These Cases Prove It: The Castle Doctrine Is a Racist Lie

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Randall Adjessom was only 16 when he was awakened in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2023, by the sound of someone breaking into the Mobile, Alabama, home he shared with his grandmother, his aunt, and three of his sisters. He grabbed a handgun and ran to confront the intruders, only to discover a group of police officers who had battered down his front door, as the Associated Press^[2] reported. According to a wrongful-death lawsuit^[3] against the Mobile Police Department, as Adjessom retreated, hands raised and gun pointed in the air, the officers shot him four times.

Adjessom’s death stands as a tragic reminder of the pattern by which some people—particularly Black Americans—are excluded from the right to be safe in their own homes.

Adjessom was a student at Davidson High School, and loved ones describe him^[4] as a good-natured and generous teen who mowed his neighbors’ lawns on the weekends. When police raided his home, they were reportedly investigating his older brother for drug possession. But his brother didn’t even live at that address, according to the AP. Adjessom’s grieving family members have sued the police^[5], based on what they claim is evidence showing that officers made no effort to minimize harm to innocent occupants when they executed their search warrant.

The case echoes many others—including the shooting deaths of Breonna Taylor^[6] in Lexington, Kentucky, and Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth, Texas—in which law enforcement’s use of “no-knock warrants^[7]” has gone horribly wrong. Officers have ended up shooting and killing law-abiding Black Americans who were trying to defend their homes against what they believed to be a nighttime break-in.

In the early morning hours of Oct. 12, 2019, 28-year-old Jefferson was playing video games^[8] with her nephew when she heard a suspicious sound outside. Retrieving her licensed handgun from her purse, she went to a window to investigate. A police officer was patrolling her yard, responding to a neighbor’s call about an open door at her home. Seeing Jefferson’s face through the window, he commanded “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” according to body-camera footage reported on by outlets like CNN^[9]. Jefferson didn’t have time to comply before the officer fired his gun through the window, killing her.

Twenty-six-year-old Taylor was also shot and killed by police in her own home on March 13, 2020. Just after midnight, officers broke into her apartment^[10] while executing a search warrant for an ex-boyfriend who lived elsewhere. Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s then boyfriend, believed that their home was being invaded, so he fired his licensed gun toward the door as it was being forced open, striking one of the officers in the leg. The police returned fire, shooting Taylor five times. She died on the scene, while Walker was charged with assault and attempted murder of a police officer. The charges were later dropped, and he received a $2 million settlement^[11] from the city of Louisville.

In each case, the centuries-old “castle doctrine^[12]”—which protects the lawful use of force against home intruders—proves to be a privilege of the select few. The doctrine originated in a 1604 case in England concerning the right of officers of the Crown to use force to enter a person’s home. Arguing that “the house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defense against injury and violence as for his repose,” Attorney General Sir Edward Coke concluded that officers must first announce themselves and their intent before entering a private residence. The case popularized the expression “A man’s house is his castle,” which many understand today as a universal right to home and self-protection, regardless of gender, race, or class.

Historical context is key to understanding how this powerful legal legacy has remained a site of exclusion in 21^st-century America. As the castle doctrine spread across the English colonies, including North America, it took its essential exclusionary principles with it. The right to protect one’s “castle” was first and foremost a right of propertied white masculinity. Women in colonial North America might defend their homes against intruders who were strangers, but they had no legal recourse against abusive husbands. Since the laws treated husbands and wives as a single legal entity governed by the husband, women could not defend themselves against their abusers. In fact, the U.S. colonies considered the killing of one’s husband a form of treason^[14], punishable by torturous death, while a man who killed his wife might get away with paying a fine.

Native people similarly found themselves excluded from the castle doctrine^[15] when resisting the onslaught of settler violence. Anglo settlers considered Native religious and cultural practices evidence of “savagery” disqualifying them from the legal protections Anglo Christians enjoyed. When Native people fought back in defense of their homes and families, Anglo settlers characterized their resistance as “savage war^[16]” in turn justifying widespread genocide and cultural erasure.

Settler and patriarchal violence walked hand in hand with racial enslavement. Starting in 1619^[17], when the first enslaved people were trafficked to North American shores by English colonists, until the criminalization of slavery in 1865, the castle doctrine excluded enslaved people from the right to protect hearth and home from the violence of their enslavers. In 1855, a young Missouri woman named Celia fought back against her rapist and ended up killing him. Since her rapist was her legal owner, a jury of white men decided that she did not have^[18] a right to resist his sexual abuse. She was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang.

Even following the 13^th Amendment’s conditional criminalization^[19] of slavery, Black Americans have been denied the right to defend themselves, their homes, and their loved ones from white supremacist violence and racial terror. From 1865 to 1945, more than 4,400 African Americans were murdered by white mobs, with many of them dragged from their homes. While most lynching victims were men, the numbers also included women and children, like Laura Nelson and her 12-year-old son^[20], who were murdered in 1911 after they resisted a white man’s intrusion into their Oklahoma home.

Older patterns of racial terror echo in contemporary patterns of violence. For example, Black Americans are almost three times as likely as white Americans to be killed in their encounters with police. As more Americans acquire firearms and carry them into public space, the laws are shifting to expand the “castle” for select armed citizens. Since 2005, approximately two-thirds of the states have passed legislation popularly referred to as “stand your ground” laws, which allow the use of lethal violence in self-defense outside of one’s “castle.” But we’ve witnessed, time after time, self-defense laws protecting aggressors, including some armed citizens who kill nonwhite (and unarmed) people, while excluding many women—especially women of color, like Marissa Alexander and Callie Adams—who use firearms to resist their abusers. These cases suggest a stubborn pattern by which the castle doctrine’s selectively expanded boundaries exclude those who most urgently need to defend themselves, especially in the places that should afford them refuge.^{[25][26][27][28][29]}

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