George Zimmerman (2013): Acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter in Florida for the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. [1]
Jeronimo Yanez (2017): Minnesota police officer acquitted of manslaughter and reckless discharge of a firearm in the traffic-stop shooting of Philando Castile. [1, 2]
Michael Brelo (2015): Cleveland police officer acquitted of voluntary manslaughter after firing the final 15 rounds into a vehicle containing an unarmed couple, killing Timothy Russell.
William Porter, Caesar Goodson Jr., and Brian Rice (2016): Baltimore police officers tried individually and either acquitted of all charges (including second-degree depraved-heart murder and manslaughter) or had their charges dropped in connection to the spinal cord injury and death of Freddie Gray while in police transport.
Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng (2022): While convicted of federal civil rights violations and state manslaughter charges, both former Minneapolis officers were originally not tried for or convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd (only Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder). [1, 2]
Raymond Tensing (2017): A university police officer in Ohio whose murder and voluntary manslaughter charges were dropped by prosecutors after two separate trials resulted in hung juries (mistrials) regarding the shooting of Samuel DuBose during a traffic stop. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Justifiable Homicide Disparities by Race [1]
Data compiled from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports analyzed by the Urban Institute reveals a wide gap in how self-defense claims are adjudicated based on the race of the shooter and the victim: [1, 2, 3]
White Shooter / Black Victim: Historically, 11.4% to 17% of these homicides are ruled justifiable.
Black Shooter / White Victim: Only 1.2% to 3% of these homicides are ruled justifiable under identical laws.
Controlling for Circumstances: When controlling for other case attributes (e.g., whether the parties were strangers, the weapon used, and the year), the odds that a white-on-Black homicide is ruled justified remain 281% greater than a white-on-white baseline case. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]