The jury didn’t buy it. Goodwin was convicted last week in a Charlottesville court of malicious wounding, which could carry up to 20 years in prison. But others arrested in connection with the rally are likely to try a similar defense. The attorney for Daniel Borden, a 19-year-old who prosecutors say struck Harris with a board three times, said he would argue for “third-person self-defense” because the attack started after Harris used his maglight to strike a flagpole that a participant in the march was using as a weapon.

Harris was charged with assault but acquitted, and the judge determined that Harris “did not intend to harm” the man with the flag. In April, Matthew Engle, an attorney for Tyler Davis Watkins, said that Harris was attacked “through his own conduct,” and that his client “was responding to what he perceived to be a threat.” Watkins reacted “reasonably and proportionately” by striking Harris while he was getting up, Engle argued, not while Harris was lying on the ground. In a separate case, Richard Wilson Preston, who pleaded guilty Tuesday to a firearms charge after he fired his gun at a black counter-protester at the rally, also initially tried to argue he acted in self-defense.

Only Alex Michael Ramos, who bragged on Facebook after the beating that “We stomped some ass … getting some was fucking fun,” did not attempt to argue that he had acted in self defense. Instead, his attorney, Jake Joyce, argued that Ramos was guilty of the lesser charge of assault and battery. The jury convicted him of the more serious charge of malicious wounding.

For police, the fear defense has been effective—but not merely because police officers occasionally find themselves in quickly escalating, life-threatening situations. The Supreme Court has held that police can use lethal force if they have a “reasonable” belief that a suspect might hurt them or others, and through the warped prism of America, any fear of a black male can seem “reasonable” to a jury, especially if that jury is all-white. Grand juries consistently fail to indict cops who kill unarmed black people, even when those killed are children, like Tamir Rice. And those officers that do go to trial often prevail on the grounds that they were simply scared, like when the Chicago police officer Dante Servin was acquitted after he fired five shots into an alleyway at four people who had their backs turned to him, killing Rekia Boyd. Servin said he feared for his life. The first attempt to prosecute Michael Slager, the South Carolina officer who was recorded on video shooting Walter Scott in the back, ended in a mistrial. In perhaps the most famous example, the Los Angeles officers shown beating Rodney King senseless on video in 1991 were acquitted.

No wonder that the men caught on video attacking Harris believed that a jury might side with them if they insisted that they were afraid. In the racist imagination, black men are capable of superhuman feats of strength and stamina; it would only take one juror who shared that perception to produce a mistrial.