[Kevin]

No, procedurally, he never requested a stand your ground hearing. Not knowing much about Florida law, that could be a lot like our preliminary hearings in Oklahoma. They're a good place to find out what the state plans on doing, but aside from a few cases (I have one right now where I might just win the Preliminary Hearing assuming the judge follows the law), they are almost always won by the state because the burden is low.

Reading the Florida statute, if the Defendant wants a stand your ground hearing, he must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the immunity attaches to their actions.

We can only speculate what happened with the defense and why they chose not to have that hearing. A quick reading of the political tea leaves would reveal that no way would Judge Nelson want to deal with the political fallout of simply dismissing this case and following that, when (not if) the defense lost that hearing, the state would have won what many lay people would consider to be a major victory and it could have given jurors the wrong idea at trial. Some might think that the judge had already heard about the potential self-defense and hadn't bought it. Jurors aren't always going to get into what the difference between beyond a reasonable doubt and preponderance of the evidence is.