Stand your ground law by US jurisdiction Stand-your-ground by statute Stand-your-ground by judicial decision or jury instruction Duty to retreat except in one's home Duty to retreat except in one's home or workplace Duty to retreat except in one's home or vehicle or workplace Middle-ground approach
Thirty-eight states are stand-your-ground states, all but eight by statutes providing "that there is no duty to retreat from an attacker in any place in which one is lawfully present": Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,[23] Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio,[24][25][26] Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming; Puerto Rico is also stand-your-ground.[27][28] Of these, at least eleven include "may stand his or her ground" language (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and South Dakota.)[28] Pennsylvania limits the no-duty-to-retreat principle to situations where the defender is resisting attack with a deadly weapon.[29]
The other eight states[30] have case law/precedent or jury instructions so providing: California,[31][32] Colorado,[33][34] Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont,[35] Virginia,[36] and Washington;[37][38] the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands also falls within this category.
Eleven states impose a duty to retreat when one can do so with absolute safety: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. New York, however, does not require retreat when one is threatened with robbery, burglary, kidnapping, or sexual assault.
Washington, D.C. adopts a "middle ground" approach, under which "The law does not require a person to retreat," but "in deciding whether [defendant] reasonably at the time of the incident believed that s/he was in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm and that deadly force was necessary to repel that danger, you may consider, along with any other evidence, whether the [defendant] could have safely retreated ... but did not."[39] Wisconsin also adopts a "middle ground" approach, where "while there is no statutory duty to retreat, whether the opportunity to retreat was available goes to whether the defendant reasonably believed the force used was necessary to prevent an interference with his or her person."[40]
There is no settled rule on the subject in American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In all duty to retreat states, the duty to retreat does not apply when the defender is in the defender's home (except, in some jurisdictions, when the defender is defending against a fellow occupant of that home). This is known as the "castle doctrine".
In Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, and Nebraska, the duty to retreat also does not apply when the defender is in the defender's place of work; the same is true in Wisconsin and Guam, but only if the defender is the owner or operator of the workplace.
In Wisconsin and Guam, the duty to retreat also does not apply when the defender is in the defender's vehicle.
Twenty-two states have laws that "provide civil immunity under certain self-defense circumstances" (Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin).[28] At least six states have laws stating that "civil remedies are unaffected by criminal provisions of self-defense law" (Hawaii, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, and Tennessee).[28]