturned on appeal and she was released after spending three years in jail.

Marc Wilson’s Sentence

Wilson now faces up to 10 years behind bars for the involuntary manslaughter conviction.

He is scheduled for sentencing on Sept. 20.