Members-Only Article
In Oklahoma, drivers can now “unintentionally” ram their cars right into a crowd of protesters without fear of criminal prosecution, even if the demonstrators are injured or killed — as long as said drivers can prove they acted in self-defense.
It’s a new legal protection afforded by Oklahoma’s “anti-riot” bill that Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) signed into law earlier this week. Now, a driver in Oklahoma will not be held criminally or civilly liable if he or she kills or injures protesters while fleeing from an undefined “riot” under “a reasonable belief” that he or she was in danger at the time, and as long as they “exercised due care” while doing so. The GOP architects of the law claim the provision is meant to protect people, like the truck driver in Tulsa last summer who ran through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters because he allegedly feared for his life — despite the fact that that driver ultimately did not face any criminal charges.
As we noted in our first post on the law, Oklahoma went further than Florida’s similar anti-protest law in that the latter grants civil, but not criminal, immunity to drivers who hit people at scenes of protests on the streets.
But the immunities in both laws are part a troubling trend in Republicans’ recent slew of anti-protest legislation seemingly targeted at the growing movement for racial justice, prompted by police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans. Much of that legislation focuses on criminalizing non-violent protest tactics, like obstructing sidewalks or streets, but the Oklahoma and Florida legislation actively makes it easier for drivers to hit or run over protesters.
And GOP efforts to extend permission to inflict that specific type of violence are growing elsewhere. Similar driver protections are in the legislative pipelines in states like Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa and Washington.
The anti-protest bills in Iowa (which already passed in the state’s Senate) and Tennessee are arguably even more sinister in their driver immunities; neither of those laws outline shields like self-defense or fear for one’s life. The driver, in those states, just needs to exercise “due care” when attempting to exit the scene of a demonstration.
Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law (ICNL) who runs a tracker on U.S. anti-protest laws, told TPM over the phone this week that the term “due care” is more commonly used in tort cases, meaning, what she described as “what a reasonable person would be doing in that situation.” But that lack of clarity in the context of these driver immunities is the problem, she said.
“It’s super vague, and it seems pretty subjective and not at all clear how a court would draw that line,” said Page.
Some Republicans like those in Oklahoma claim that the immunities are meant to protect motorists from dangerous mobs, while others GOP legislatures insist, without explaining the immunity provision, that their bill as a whole “promotes law and order.”
“That’s bullshit,” Valencia Gundar, co-founder of the Black Collective in Miami, Florida, told TPM over Google chat on Friday. “They’re just trying to make up storylines.”
Those immunities are “a direct attack on Black and Brown folks,” Gundar said, and they are a pseudo-solutions to what she believes is a growing Republican fear that “the protesting is working.”
NYU Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian on authoritarianism, agrees that the GOP is “on the defensive” with this various iterations of this type of legislation, during a groundswell of public support for addressing systemic racism in recent months.
“They are hurrying to enact all of these laws as a prelude because they know social justice movements are spreading in the country,” Ben-Ghiat told TPM over the phone on Friday.
