Except the part where I was 100% right on the SYG instruction.
Take a lap, even though I was the one who initially posted about the jury instruction here. The point remains that this case had
absolutely nothing to do with Stand Your Ground. SYG is just one provision of FL's self defense statute, which is why it is also included in the standard self defense jury instruction. To quote the statute:
A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.
GZ could not retreat - he was pinned to the ground - so the SYG provision was irrelevant. If they had both been standing up at the time, then SYG would have been relevant.
So why did the juror use the phrase "stand your ground"? No idea. She never explained how that particular provision factored into the decision. She never said, for example, "well, he had no duty to retreat." Instead, she just talked about ordinary self defense. "Because of the heat of the moment and the Stand Your Ground.
He had a right to defend himself. If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right." Most likely, if she read any of the ignorant media coverage between the verdict and giving her interview, she just conflated "stand your ground" with "self defense."
Again, none of this has any relevance to the inescapable fact that
because GZ could not retreat, stand your ground was irrelevant.